Occupy Palm Beach County: One Year Later

On September 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street coalesced into sudden view, built from long work by many organizers, the promptings of Adbusters magazine, and the accumulated frustration, anger and desperation of decades of escalating class warfare by financial and corporate elites against ordinary people. A small group of young people near Lake Worth, Florida recognized themselves in the actions of the mostly young people in New York, and began to plan their own Occupation.

People on local union, Democratic Party, progressive and other e-mail lists were invited to a rally at Bryant Park in Lake Worth. Hundreds showed up. It was exhilarating, but also chaotic. Speakers denounced the 1% and a variety of social ills, but it was nearly impossible to hold a productive meeting with all those people wandering around the park – many with loyalty to no common organization, and with expectations of a conventional political protest, with hierarchical leadership, a designated march route, and professional speakers.

Those expectations remained unmet in the determination of the initial organizing group against hierarchy and against the compromises and corruptions of the mainstream groups that had enabled the banksters to crash the economy and get away with it. There were more long weekly meetings as the crowds shrank and we struggled to focus our General Assemblies and working groups, and started to build a movement.

As in hundreds of cities big and small, that explosion of energy and anger was unsustainable, since most of the people attending those protests and meetings had family and job commitments and were coping with the consequences of the Great Recession. Florida has a weak safety net by elite design, and Palm Beach County has been a center of the foreclosure fraud crisis; young people, poor people, African-Americans and Hispanics were especially hard hit when layoffs and foreclosures multiplied after 2007.

Helped by sympathetic progressive Democrats with close ties to the Democratic mayor and city council of West Palm Beach, Occupy Palm Beach County moved to downtown West Palm Beach. Twenty to thirty Occupiers lived in tents on a grassy vacant lot, then outside the old city hall from October until March. They participated in direct actions against the 1% on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, at a hedge fund managers’ conference in Boca Raton, and against big banks and their allies. We formed active working groups that articulated our vision and goals, trained meeting facilitation teams, self-governed those living on-site, sponsored teach-ins and film screenings/discussions, created a community garden, and developed direct actions.

For about six months we created one of the longest and most consistently nonviolent Occupations in the U.S. In early March 2012, partly because of complaints by the city of West Palm Beach about alcohol and crime at the Occupation site, and partly because OPBC was increas- ingly unable to contain our own internal divisions, we were evicted by city police. Many of us were ready to stop occupying by then, convinced that the efforts to hold on to an urban site were diverting movement energy away from more important issues. A small group of Occupiers resisted eviction but were unsuccessful.

Now smaller but better focused and organized, OPBC returned to Lake Worth for General Assemblies, initiated projects like Foreclosure Court Watch and has, since March, been publicizing and participating in a variety of actions initiated by various progressive groups through- out south Florida: Awake the State, Stand Up Florida, the national Veterans for Peace convention in Miami, and Occupy Fort Lauderdale events, among others. In addition to keeping judges and lawyers more honest, our persistent court watchers are helping homeowners caught in the Orwellian web of foreclosure fraud and our overwhelmed legal system.

We’ve helped several save their homes, and as a result at least one has become an OPBC activist. OPBC is also building a record of small but significant successes in other areas, and is becoming a regular part of the progressive scene in Palm Beach County.

It’s been a long hot summer, and working for President Obama’s re-election campaign has absorbed progressive energies. Most Occupiers (and Progressive Democrats) have a keen sense of the serious limitations of electoral politics generally, and of the Democratic Party specifically. On inequalities of wealth, regulation of the financial sector, global climate change, drones, torture, indefinite detention and other issues, Obama and the Democrats have been way too close to Wall Street and big corporations. But given the right-wing insanities of the Republican Party, memories of the consequences of the 2000 election, and Florida’s status as a swing state, there is little interest among Occupiers here in working for third-party candidates who might swing the election to Romney and Ryan.

Hopefully President Obama will be re-elected, and with a Senate and possibly even a House majority. But that doesn’t mean we can all go home and leave things to a system rigged against the 99%. Like FDR before him, Obama has said to progressives demanding major progressive legislation, “Make me.” In other words, generate a groundswell, a social movement which will create the conditions for such action; as President I can’t or won’t do it by myself.

