People Power
Please start reporting ‘Occupy’ [London] and report it as the peaceful, non-violent protest that it us.
THIS polite request is written on a piece of cardboard and propped between the knees of a tired but buoyant protestor sitting on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, next to the London Stock Exchange in Paternoster Square.
The privately-owned square is completely sealed off by police, security guards and crash barriers; there is an emergency injunction in place to keep protestors from setting up camp outside the Stock Exchange. So they set up outside St Paul’s instead, just metres from the epicentre of financial meltdown.
The canon of St Paul’s, the Rev Dr Giles Fraser, believes that the protests are entirely legitimate, democratic and peaceful — so on Sunday morning, he came out and asked the police lined up on the steps of the cathedral to take a hike. The protestors were overjoyed. The relationship between the cathedral — a massive tourist attraction which charges £14.50 to walk around inside — and the raggle taggle protestors outside is harmonious. The protestors have been hailing the Rev Dr Fraser and his officials as “good, peaceful people”. The musician protestors playing in the courtyard at the bottom of the steps have even dedicated songs to them.
The Occupy London camp is a pop-up community of around 200 tents pitched on the cold stone outside the cathedral, which is growing daily. Like Occupy Wall Street across the ocean, it has the atmosphere of a highly politicised festival; there are hundreds of people camping out in protest at the extremes and inequalities of global capitalism, all sleeping under a huge green banner which reads “Capitalism IS Crisis”.
A rota of surprisingly talented musicians is taking turns to perform in front of the cathedral, and there is much humour – handmade signs like “The Beginning Is Nigh” and “$ell Your $tocks, It’s Ovr!”, as well as a full-sized confessional made from cardboard boxes specifically constructed for bankers. The place is crawling with photographers, legal observers, the media, police, and well-wishers. Lots of well-wishers.
It’s very organised. As tourists look on bemusedly, and city workers stride past, you have to hand it to the protestors: they have got their act together. Around the side of the cathedral, there is a well-stocked field kitchen, full of food that has been donated. “We’ve been here since Saturday,” says Kai, a 26-year-old German activist. “We want to stay until Christmas, even though it will be very cold. But we need to do this.” She smiles. “We want authentic change to happen, all over the world.”
On the wall, someone has posted an imitation street sign that reads “Tahrir Square, London EC4M”, in solidarity with the Egyptian square where the Arab Spring began. I nip over to a nearby M&S and bring back boxes and tea bags and biscuits to contribute to the kitchen — always better to make tea, not war — and add to the piles of bread, fruit, vegetables, and dried food. People are pitching in with cooking and washing up, and there is a recycling area black binliners and cardboard signs. There is a huge box of Pot Noodle for individuals to help themselves, if they have camping stoves.
It’s not easy camping in the middle of the city, and cafes around here are expensive.
Everyone is in a very good mood – industrious, focused, positive. And friendly. There is none of that nihilism you get at angrier demonstrations, because the police – on the instruction of the Rev Dr Fraser – are leaving people in peace. Last time I was at one of these protests, on the steps of the Bank of England in 2009, the police kettled us and killed a passerby, Ian Tomlinson. Today, however, they are not in attack-dog mode, but friendly and relaxed, chatting with protestors and City workers. Lucy, who works in a nearby bank, is out on her lunchbreak. “I support them,” she says. “I’m affected by the economic mess as well.”
The protest’s media centre is a lot of laptops and a generator under tarpaulin. At the moment, the Occupy London group are communicating with the world via Twitter, but are hoping to get a live feed up soon. The hacktivist collective Anonymous (UK) are here too — all wearing Guy Fawkes masks from Alan Moore’s 80s futuristic dystopia V For Vendetta — and there are informal workshops going on all around, with various smaller political parties represented. There’s even a library — a bookshelf heaped with intelligent political books. “Help yourself,” calls the librarian from inside her tent. “They’re free.”
