I went to sleep last night pretty sure that Occupy Wall Street would be around today. Not just because they are organized, committed and willing to put their bodies on the line. Not just because they have the numbers. (The Brooklyn Bridge trap of two Sundays ago proved that the NYPD will not hesitate to perform mass arrests, if their power elite masters tell them too.)
No, I felt sure that the protest would continue because earlier in the evening a friend mailed me a copy of this letter from Occupy Wall Street's legal advisors to Brookfield Properties:
Dear Mr. Clark:
Attorneys associated with the National Lawyers-Guild-New York City Chapter have been asked to represent the Sanitation Working Group. One of several autonomous working groups formed and operated by people who have been occupying Liberty Park. We are in receipt of a copy of your letter to New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly requesting police intervention and outlining your concerns about cleaning and maintenance of Liberty Park.
The enforcement action you are requesting raises serious First Amendment and other legal concerns. Under the guise of cleaning the Park you are threatening fundamental constitutional rights. There is no basis in the law for your request for police intervention, nor have you cited any. Such police action without a prior court order would be unconstitutional and unlawful.
Zuccotti Park, as the NYT points out in an article yesterday, is a prime example of one of the big urban real estate boondoggles of the last thirty years: the "Privately Owned Public Space."
Brookfield Properties, the real estate development corporation, gave up this sliver of property in return for setback and height concessions on a nearby skyscraper. There are hundreds of strange, usually useless "POPS" throughout NYC, and urban areas around the world. You pass these spaces and hardly notice them: a gap between buildings with some hard steel chairs, or a wide windy concrete plinth with an ugly sculpture. They are a recurring feature of the late corporate urban landscape, which only reluctantly and under duress gives up any breathing room to actual, like, citizens.
(In HK, where I also live, the concept of POPS has reached amazing heights of sophistication--most HK private/public areas are hidden in buildings and courtyards, and kept secret so the public can't find them!)
Because POPS like Zuccotti Park weren't designed as actual parks for actual people, but rather as shiny tokens to keep citizens from complaining about the chipping away of urban zoning regulations that protect our rights to open air, sunshine, and a pleasant living environment, the legal status of POPS is ambiguous. Part of the deal is that they're required to be open to the public 24 hours a day (as compensation for the public space that's been given to the developer for his taller building). Otherwise, the rules are hazy.
That's why, when I read the lawyer's letter last night: "There is no basis in the law for your request for police intervention, nor have you cited any. Such police action without a prior court order would be unconstitutional and unlawful", I figured that Occupy Wall Street would not be taken down this morning. Because in the scramble to figure out loopholes that would give corporate developers like Brookfield the space to maximize their profits, the NYC government didn't bother to define what laws would apply to this new urban bastard child, the "Publicly Owned Private Space."
The lawyers for OWS are absolutely right. There is no legal basis for Brookfield Properties to ask the NYPD to intervene to eject the demonstrators. I am sure that Brookfield's lawyers were up until the wee hours trying to come up with one. And failing, because there isn't any. Certainly the fervor, organization and dedication of the thousands of people who turned out last night had a lot to do with saving the Occupation. The union members who showed, and the City Councilpersons who made phone calls helped, too. But I'm pretty sure the main reason Brookfield Properties "postponed" their "cleaning" is because they knew they would be opening themselves to a huge lawsuit. Which they would lose.
One more interesting thing. This is New York City, where power is incestuous. We already know about Bloomberg's girlfriend, Diana Taylor, who sits on the board of Brookfield Properties. But then there is the matter of the lawyers who drafted and signed the legal challenge that saved Occupy Wall Street last night:
Very truly yours,
Margaret Ratner Kunstler
Gideon Orion Oliver
Yetta G. Kurland
Sarah Kunstler
Martin R. Stolar
Bruce K. Bentley
Janos Marton
Michael Ratner
Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler are, respectively, the widow and daughter of the famed civil rights fighter William Kuntsler.
But it is the name of Michael Ratner that caught my eye last night. For Ratner is not just the number one human rights legal activist in New York City, arguably the US. He is also the scion of a multi billion property development firm run by his brother, Bruce Ratner, who happens to be a crony/buddy of Michael Bloomberg. So much so that he got more than 100 million dollars of tax and price breaks from NYC to build--against community opposition--a boondoggle basketball stadium in Brooklyn.
(Oh, and besides being a crony of Bloomberg, guess what! Bruce Ratner was the real estate developer for the New York Times' shiny new skyscraper. Do you think the Atlantic Yards stadium boondoggle got much coverage in Izvestia
?)
So while Michael Ratner's credentials as a legal rights activist are solid, his family/monetary connections (he was conspicuously silent in the community legal battle against his brother Bruce, and he owns shares in the Nets, Ratner's team) place him well inside the cozy embrace of New York's power elite.
The minute I saw his name at the bottom of the letter I knew we'd most likely won this battle.
Which all reveals yet more of the genius of OWS. Simply by the act of taking back--and legally holding--privately owned public space, they've exposed yet another rentier scam. Which, judging by the rapid response of Brookfield Properties, has sent the city's power elites into a tizzy.
