Just occupation

Would Martin Luther King, Jr. support the Occupy Wall Street protests? In his Oct. 28 column, Jacob Reses criticized the Occupy Wall Street movement and expressed skepticism that protests involving the arrest of Professor Cornel West GS ’80 were justified and in the spirit of Dr. King.

West was arrested twice in Occupy Wall Street affiliated protests, first on the steps of the Supreme Court opposing corporate influence on politics and the Citizens United case, and again in Harlem.

The history bears repeating. In early 1968, King and other civil rights organizers planned The Poor People’s Campaign, a concerted effort to pass an “economic bill of rights” including measures to provide the poor with jobs, heathcare, housing and a guaranteed minimum income. King saw the campaign for the impoverished as the “second phase” of the civil rights movement meant to address the “limitations to our achievements” thus far. Before he died, King had planned a march on Washington that ended with marchers sleeping on the ground of the capital with no shelter to illustrate the plight of the poor. Sound familiar? “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” he once said in a sermon, “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Professor West was arrested in New York on Oct. 21 during a protest of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy. “You have to fight arbitrary police power,” he said of the department’s policy of arbitrarily stopping and searching last year the persons of over 600,000, largely poor, black and Latino citizens. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been quoted as saying, “The reason we use stop-and-frisk and target the group that we do is because we want all people who fit that group to feel that any time they leave their house they can be searched by the police.”

It is not hard to see the connection between Occupy Wall Street’s issues of economic justice and King’s own legacy of civil disobedience on economic issues.

Reses tries to paint a picture of the protests as lawless and pointlessly destructive. Yet he doesn’t mention the troubling evidence of unprovoked police brutality that has been corroborated by multiple videos. One picture of a protester being crushed into the ground by a police boot was troubling enough to illicit a tweet from former Wilson School dean Anne Marie Slaughter ’80: “Not the image or reality the U.S. wants, at home or abroad”. This is not the reaction you want from the former head of the State Department’s strategy against government brutality during the Arab Spring.

We already know there’s a system in place to imprison protesters who harm property. Can we say the same about the police who harm them?

Reses allows that disorder may be justified by grand purpose, but is skeptical that the group has any — especially compared the Tea Party’s “clear demands: no more stimulus, repeal Obamacare, cut spending.”

If anything, however, Occupy Wall Street has a far more developed method of making preferences explicit. It has a General Assembly comprised of many working groups that publish written policy statements by consensus. The most recent, a product of the Finance group released on the day Reses’ column ran, gives a fairly clear list of policy demands and grievances, including illegal foreclosure without copies of mortgages, environmental damage such as oil spills with only a pittance of retribution and no new regulation and the abuse and capture of the military’s procurement process to demand unnecessary weapons systems.

These problems are pretty much common fact. The New York Times uncovered in October that mortgage companies employed “robo-signers” who committed wide-scale perjury by claiming to have original copies of the mortgages. Congress has failed to pass any significant change to the regulatory structure that allowed the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Boston Globe found that in the last 10 years, 80 percent of retired three-and four-star generals have gone on to work as consultants or defense executives, with no restrictions on their use of government contacts for contracts.

So while Reses argues that protesters should simply be using their political representation to pass favorable laws instead of using civil disobedience, these examples seem to depict a system that is incapable even in the wake of disaster of defending the public interest against corporate influence. The constant fundraising and revolving door of legislators and important executive branch officials to Wall Street and lobbying firms show that the general influence of money could destroy the government’s credibility to reform, even with popular support.

So when is civil disobedience justified? “One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,” said King. “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

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When West was arrested in front of the Supreme Court, arguing that corporate influence in politics has overwhelmed representation for the poor, he said with characteristic flamboyance, “We will not allow this day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memorial to go without somebody going to jail, because Martin King would be here right with us.” After reading King’s own words on the plight of the poor, I cannot help but conclude that he is right.

Allen Paltrow is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at apaltrow@princeton.edu.