So what’s it been like sleeping in the square? “Not as cold as I expected,” says Mike, an American, who plans to camp out until the protest ends. He says that the police removed the portaloos, however. Yikes. That could be awkward. “We’re going to make our own,” he says calmly. “We can do that.” Meanwhile, local cafes are being accommodating.
Conditions will get tougher as winter kicks in, but the crowd here — young, eloquent, impassioned — are determined to stay for the long haul. “We are a coalition of resistance,” says a man with a Manchester accent. He then proceeds to berate a besuited Daily Mail journalist through a megaphone, which makes people laugh. He is bellowing, but good natured. Many City workers stop and chat. Apart from the Daily Mail man, there is strong feeling of amiability and inclusiveness — anyone I speak to stresses it’s not about ‘us’ and ‘them’, but about fundamental change that will benefit 99% of us.
Over in Wall Street, Al Gore called the Occupy Wall Street movement — which has inspired similar occupations all over the world — a “primal scream of democracy”. Despite the original shock and awe tactics of the NYPD, the movement, centred in Zuccotti Park, has huge support. (Twitter is humming with well-wishers sending donations — from cash to pizza deliveries — “to the hippies in the park”.)
Except they’re not just hippies. This movement, globally growing in momentum, is calling itself “the 99%”. In other words, everyone who has been done over by the actions of the ruling corporate and financial elite. Political commentator Matt Taibbi, speaking to a NYC interviewer, believes that if Occupy Wall Street (OWS) reaches beyond New York and harnesses the fury of middle America, increasingly angry and bewildered at all the drastic unemployment and foreclosures, it could become revolutionary. (If Obama wasn’t president, would he be down there amongst the protestors? I bet he would).
“If it [the OWS movement ] reaches those people there is no limit to what it can achieve,” says Taibbi. A Time magazine poll shows that 54% of Americans favour the Occupy Wall Street movement — which makes it considerably more popular than the president, the Tea Party, the Republicans, or the Democrats.
And calling themselves ‘the 99%’ is not an exaggeration, but an accurate reflection of US inequality. The top richest 1% of Americans have more money than the bottom 90%. There are 400 individual Americans who have more money than the 150 million least richest. Under the presidency of George Bush, 65% of economic gains went to America’s richest 1%. The CIA’s inequality index places America as the 39th most unequal country in the world — less equal than countries like Iran, Uganda or Cambodia.
To contextualise, Britain is 91st on the list, and Ireland is 117th. Sweden is the most equal country, and the two least equal are Namibia and South Africa.
So it really is a rallying cry from a loose alliance of the 99% to get off our sofas and work on structural change towards authentic global equality. Occupy Wall Street has been going for a month now, despite organisers originally thinking it would not last longer than 15 minutes. There are now protests and occupations in numerous cities, including Melbourne, Rio and Frankfurt.
It is the first global internet-era movement, which is just as well because mainstream media have been studiously ignoring it — particularly in New York, as the banner of one protestor summed up: “Ignore Me, Go Shopping”. Too circus-like, sniffed the pundits. Except now, with a global groundswell of support behind the Occupy movements, the media, not wishing to be caught short, is reassessing its position.
But this is a people-led movement, independent of leaders or famous faces, and with its own heroes. Another heroic reverend of the movement is the Rev Billy. While not of the same canonical stature as the cleric at St Paul’s, Rev Billy, as head of the Church of Life after Shopping, is a rather more maverick figure. He and his choir, the Church of Earthalujah, have been doing pop-up performances around the Occupy Wall Street site since the protests began.
Part preacher, part performance artist, part Elvis, the Rev Billy is an activist who has been in the public eye since the late 90s. His is a doctrine of peaceful protest and humorous anti-capitalism.
“We are a post religious church,” reads his mission statement. “We hold ‘services’ wherever we can, in concert halls, theatres, churches, community centres, forests, fields, parking lots, mall atriums, and perhaps most importantly, inside stores, as close to the cash register as we can get, within spitting distance of the point of purchase. We get hassled by security guards and sometimes get arrested.”
Rev Billy performs exorcisms, particularly of cash registers. Tired of the cultural inauthenticity of the post-Giuliani branded-logo New York, his protests were not against traditional concepts of sin, but against commercialisation. And he travels. In July he performed an exorcism at Tate Modern in London, protesting about the art gallery’s BP sponsorship. The Church of Earthalujah was formed in response to BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The performance activists marched down Main Street Disneyland in California on Christmas Day 2005, singing anti-shopping songs; Billy (real name Bill Talen, a 61-year-old actor from San Francisco) was duly arrested. He and his ‘church’ have been the subject of a Morgan Spurlock documentary, What Would Jesus Buy?, which is also the title of the Rev Billy’s book — subtitled Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse. The film was not a roaring success, however, because its anti-consumerist message meant retail giants like Wal-Mart wouldn’t stock it.
Billy has run for mayor of New York and been arrested by the NYPD for reciting the First Amendment (the one about freedom of speech) at them through a megaphone. Every week he and his choir perform the Church of Earthalujah, a show which combines environmentalism and humour (not usually words you’d find in the same sentence). He has marched against corporations like Starbucks, for engendering what he calls “fake bohemia”, and staged peaceful direct actions in bank lobbies. His website is funny, original and worth a look.
“Liberation is a radiant process, it spreads,” he writes. “We think freedom from consumerism is virulent, contagious. Tell your neighbour you stopped shopping and it gives her permission to do the same. One day we can all live in richly varied and hilarious neighbourhoods, with people who seem to have invented themselves, and so are endlessly fascinating, something beyond entertainment. Yes, there IS a Life After Shopping.” !
Meanwhile, the Occupy movements continue to grow. They are a peaceful call to everyone to do something. As street protests go, they are the polar opposite of the shopping-with-violence which happened in Britain this August; this is thoughtful, organised, peaceful direct action.
The people camped out in tents represent not some loony fringe elements, or mindless looters, but all of us — except these guys have actually gotten out of the house and are doing something about the situation that the 1% have dumped us in.
Although just back, I feel London calling again, to the courtyard of St Paul’s and the most vibrant and optimistic community in the metropolis. This time, however, I’ll bring thermal socks. And more tea.
THE simple hashtag — who’d have guessed just a few short years ago the global phenomenon it would become?
Probably nobody, even including those at the then embryonic social network, Twitter. The name hails from the hash key on your keyboard (#) followed by a, usually abbreviated, tag to denote subject matter. The hashtag is just over four years old, born on August 23, 2007, the suggestion of one Chris Messina.
The first tweet with a hashtag read as follows: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” Up to this time the hash key had most notably been used to refer to “number” or “pound” in the US. The hashtag is used to mark a keyword or topic in a tweet.
Any Twitter user can categorise, create, or follow topics or keywords using hashtags in their tweets. Twitter itself has only been with us a half a decade and in popular use for only half that time.
Twitter may not have been responsible for the Arab Spring, the London riots, the Occupy Wall Street protests (along with those at St Paul’s in London and Dame Street in Dublin) or the “indignants” flooding to the streets of Athens, Paris and Madrid, but it has, along with mobile communications devices, been a central figure in all of the above.
Twitter, allied with other technological advances, serves as a means of communication for large groups of people with similar values and ideals that would otherwise have remained remote and unknown to their peers.
With Twitter you can broadcast your thoughts and feelings to others of a similar frame of mind, wherever they may be in the world. It is revolutionary as a “broadcast medium” with a strong element of “reciprocity”, something traditional broadcast media struggles to master. It is one thing to broadcast your opinions, quite another to have them available for almost immediate adoration or vilification.
Twitter facilitates this, as well as the tracking of trends (although not always accurately, it must be said, something to which the still living Terry Wogan will attest).
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