Re: Occupy

From October 3 to about 21 (it's tough to track time when you run on little sleep) I actively participated in the Occupy Portland movement. It was heavy.

I avoided labeling myself with any particular committee affiliation, but the work I chose to do would fit under their labels facilitation, communication, tactical, peacekeeping, mental health and sexual assault prevention.

Now that I've had some time to reflect on the whole thing, I've developed a conceptual framework that has helped me make sense of what I experienced:

The way I see it, Occupy can be broken into 3 parts:

1) The Movement: an overall, national and worldwide feeling of need for change. The Movement can still be best explained only by the very general slogan "We are the 99%" which attempts to address the increasing income inequality trends in this country and the world.

The Movement is very very important. As an economist, a former foreclosure prevention counselor, a product of poverty, a humanist... as all of who I am, I know that income inequality, which is accelerating and systemic in the U.S, is not good for society. We have to do better, or our civil society will devolve even further. See previous posts.

2) The Process: Decisions are made using a consensus model. General Assemblies are held daily, and last hours. Participants hash out decisions through the use of specialized language, specific hand signals and 'mic check' a call-and-response method of information dissemination. There are multiple rounds of "proposal suggestion", "clarifying questions", "points of process", "concerns", "direct responses", "proposal amendments", and "breakaway groups" until (in Portland's model) 90% of the participants agree or the proposal is blocked, in which case the idea is either dropped or it goes back to "working committee" for further revision.

There's a whole lot of social statement about group-think and inefficiency and lowest common denominator and self selection and etc. that could go here, but ultimately, The Process isn't the point of this post.

3) The Encampments: This is the physical manifestation of the movement at the local level. This is the tents and people and services that are holding the space itself and act as a tangible symbol of the movement and which allow a gathering space for The Process to happen in the hope that The Movement will go somewhere. This physical manifestation is incredibly important, becasue it gives a face to The Movement. It is unfortunately, this face that could destroy the Movement, if The Process does not adjust itself, quickly.


So, here's the thing: as far as reality goes, right now neither The Movement nor The Process can move forward, because The Encampments are taking them down.

When I first got involved, what I saw in the Occupy Portland planning process was a reasonably sized and very vocal contingent, but not nearly a majority, whose generalized distrust of "the system," and intense feelings of "personal authority above all," influenced The Process in ways that kept a clear statement of respect for basic rule of law at a structural level from being made, or even implicitly followed.

Despite this vocal minority, for the first few days of The Encampment spirits were high and public opinion was supportive. Within 48 hours of claiming the space, centers of operations for food, medical, peacekeeping, library services, information, and engineering had been established. The signs and chalk slogans on the sidewalks were on message and positive. Thousands turned out for the first march event on October 6, and then again a few days later on the 9th. The City and Police were cooperative. The Portland Marathon allowed the camp to remain in place the first weekend, despite the fact that they held a permit to the space.

The Process worked well enough, at first, because enough participants were motivated by their personal interpretations of what The Movement was about, and by the rush of positive feeling that accompanied the ability to do work, to be useful after such a long recession, a drought of personal utility unleashed into a flood of hope and constructive action.

At one point, I was so moved by the paradigm shift in the way that authority reacts to civil protest and the overwhelming manifestation of positive cooperation that I collapsed, weeping in joy (and, admittedly, exhaustion.)

But the empowerment of the people building the camp, combined with a desire to maintain autonomy, plus the feeling of the vocal minority that the movement was one of civil disobedience which required a position of opposition to all established law and structure, quickly took a toll.

As a result, it took about 4-5 days for the encampment to welcome the assistance of the police for rising issues of crime.

(I won't detail the events that occurred in the camp, nor the tipping point that led to increased willingness to request police intervention, at this time).

By the evening of Monday, October 10 Occupy Portland was an encampment of several hundred people spread over two city blocks separated by a (once opened forcibly by the police, the first arrests of Occupy Portland and in many ways the turning point for the future of the camp) heavily trafficked street... and by this time the demographics of those camping had changed.

