Why Occupy DC Matters to You

The following is a guest article provided by Jeffrey Bartlett. A fantastic lawyer in the DC Metro area and a passionate geek. We're proud to have this piece by him. Being a lawyer, and by definition insufferable, he asks that we kindly point out that none of the following constitutes legal advice, and that the following views are entirely his and his alone, do not represent the views of any person, company, or government he has worked for or represented, and you hereby absolve him of any and all liability for any injury, real or imagined, you, your feelings, or your sense of proper grammatical structure may suffer upon reading this essay.

Not much is being said about the Occupy movement these days, and perhaps this long overdue essay has missed its moment. But perhaps now is a perfect time to reflect on the Occupy movement and what it means.

The jist of Occupy Movement. via Occupy DC

About six weeks ago, DC Geeks founder Scooter and I went to visit the Occupy DC camp and to hand out blankets. The people we met there are exactly the sort of people you would expect. Dirty, stinky, young, with the sort of brain burstingly naïve political views that might lead a person to wear a Che Guerva t-shirt. More than a few were clearly crazy. But they were also passionate and hopeful. They believed in something enough to brave the cold, the cops, the camp violence, the crazies, all because they felt something had gone terribly, desperately wrong with this country, and they had the drive to do something about it. In short, I fell madly in love with them.

Right about now, you are probably wondering what the heck an essay on a political movement is doing squished between articles on Magfest and Anime USA. I’m sure you’d rather spend this time clicking through photo albums of cos-play, painting your miniatures, min-maxing your half- Elven blade-singer, or engaging in whatever other activity feeds your geek fetish. That’s what I do most nights. Hence the lateness of this essay. And I certainly want to keep politics and DC Geeks as separate as possible. Just because we can all agree that Firefly was amazing and Ripley could beat the tar out of Princess Leia does not mean will have the same views on Congressional regulation of the high-yield bond market. But if you will bear with me for just a little while, and resist the urge to scroll to the bottom to post something unique and inspired like “first!” or, more likely, “TLDR,” then you might agree this essay was worth your time. Or not. At minimum, it will give you something new to ruminate on as your paint your Skaven.

Collaborative stories written by the participants.

So, just what the heck IS an essay about Occupy DC/Wall-Street/Wherever doing on a site like DC Geeks? I was wondering much the same thing. DC Geek and messianic presence Scooter assures me that it belongs here. He correctly pointed out that this is a movement that depends on the internet and social media to survive. Perhaps that alone is enough to make it geek worthy, but I’m not sure I agree. When your grandmother has a Twitter account, I think it is safe to conclude that social media has jumped the geek shark and belongs squarely to the omni-culture. But hey, you guys are trendsetters. Suck it, high-school cheer squad that judged us!

No, the reason the Occupy movement matters to geek culture is because it is a grass- root response to a cultural shift we called way back in 1984 when William Gibson wrote Neuromancer. We may not be able to hit a LIMB clinic and have cybernetic arms installed just because it’s Tuesday (fascist doctors demand we first lose our limbs the old-fashioned way first), but in terms of domestic politics, we are on the edge of realizing all the dystopian ideals of the cyberpunk genre. It isn’t fiction anymore.

In 2010, JP Morgan Chase gave $4.6 million in “technology, time and resources” to the New York City Police Foundation.  The Department of Homeland Security is deploying military technology against the citizenry.  Predator Drones are being used for law enforcement.

Even late at night, people gathered to tell stories and get in some
freestyle rap (I'm not even kidding, and it was awesome.)

Which brings us to what I believe the Occupy movement is really struggling against—the disintegration of the social contract. You probably recall from your high school American history class something about Hobbes and Locke and how their ideas on the social contract influenced the founding fathers. But they weren't the only thinkers. 50-100 years later, a Frenchman by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing on the subject as well.

Rousseau was particularly obsessed with the idea of moral government and what would or would not make a moral government. He wrote in his aptly named essay The Social Contract that “[s]ince no man has natural authority over his fellow men, and since might in no sense makes right,” then those who are governed against their will by the strong are slaves. If a man can be a slave before a master, then so can a people be slave to a king. Governing by the threat of force and the ability to execute that threat can therefore never be the basis of a moral government. A just government can only exist when it is the product of a social contract entered into knowingly and willingly by all participants. But this of course creates a problem. When you are born into a society you are subject to the laws of that society, and by a contract you never agreed to enter. For Rousseau, a government lost its moral authority the moment the second generation became old enough to be independent of their parents. How then to resolve this problem?

Without wandering too far afield, it is simple enough to say that Rousseau argued for such rigorous indoctrination that the second generation would so love the nation that by the time they were old enough to dissent, that they would be so enthralled with their nation that they would accept the social contract as it was without question. They would not be governed against their will, and so were not slaves. It was a somewhat cynical way of viewing the world, and rightly or wrongly he has been criticized for being the foundational ideology of both National Socialism and Soviet Communism.

Additional signs posted around the Occupy camp

The founding fathers resolved the Rousseau problem somewhat more artfully: participatory government. By giving the people the vote they gave people the right to shape government. Every person of voting age therefore plays a role in shaping the social contract, and therefore agree to it. A government of the people and by the people necessarily retains its moral authority.

Now let us return to the Occupy movement and what it is that they are really protesting again, whether they acknowledge it or not. They are protesting against a government they see as having a steadily declining moral authority; one that belongs to the corporations and not to the people. And they certainly aren't alone in this feeling. Robert Reich, the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkley recently stated in an NPR podcast (Market Place 12/28/11) that “the defining political issue in 2012 is not the size of government but who government is for. Nearly 80% of respondents in a recent Pew charity foundation pole said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.” Roll that around in your head for a moment. 80% of survey respondents feel that corporations have too much power. Now ask yourself what Congress is doing about it.

A recent article in Wired points out that a bill that would require the government to obtain a warrant before reading your e-mail or electronically stored data—you may we recall we fought a war over basic rights such as remaining secure  unreasonable and unwarranted search and seizure—cannot even get out of committee. While SOPA, a bill with almost unprecedented backlash from the voting public is expected to sail through Congress.

So what is a corporation, and why have they got the park hippies so persnickety? A corporation is a legal creation that functions as a liability shield. When a group or individual forms a corporation, they that ensure their personal assets cannot be touched by a law suit brought for the actions of the company. If a corporation destroys your house, you cannot sue the board members who approved the action that destroyed your home, only the corporation. And if they corporation has no money, it doesn’t matter how rich the board members are, you are out of luck.

You've also probably heard people bemoaning how crazy it is that corporations are people. Well, they aren't, and that is a misperception stemming from a Supreme Court  case called Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819). But a corporation does enjoy many of the rights of an individual person without risking many of the consequences--a corporation cannot be jailed. Recall that the social contract is an agreement between people to form a government that creates rules to govern all the individuals. Everyone surrenders a little freedom in exchange for security against their neighbor. A corporation reaps all the benefits of the social contract, but makes a much smaller sacrifice of freedoms. They are, in effect, super-citizens. Now add recent Supreme Court decisions that money is speech, and corporations, engines of profit generation, become truly terrifying.

If you really want to have a hard time sleeping at night, your independent reading assignment is this  Wikipedia article on regulatory capture.  It’s not just corporations though. Take the media. A media corporation not only has all the protections of a corporation, it has greater first amendment rights than you. For you to be guilty of slander or libel you merely need to say something false that causes another person economic damages. And for certain types of slander or libel, the damages are per se, meaning the slandered person doesn't even have to prove they were injured in court, only that you said it. It does not matter that you did not realize the statement was false.

For a newspaper, television newscast, etc., to be guilty, they must have had “actual malice” or a “reckless disregard for the truth.” It doesn't matter if they publish false information that destroys someone’s life unless they did it with the intent of injuring that person. It’s a similar situation with the police. For a civil suit for, say, assault and battery against you, your accuser must merely prove you assaulted them or battered them by a preponderance of the evidence. The “51% standard” if you will. But with the police, if they assault you, batter you, or violate your constitutional rights you must again prove actual malice. You have to prove that they knew at the time that they were violating your rights and that they did so intentionally. This is shockingly hard to prove.

Many of these sorts of rules exist for good reasons. They exist to prevent nuisance law suits that might otherwise chill desirable behavior. Think a major newspaper would ever call out a politician on their lies if that politician’s lawyers only had to prove that something the paper published wasn’t absolutely 100% true to only 51% of a juries satisfaction? Of course not—no business would engage in such a ridiculous risk. And what about money as speech and corporate first-amendment rights? Well, when you begin to consider all the different corporate structures including solo-corporations, non-profit organizations, etc., its start to become very difficult to separate a corporate speech from just a group of citizens speaking. These rules are the product of very smart people wrestling with very difficult issues, but these rules taken as a whole have created a situation in which it has become very hard to deny that the laws have to privilege and protect non-person entities over the citizenry. And that just isn’t fair.

Fairness is an odd concept. It is, in many ways, a fairly juvenile concept. And yet, if I may take a moment for sentimentality, a very core American value. And I think you disregard that notion at your own risk.

So getting back to why this discussion is here: The Occupy movement is a grass roots response to a gradual but ultimately seismic shift in American culture. It is a shift that was predicted almost 27 years ago. Historically, speculative fiction has played the role of the moral mother, tut-tutting at us or raising issues of bio-ethics but rarely have the horrors that we've spun ever come to pass. We've yet to create Frankenstein, machines don’t rule the world, etc. But the dystopia we predicted in which the police, law, and policy are all available to buy if you control enough market share is right around the corner. Whether you agree with the Occupy movement’s methods or not, you have to admit that something is wrong when a non-person has greater rights than a citizen; that a government cannot have the moral authority to govern future generations if the past generations have handed the government away to fictional entities. But if the rules that brought us to this point exist for good reasons, what is the solution? What changes do we, as a people, push for next?

Signs that were up at McPherson Square

Just something to consider, next time you are painting that Skaven.