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<DIV class=print-site_name><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT color=#800000
size=4><B>From Occupying the Financial Districts to Occupying the Goods in Our
Hoods</B></FONT></FONT></DIV>
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<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT color=#800000><FONT
size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif"><B>by BAR managing editor Bruce A.
Dixon</B></FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif"><FONT size=4>The south end of downtown Chicago's
LaSalle Street dead-ends at a gray concrete canyon thirty stories deep. Its
east, south and west walls are Bank of America, the Chicago Board of Trade, and
the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. At street level, depending on the day and
time, you can find anywhere from 20 to several thousand chanting, drumming,
sign-waving, caucusing demonstrators, mostly but by no means all white, and
mostly again, but certainly not all young. This is </FONT><A
href="http://occupychi.org/" target=_blank><FONT size=4>Occupy
Chicago</FONT></A><FONT size=4> <SPAN
class=print-footnote>[4]</SPAN>.</FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">I came straight there from the airport the afternoon of
October 5, and hung around for an hour or two. There were a hundred or so on
each side of LaSalle Street and forty or fifty more facing them from Jackson.
Between the chanting and the cars and trucks honking their support, normal
conversation was a challenge. At 3PM an organizer with a bullhorn announced
their general assembly, and two thirds of the crowd moved to the east side of
LaSalle Street.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">The corporate media rap on these occupations is that
participants are “unfocused” and don't know what they really want. But in the
first twenty minutes of this Occupy Chicago meeting they adopted a resolution
demanding the withdrawal of all US military forces from outside the borders of
the US, and the closing of all the Pentagon's military bases on foreign soil. A
local TV station interviewed one young man the following Monday, who insisted on
the forgiveness of student loans. A friend who called me from Atlanta told me
that Occupy Atlanta was including something about “mass incarceration” in its
core demands. Didn't sound that vague and unfocused to me.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">On Saturday, not quite a thousand marched from the
Occupy Chicago site down to Grant Park and joined a rally at which I spoke
observing the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. They joined
about twice that many and stepped off into the sunshine for a two mile walk
through Chicago's Loop. The number of marchers grew a little, hitting five
thousand by the time we paused for ten minutes in front of Barack Obama's
campaign headquarters before returning to Grant Park. Neither the president, who
wasn't there anyhow, nor any of his minions came down to greet us. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">The event, and Occupy Chicago too, are overwhelmingly
white. For a city that's still a quarter black after losing some 200,000 African
Americans in recent years, that's problematic. I didn't see any Latinos either.
This was less true on Columbus Day, when transit and teachers unions and SEIU
swelled their ranks for an afternoon. But the union leaderships in Chicago have
been Democratic Party functionaries for a long time. Their clear objective is to
take over, or at least take some credit in the eyes of their members and the
public, for the protests.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">I asked some south side activists about the nature of
their disconnect with the people occupying Chicago's financial district.
</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4>“<FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif">We'll see a lot more black people involved in this
occupation stuff,” J.R. Fleming of the <A href="http://antieviction.org/"
target=_blank>Chicago Anti-Eviction Movement </A><SPAN
class=print-footnote>[5]</SPAN>told me, “when we start occupying these thousands
of vacant bank-owned homes and apartments. You can take a day to protest
downtown, and come back here and you're still homeless or about to be homeless.
When we occupy the goods in our hoods, that will be the occupation that means
something to people out here. That will be the occupation that really makes a
difference.” </FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">That about says it. Different constituencies have
different interests. Coalitions are built when differing parties adopt and lend
tangible support to each others' interests in order to further their own. If the
people on those corners can reach out to the communities out here for who
economic insecurity and the prison state have long been facts of life, they
could give birth to something truly important. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">The student loan bubble, along with the shrinking job
market has made newly poor white hipster kids mad enough to stage 24/7 street
corners protests in scores of US cities, where they have connected with longtime
leftist and community activist types, often older and not always white. These
are helping keep them focused on the connections between the warfare and prison
states and the unavailability of funding for anything else. Establishment
Democrats try hard to co-opt them into narratives that place exclusive blame on
those awful Republicans and Tea Party scoundrels blocking our brave president.
Toward this end, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have showed up at street corner
occupations, and the likes of Warren Ballantine and Michael Baisden have
reportedly done segments from the same. The president himself has issued
carefully worded statements that those still thoroughly drunk on hope may
interpret as endorsing or even taking credit for the street corner protests.
Democrats desperately need to contain this protest, to make sure its message of
disgust for both the two parties is not communicated to its own disillusioned
base (black) voters. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">The Occupy Everything Movement's reliance on electronic
and social media is problematic too. Late Sunday night I sat across the table
from the friend I stayed with while in Chicago, both of us on our laptops. He
asked if I received the two emails he'd sent earlier that day. </FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4>“<FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif">Here's one,” I told him. “I don't see the other. Can
you send it again?” He did. When it hadn't showed up a full five minutes later,
he sent it again a second time. I told him to copy my Gmail address too, and he
did that, and sent a third time. Nothing. No message on my end, no error
messages on his. I was able to send to him from that email account,
though.</FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4>“<FONT
face="Arial, sans-serif">I'm gonna try something....” he told me. A moment
later, he asked if I'd received an email from him. “Yeah, here it is right
here,” I said. He jumped up from the table laughing and went to pour himself a
drink. The subject of the vanishing message was “Occupy Chicago” something or
other. He had removed the word “occupy” and the message went through. I checked
my Gmail account, and they were not landing there either. In the next half hour
I had him send to my yahoo, hotmail, gmail, aim.com and godaddy webmail accounts
from a variety of addresses, with the word “occupy” present, absent, and
misspelled. Gmail rejected all messages with the correct and incorrect spellings
of “occupy,” whether sent from hotmail, yahoo or AOL, while letting the control
messages through. GoDaddy webmail let the control messages through and those in
which “occupy” was spelled “ocuppy.” But with the word spelled correctly, those
messages vanished too. I checked another GoDaddy webmail account, not mine, to
which I had access. The “occupy” messages were showing up just fine
there.</FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT size=4
face="Arial, sans-serif">We both had a drink, and went to sleep.</FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0.06in; MARGIN-LEFT: 0.06in"><FONT color=#800000><FONT
size=4 face="Arial, sans-serif"><I>Bruce A. Dixon, a lifelong Chicagoan, is
managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Marietta GA, where he
serves on the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him at
bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.</I></FONT></FONT></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>