Many of the women and the families and the folks who had someplace else to sleep at night left soon after. They were marginalized out by the partiers and the drug addicts and the homeless that flooded into the camp. This only further complicated the work of the folks who did decide to stay committed to peacekeeping/community safety in the name of either "The Process" or "The Movement".

The camp is now a concentration of those whose needs for social services is most desperate. They represent not The Movement, nor The Process, nor the 99%.

The Encampments now represent only the 1% on the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.

I have seen no effort to delineate the Encampments from The Movement, and the general public doesn't understand The Process at all.

This is not the way to win hearts and minds.


At this point, we're hearing more and more reports of police intervention because

1) the amount of crime continues to increase, and

2) there is willingness to report crime, a sign of acceptance by the people working in the camps that they can't handle all of these issues internally. This acceptance is good, because it's true, but it's also the beginning of disillusionment.


How feasible will it be for the limited number of folks on the ground to maintain their willingness to fight against the tide of deprivation that they are immersed in? These are people who for whatever reason, can afford to be there in the first place, but their motivation comes largely from a feeling of purpose that was unleashed after years of recession, in which their desire to work was not allowed an outlet. These people need to feel like their work is valuable.

They are working long shifts in a 'hyper-real-time', constantly moving and changing environment of near constant and super direct interaction with, in addition to The Process and The Movement aspects, a proportion of severe mental health/social services needs that exist in a free to all, initially perceived as somewhat lawless, no particular assurance of future security, place.

Already they are realizing that the work they're doing is not making a difference. No one can tread water forever. Many have already walked away. Those that are left are increasingly unable to see clearly.

Is is possible for The Encampments to get to a place of safety/security that will encourage a larger demographic of people to camp, representing more of "the 99" on the ground, thereby allowing the three parts of this social event to merge more?

Should the encampments try to go mobile and limit the communities that are allowed to camp with the group? What effect does self limiting have on the other (moving, working, developing) parts of this thing?

What it would take, and/or how effective it could even be, to try to raise awareness of the differences between the three elements of this social event?

Is it possible to separate/eliminate The Encampments from The Process and/or The Movement?

In the national news, we're seeing more and more encampments being broken down by police in riot gear, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. This isn't surprising at all, once you realize what The Encampments really are.

Portland police have halted their implicit support of the movement and have started publicizing the lists of problems and complaints in the camp. Public opinion is increasingly hostile. The City is obviously building the case for a eviction deadline.

It is almost, if not already, too late to stop the inevitable end of the current camp, because the camp has become a public health concern.

Reading notes from the last few days of General Assemblies, I see that the vast majority of energy is going into addressing the issues of crime and violence in the camp. Little to no energy is left over to systemically address evolving The Process, or enlarging the reach and message of The Movement.

The Movement arose from imbalance. Over the last 30 years, the percentage of American resources owned by the richest 1% of the population has doubled, and now stands, by some counts, as high as 40%.

The Movement is being destroyed by imbalance.

Over just the first few weeks, the monopolization of the Occupation resources by the poorest 1% of its members makes the 40% of wealth owned by America's elite seem almost reasonable.

The 99

About a year ago, as part of a PSU Economics Department Symposium, I had the opportunity to stand in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and ask them to use their authority to refinance consumer debt at an interest rate more like 3-4%, with a repayment forbearance period along an income scale.

I found the authorization in their charter, I convinced my group, I made a Powerpoint with the words liquidity trap and helicopter money. I asked for changes to the ZZZ and the FDCPA.

I chickened out.
I'm sorry.

In many ways, it was already too late. My plan would have been most effective before Americans in recession dumped their money into paying their debt down.

Now, maybe I don't understand international capitol flows as well as I should.

But I do know that American consumers cannot keep up, with their stagnant incomes, on the interest payments they make to the banks, which now average 13% and range up to around 28%.

