American Currents: Getting Occupy on the Program

The ex-Marine had served four tours of duty in Iraq. I went up to him after the meeting and asked him, “Looking back on your military service, do you feel that you were defending liberty and freedom?”

“Absolutely not,” he replied. “That’s what radicalized me.” He now works with and speaks for a veteran-run, anarchist collective known as Rose City Resistance. There is a growing, committed anarchist movement of military vets, he continued. Sort of like recovering Catholics, I suggested; he grinned and nodded. When I told him I had recently seen an Internet graphic on Facebook that consists of a photo of soldiers in the field carrying a wounded comrade on a stretcher with the legend, “We were too busy defending your freedom to Occupy anything,” he almost growled.

I met this man Sunday afternoon in a meeting at the Ace Hotel, SW 10th and Stark, organized by The Bus Project and The Portland Mercury. The former is a volunteer-driven nonprofit that works to get young people involved in political activism, the latter an alternative free weekly newspaper. (The founder of The Bus Project, Jefferson Smith, currently a state representative for House District 47, is also running for mayor of Portland.) They had brought in legislative activists, community organizers, representatives from Mayor Sam Adams’s and U.S. Senator Merkley’s offices, and the vet and a self-described “1 percenter” to exchange ideas with Occupy Portland vets and sympathizers about future directions for the movement.

I’m not going to write about what we heard and talked about there . . . not because it was particularly pithy or deserves top-secret protection; like most Occupy and post-Occupy events, such as the MoveOn.org gathering at Senator Wyden’s office I wrote about in my last blog commentary, it was more about getting to know people, seeing a few familiar faces, and learning a couple useful things for future activity.

But mostly because if you’re interested in where Occupy is going next, I want to encourage you to get online and get out the door and find out for yourself, as well as contribute ideas and sweat. (I’m also embarrassed that I forgot to take my digital camera to the meeting, so I don’t have any new graphics to illustrate this commentary.) But I did want to say a word or two about Monday’s

DEC. 12 SHUTDOWN OF WEST COAST PORTS

I don’t read Occupy Portland’s web site on a regular basis. Hardly at all, really; partly because I want to continue to see how the movement looks to the average Portlander, through the lousy prism of local TV news and (most) print reporting . . . and partly because it’s too much work. Once Occupy Portland stopped furnishing local broadcasters with “filthy camp” material, and the police wised up and cut way back on their downtown presence, TV news reporting all but disappeared and explanations of the coming protest have been particularly poor to absent.

Like most middle-class and working-class citizens, I would imagine, I couldn’t understand or explain why Occupy Wall Street was proposing to hurt working-class dock workers by denying them a day’s pay. That’s the easy spin some media outlets -- for example, Business Week -- are putting on it. Sunday’s meeting was the first time I heard that the shutdown was aimed at Goldman Sachs, which owns a big chunk of the shipping operations on the West Coast. Here’s a video by Boots Riley that presents the case for the protest.

I’m sitting this one out. It’s hard for me to get to the site in Portland, without a car or ready mass transit access, and I’m just not sold on this particular move. Officially, the unions have not taken positions; or, as in the case of the Longshoremen’s union, they oppose the shutdown. But it isn’t hard to find websites where individual Teamsters, for instance, are pretty enthusiastic in their support of Occupy in general and the port protest.

Curiously, local ILWU president Jeff Smith told Willamette Week, “If I wanted to shut down the port, I could do it without Occupy. I don’t need ’em,” which sounds like a power thing: It wasn’t my idea, so I don’t wanna play. (The ILWU, by the way, is the union that indeed shut down the ports of Longview and Seattle for periods in July, August, and September, defied a judge’s temporary restraining order, and triggered an NLRB investigation in a dispute -- including some property damage and violence -- over labor assignments at a new grain elevator at Longview. Some stories I have seen -- here’s one in Mother Jones -- say the call from Occupy L.A. for Monday’s port shutdown was partly intended to support that dispute.)

My next moves? To rake leaves in Chapman and Lownsdale squares, where late the Occupy Portland camp stood. My wife Carole and I volunteered in response to an invitation from Portland Parks and Recreation. I’ll be curious to see whether any of my fellow Portlanders who made such a loud noise about “the damage” to “our parks” will be there too. I’m guessing not.

I mentioned in my last commentary that a surprising number of comments to the Oregonian’s web site expressed skepticism about the Parks Bureau’s estimate of $85,000 to fix up the Occupy site. Here’s the full dollar breakdown. It’s hard not to suspect there are routine maintenance and even upgrades that have nothing to do with whatever Occupy Portland might have done on the site. I know how awful those bathrooms were before Occupy Portland ever showed up on the scene; seems like they were often just locked up and unavailable to the public, which was certainly not the case when the protesters were around. Nevertheless, I’ve heard lazy and ignorant TV newscasters refer to the “$85,000 in damage” by the protesters.

One other interesting item that hasn’t received much public attention: Portland Mercury editor Denis Theriault (one of the presenters, and I suspect, organizers, of Sunday afternoon’s meeting) blogged on Nov. 30 that city officials told him that no soil contamination was found on the site after the protesters were evicted. I doubt very many members of the giant peanut gallery who decried human waste, drug needles, and diesel fuel from the power generators “polluting our park” are even now aware of this.

So that’ll be the local task. On the national level, I need to follow up on the buzz that bills have actually been introduced in Congress to alter or limit corporate personhood -- the legal concept behind last year's disastrous Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which said corporate money for political campaigns constituted free speech protected by the First Amendment. I want to investigate the legislative proposals and pledge to let my elected representatives know directly what I think about it.

But to finish with the Marine vet. He’s missing a front tooth that he told me was knocked out when a roadside bomb exploded in Iraq. The military won’t pay to have it fixed because it says, that qualifies as “cosmetic surgery.” Since the U.S. currently spends $4,000 a second on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and $4,000 would repair the damage to his mouth, he tells people, “for this vet, they won’t give a second of their time.”