(And now, with the help of their political allies, they’re after Medicare and Social Security.) Since the emergence of Oc- cupy, President Obama and many Democrats have started talking more about inequalities of wealth and less about the mostly bogus issue of federal deficits. Democratic leaders had been influenced by a social movement acting mostly outside their party.

But Occupiers can’t sustain this movement, can’t fight back by our- selves. This is where PDA’s inside- outside strategy connects to the Occupy movement, in Palm Beach County and elsewhere. Nationally, PDA works both inside the Demo- cratic Party and outside, with independent progressive groups to the Democrats’ left, like Occupy. This works well where progressives both inside and outside are strong, in cities and towns with robust left movements building coalitions on issues the Democrats mostly ignore: community organizing, workers’ and im- migrants’ rights, bank and foreclosure fraud, global carbon emissions, U.S. militarism, and others. A strong progressive community at least partly indepen- dent of the Democrats helps move local Democrats to the left, creates political leverage both inside and outside the party to make change and get progressive candidates elect- ed. Paradoxically, the Occupy movement, which rejects affiliation with the Democratic Party, has given new energy and issues to Progressive Democrats in many places. PDA’s inside-outside strategy works best when progressives out- side as well as inside are strong. But PDA’s inside-outside strategy is more difficult to implement in Palm Beach County.

A majority of voters here regularly support Democrats, and the party dominates most of the county. But because of the region’s southern history and unusually transient population, progressive groups more or less independent of the Democratic Party have usually been quite small. Partly because of this imbalance between progressives inside and outside the party, Democratic bosses and elected officials, everywhere too responsive to donors over their base, have more than elsewhere been able to ignore the growing progressive community in Palm Beach County. But there is increasing discontent inside the Party, includ- ing in the county’s Democratic Executive Committee, as well as outside, as a result of Democrats’ complicity with the 1%. Occupy Palm Beach County is an important sign and builder of that discontent. OPBC is in one sense a symptom of the failings of the local Democratic Party and the need for reform. That is why the local Democratic Party was a divisive force within OPBC: despite -- or be- cause of -- powerful Democrats’ support for us, many of us saw that support as an attempt at co-optation.

By inviting us to Occupy downtown West Palm Beach, were Democratic leaders using OPBC as a tool to manage our organized anger at their betrayals of us and their collusions with the 1%? Was their participation in OPBC sincere or cynical? In participating, were they also trolling OPBC for new party activists who could be put to work in a two-party system designed to marginalize those activists’ progressive goals? Perhaps we’ll never know. But it’s clear that, in Palm Beach County, too many Democrats have an uncritical relation to our party, acting as though we can vote and forget about it. Progressive change can only be made when more of us are active – inside and outside the party. OPBC, and the Occupy movement generally, demonstrates disillusionment with party institutions and the intense need for more radical change. Occupy strengthens progressives inside the party, and heightens the case for grassroots reform.

The Progressive Democrats of America and the Occupy Movement are natural allies. Locally, OPBC gives Progressive Democrats opportunities to promote grassroots change that the Democratic Party too often ignores. After the election, we’ll need to push the Democrats to listen to us. An important way is to declare our partial independence of them so they don’t ignore us. We can vote for Democrats and still work outside the party.

At OPBC’s one-year anniversary meeting on October 6, there was new energy, and several activists returned. We expect more Occupiers to return after the election, and are planning new actions.

To get involved in OPBC, call Carol at 561-793-5868. Come to our General Assemblies, which are from 11 to 12:30 in Bryant Park in Lake Worth; if the park is booked, we’ll be at the covered bandstand in the Cultural Plaza in down- town Lake Worth, between Lake and Lucerne across from the library. (Free parking. Bring your own chair.) If it rains, we’ll meet at the Pegasus Restaurant in Lake Worth. You can also find us on Facebook at Occupy Palm Beach. Join us! The Occupy movement started such a groundswell a year ago with our focus on how the bloated and greedy financial industry crashed the world economy and threw millions of people out of work, out of their homes and retirement and security.

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