We are in a trap we can't afford. I do not see any justification where finance needs that money more than we do. Whether it should be going to individuals or to government is truly beyond the point. Finance is not using it to grow the economy by reinvesting it productively. Finance is using it to hoard wealth. While people are suffering.

We are in deep. Our problems are complicated and agreement is hard to come to.

But we, the people, cannot afford to buy our groceries on loan anymore.
We, the people, cannot afford to pay half, or more, of our incomes on housing anymore.
We, the people, want to work.
We want to believe our children will have a life at least as good as ours, if not better.

We, the people, at least the ones on my block, and in my classes, and in the grocery store and the thrift store, have changed the way we shop, and have stayed in town on our vacations, and have learned how to get by on less. We have seen our positions cut, our workloads increase, our wages fall and our leaders fiddle, all while we continue to just try to adjust.

We want a reallocation.

We want less hoarding. We want more work, and we want more of the benefit of our labor to be in our hands and in our communities.

We want the games to stop, because it is our lives and our futures that are being gambled by an entrenched minority that has ceased to provide adequately for the masses.

We, the people, are the 99%, and we cannot afford no change.

I remember

I remember the alarm was set for early, because boyfriend was going to be on "AM Northwest."

I remember they called and said, "Turn on your tv right now" then hung up.

I remember the 6 year old girl, waking up and seeing the tv, the people covered in dust, everything beige. "Mommy," she said, "what planet is that?"

I remember going to work, at the newspaper. Boss was saying "Call all the airlines right now, they'll want to buy big ads, condolences."

She was in shock, too.

It felt like the dust was blowing all the way over here, the other side of the country was so close, and none of us could really breathe.

I remember afterward, for awhile, it seemed like more people carried a camera all the time, just like they did after Oklahoma.

As if that little machine was insurance, because if we could be the recorder, we would be more likely to survive.

me being published running my mouth

I'm already seeing where I could take the 100% opposite view from the one I've taken here.. but heck... I got published!

(10.27.2011 - it appears that the link is gone. While I try to retrieve the full thread, here is a comment I posted, in response to a comment on the post, that gives a gist of the argument I was making.)

Hi Bob and dtafs! Thanks for jumping in! Great food for thought you’ve offered.

Before I get too wrapped up in that head of lettuce touched by your 7 cent Mexican, or wonder what strata of workers deserve to eat in restaurants every now and then, I’d like to revisit my original point. Calling the Madrona affordable housing is wrong.

The Madrona is a housing project. For what it is, a housing project for near homeless addicts, its wonderful news, and yes, dtafts, on that merit alone it is something to be commended. But to paraphrase what Bob said so well in his comment on Dan’s original posting, there should be a difference between affordable housing and housing projects.

I’ll refer you to this piece about the Madrona, written by Anna Griffin for the O. http://www.solaroregon.org/about/news_folder/madrona-studios-opening-most-worthwhile-part-of-portlands-rose-quarter-renewal You’ll notice that she never calls this ‘affordable housing’: “To move into the Madrona Studios, a rectangular box of an old Ramada Inn on Northeast Weidler, you must be homeless or nearly there.”

Where I get my tuft in a ruffle is when we lump hardworking, fully employed people who happen to be doing jobs that rest on the ‘no degree required’ scale in with recovering addicts and expect them to knead their soiled hats in their hands and whisper ‘thank you, sirs, may I have another?”

There should be a benefit to working.I am having a hard time fathoming that we actually disagree on that point.

Bob, you’ve provided a handy calculator and answered my direct question. You consider $8.73/ hr. a living wage for a single person in Portland, Ore. With 47% of take home toward housing, and a $53/week food budget. Really? Are you kidding me? That’s a lot of fast food down the gullet, and bound to up that medical cost pretty quick, don’t you think? Well, heck, on that scale, my 11.50/hr. worker really is earning a kings wage!