And, genius on top of genius: We tend to overlook, as we focus on the invisible money shell games of Wall Street and the squeeze scams of the rentiers, something even more precious than money that's been stolen from us by the 1% in the last decades: space. This was brought home to me in a big way at the end of the big Brooklyn Bridge march a few weeks ago.
Our small group of 350 who managed to get across without being corralled and arrested ended up in a lovely old Brooklyn public space, created in 1945: the Walt Whitman Park. Open, filled with trees and covered with grass, the park was ringed with benches, and anchored by a statue of Whitman elevated on a broad stone platform that made a natural speaker's stage for our gathering.
Walt Whitman is a public space in the 19th/20th century sense--comfortable, inviting, and designed so that citizens from every walk of life might gather together there. It's a concept of public space--and public life!-- that's all but disappeared in the late corporate era.
Because, quite literally, our bodies and the space and air and life around them have been squeezed and constricted by corporate power. It has happened so gradually, that most of us now don't think twice about conforming to the restrictions placed on our bodies and movement by these controls.
It is only at those moments when we are suddenly freed of them that we remember. We step, together with hundreds of strangers, into an empty street. We stand, and burst into chant together in an empty park. Oh yes! This is what the world, our neighborhoods, our streets, used to be like. This is how life was lived. It is as exhilirating as being let out of a cage--because that is actually what is happening. The cry "Whose Streets? Our Streets?" [#7] isn't about hooliganism. It isn't about demands or even about protest. Taking back space is a liberation of the body and soul. The power and confidence it unleashes is truly awesome. No wonder the kings and their courtiers are scrambling.
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Informative and a beautifully written ending.
Beautifully written because it is evocative. I feel like I am there with you bursting into an open space. Bursting out in new found freedom. We are blessed to have your reports. Where else do you post?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx
Thanks, MM
No I don't post anywhere else as MsExPat. I do write essays under my own byline--send me a Corrente message for links, if you'd like.
thank you so much for this report
so much insight as to what is happening.
I second that
Terrific post.
I keep finding JOY as a common experience in the Occupations....
... that are successful. I've always put it down to self-organizing. This wonderful post gives a second (though not mutually exclusive) explanation.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
The self-organizing is the root cause; Michael Ratner is part of
the elite response to that. And an indicator for what is going on within our non-transparent elite. (Ohh, look, is that Podgorny next to Brezhnev on the reviewing stand for the parade by the Kremlin?)
Without the social capital that OWS has built up, the fact that the powers that be forgot to leave themselves a legal leg to stand on would not come into play. The powers that be would just clear out the park and maybe 6 months from now, some judge would rule that yeah, OK, it wasn't quite legal to do so, but it is all over now anyway and no one has standing to complain about it anyway, so case closed. But there were too many people watching this time to pull that one off. And they were watching because OWS has acted in ways that appeal to people and bypass the pre-established propaganda memes. (And the propaganda memes have been weakened by the extreme overt misrule of the past few years.)
Thanks to MsExPat for the very well-written, useful information (in yet another area!) and to Lambert for coming back again and again to "self-organizing". This creation of something _social_ that is new is what is making everything else possible.
All these decades our misrulers have misled us, but the basic goodness and creativity in people has been building up something unseen in the soil, in the rhizomes. Now that is popping through into the light of day.
A lot has been mulched into the rhizomes. As someone pointed out (very possibly on this blog), the OWS folks are clearly affected by having been raised on an ethos of "everyone's voice matters, everyone must be heard", which is the opposite of only leaders speak or only celebrities matter or only the loud and bold speak. There is also the impact of the human-level networking that sites like Facebook try to make money from. Even little posts like "I love the mall" are a small break from giving away attention to our pharaonic elites and celebrities.
If our misrulers were truly clever (rather than the opportunistic infection that they actually are), they would have given some small group the permit for the bullhorn and made them responsible for it. It is just so sweet that OWS has turned the pettiness of our misrulers about this into a new form of social learning.
And oh yes, the joy. When we create societies that resonate and re-enforce our individual uniqueness, rather than try to make everyone the same or try to take from some for the benefit of others, then we are able to be more alive, more human, more ourselves. That is joyful.
To clarify:
I didn't argue that the Occupation was saved because of the support of a Michael Ratner. Rather, that his name at the bottom of the legal letter was a sign to me that the power elite is now wide awake and paying attention to the Occupation and its ramifications. And that various subgroups of the Elite are (uncertainly) scrambling for position. They are conflicted. They are confused and in disagreement about what to do. They understand that simple repression is not going to work here (heh, the Occupation is now "Too Big To Fail"). And The Law (thanks to hubris, carelessness, lack of foresight or all of the above) is NOT on their side.
What happened on October 14th was a multi-layered win for OWS.
Clarifi-clarification
You were clear in what you meant. I wasn't correcting you. Just spelling out in detail how the different factors connect to each other to make it all explicit.
Thanks for these posts and all the ones you send in from everywhere. In less interesting times, you would be posting about the floods in Thailand for us.
That the elite didn't bother to rig the law about privately owned public spaces is a lot like the foreclosure fraud. This is not an elite at the top of its game. The elites may prove to be surprisingly brittle. Dangerous, but brittle. Dinosaurs kind of sums it up. Big teeth, little brains.