Apparently, though, that princely sum doesn’t extend to being allowed to dine alongside their betters or take a few days rest and travel once a year? (for the record, Bob, there is quite a continuum you’ve quoted between dining in a decent restaurant every now and then and the luxury of keeping domestics)

At what point does a person ‘need’ a vacation, dtafs? At what point do they deserve one? I have to let you know, poor folk do eat out, not as often from white tablecloths, but cost increases do affect them as well. And while you may not worry too much about those upper crusts who can afford to have their manors tended by crisply uniformed staff, I think they’re valid humans, so I tend to ‘worry’ about them, too.

So where we seem to diverge is on the realistic implementation and effects of ‘living wage.’ The question is one that is by no means settled, so on that point I’m gonna do my homework and come back for more real soon.

But again I would like to point out that we are constrained to the realities we live in; those being that we are in the midst of a recession and that wages are not likely to rise for a while. I’ll also note that Oregon’s minimum wage is already tied to rise with inflation.

Ultimately, though, the main point is just this, $11.50 an hour should afford a better quality of life than a housing project.

Crazy Bus Man...

Today I took the only seat open on a crowded line 9, and there’s one of those guys sitting there reeking of booze and getting chewed on by some other washed out and useless whose conversation he jumped into, unwelcome.

No one wants to sit next to that guy.

But I do anyway. He says he wont bite. Almost looks like he’s grateful, to me, just for sitting down. Starts talking my ear off, old timer, 60 but looks like life’s been hell, he smells like hell, I can see the bottle peeking out from behind his coat, a bottle with a cap like mouthwash, but he reeks of hard booze.

But he has a smile, and a soft careful gentle about him. I can tell he’s harmless enough for 50 blocks, and I want to sit down. So I listen, put on my nice smile, he’s gonna talk, and I wanna sit, so ill listen.


Said he’s got cancer.

Had hair down to his ass, but cut it all off and gave it to the kids at st. judes.

"But I don’t want to go up to pill hill and get the microwave – that’s what I call it - they gave me some pills, but I quit ‘em, ill let the vodka do the job."

"I’ve got a real nice apartment, I get my check direct deposit and I put a nice parachute over my bed and one of those folding Japanese things and a real nice view and… I just want to die at home."

"I rode the rails when I got back from killing viet cong for a living,. 70’s and 80’s, went all over, till I came back to here and got in that fight over around Lloyd center. They called it murder, but I was just defending myself. They gave me a lawyer and he said, ‘just sit on your hands and don’t talk’., so that’s what I did. ‘ I wasn’t doing so good back then"

He shows me how kept quiet and just sat on his hands.

"I wasn’t convicted, though. They told me to take a plea. They called it manslaughter. So I went to prison. For ten years. "

Then his blue eyes just lit up... he was smiling, remembering prison.

I was not more than a few inches away from those eyes. You get real close to another person on a public bus. Temporary, but distance can just melt away. He’s glowing, now. While he tells me his story.

He built a garden while he did his ten years. The officers and the inmates aren’t supposed to get involved with each other. Keep their distance. But the guards brought in 40 tomato plants, and he built a fence for the string beans to crawl up.

He’s shining like a little boy, his bright blue eyes are dancing.

One time a hummingbird landed on him… and when he was telling it, remembering it he was back there, he was full of pure sweet satisfaction and love and joy. He held out both hands, 9 fingers, and he showed me where the bird landed, right on him, loved him for his prison garden.



I see my stop coming. I like this old guy. He calls himself an old hippy, talks about playing cat stevens on his guitar in the same breath he talks about killing in Vietnam.

He's still rambling on, while my stop is getting closer.

“And now, our guys coming home, they keep putting guns in their mouths and pulling the triggers. 6000 of em so far, just can’t handle being back because the government isn’t helping them get home, they get here, and they don’t know what to do. Just like Jimmy and Charlie, and Rob.. guys I grew up with, they did the same thing, just couldn’t take it. We all volunteered, then we got home, and…. you think they would have learned. I guess I’m just not as sensitive as them. I miss those guys.. but”

… he's closed his eyes and he says…

“About all that, I , … I only think about the good times.

But I’m watching his eyes get wet and I hear his voice drop low and he whispers… ‘I love everyone on this bus’


I should have stayed just a little while more. What does it matter to me, really, if I have to cross the street and catch the line back. The timing was all off… I left him alone when he had picked me to talk to. Who cares if he’s crazy, or he killed someone, or if I don’t know him so he shouldn’t matter. He picked me in that way we sometimes need to, just talk to anyone, someone, anonymous. He was starting to talk about that shot he took, aimed a little off, killed that whole family, but he didn’t mean to. The difference in his eyes between the hummingbird and that hellish war.


He didn’t mean to, just aimed a little off. Blue eyes sad and wet and trying not to cry.

He’s dying of cancer, and giving his hair, and some of his check each month, to those kids up on the hill, and just letting the vodka do the job because he just wants to die at home.


And I pulled the string.

I Went one stop, two blocks, past where I would have usually. I should have given him more time. Should have tried to get him back to that hummingbird, behind the prison wall.

His tomatoes and string beans, and watermelons this big, and the guards sneaking his seeds out to plant in their gardens at home. The way his eyes lit up, pride. Acceptance, he accomplished.


In that temporary moment of no distance between us, but still anonymous, free to just say what you need to, he talked to me about things I will not ever know myself.

Between Vietnam, and riding the rails, and manslaughter, and dying of cancer, that hummingbird in his prison garden is the place he goes back to, the place where he was accepted and accomplished and proud.

this is how much it costs to live indoors.

Oregonians average housing cost as a percentage of gross household income across income brackets, and percentage of Oregon population earning each income bracket. 2006 census data.

Project 2/3

For our project on housing & homelessness, I used 2006 Oregon census data, and investigated the percentage of income that Oregon families spend on shelter - rent or mortgage and their utilities - across different income brackets.

My suspicion was that lower income families are paying a huge percent of their income toward housing, the issue is known as the poverty trap.

I also wanted to show that not only are lesser incomes spending a high percentage (on average) of their income on shelter, but that there are a lot more people in those lower income brackets... median household income in Oregon ( 2006) was around $46,000 / year, which means that half of Oregonians earned less than that amount, while the top range of income for my study was over 200k.. an income that some still consider 'middle class' though it represents only 1.5% of the population at the high end of the range.

The first challenge was sorting through the 56,000 records of data that I had. A lot of time was spent waiting for the computer to catch up to what i had asked it to do. Huge data set for a little macbook to try to crunch! Eventually, I arranged each income grouping ( separated into 15k ranges) into a scatterplot with income on the y axis and percentage spent on the x axis. is a

This is an image of the 60k - 75k income graph




Now the design issues began. My initial idea was to layer each of the scatterplots, using color contrast to show the larger numbers of people in the lower income brackets, and eventually make something that would be interesting to look at, and also convey the huge numbers of Oregonians spending far more than the 'traditional wisdom' of 1/3 of their income on shelter.



Quite pretty, but it doesn't really convey the information. I banged my head on how to make this more effective for quite awhile. The idea I came up with was to print each individual layer onto a transparent sheet of plastic, and separate them so they could be viewed either individually or as a single image, with each layer labeled with its income and percentage info.

For web viewing purposes, here is a version of that concept, thrown together when I found out we weren't having an in person final, so bringing in my tactile object wasn't an option and it didn't photograph well)







Very interesting, but now I decided to go back to the drawing board and create a single image that used my data, but in a way that would clearly and immediately show the issue.

The poster design was full of its own challenges. After spending so long inside the huge mass of information, distilling everything down into simpler and simpler visual concepts was challenging for me. Lot of people tried to say 'bar graph, Jana", but it wasn't until I heard it from my dad that I actually listened.

Here it what came out of the process: