[nyfoil-l] 3/26: Meet Professor Occupy--Lisa Fithian

[SIUHIN at aol.com]

Meet Professor Occupy
 

 
Lisa Fithian is the streetwise radical who's teaching kids who want  to be 
badass to be smart. 
By Josh Harkinson on Mon. March 26, 2012 3 
_http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/lisa-fithian-occupy-wall-street-t
eaching-civil-disobedience_ 
(http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/lisa-fithian-occupy-wall-street-teaching-civil-disobedience)  
 
Jeffery Salter/Redux
In her makeshift classroom in lower  Manhattan, Lisa Fithian turns to a 
group of several dozen students, squares her  shoulders, and issues a 
challenge: "Does someone want to be a cop and come get  me?" A tall redhead abruptly 
breaks out and lunges at her, but Fithian, a  petite, den-motherish 
50-year-old, head fakes and bolts away. Cheers erupt from  her pupils, Occupy Wall 
Street protesters intent on shutting down the New York  Stock Exchange the 
following morning. Another pretend cop moves in, and this  time she drops to 
the ground, flopping like a rag doll as the officer struggles  to drag her 
away. Fithian stands to deliver her lesson. "Of the two choices,  running away 
or going limp, what does running away communicate?" she asks. 
"Guilt," several people say. 
She smiles and nods. "Guilt." 
When it comes to civil disobedience, there's often a right and wrong way to 
 break the law, and one of Fithian's jobs is to teach the right way to 
hundreds  of newly minted Occupy activists. Call her Professor Occupy. With 
somewhere  between 80 and 100 arrests under her belt (she's lost count) over 
nearly four  decades of rabble-rousing, Fithian may be the nation's best-known 
protest  consultant. Unions and activist groups pay her $300 a day to run 
demonstrations  and teach their members tactics for taking over the streets. 
But for much of the  past six months Fithian has been dispensing free wisdom 
to the young radicals  who took over parks from New York City to Los Angeles 
last fall, everything from  proper tear gas attire to long-term protest 
strategies. "When there is some  conflict, or things aren't going the way that 
we want them to go, or people  don't have a good long-term plan," says 
27-year-old Jason Ahmadi, an early  arrival at Zuccotti Park, "I have heard 
others and myself say, 'Dammit, where is  Lisa Fithian?'" 
Fithian, who lives in Austin, Texas, but spends most of her time on the 
road,  dresses like Mark Zuckerberg and swears like Tony Soprano. She grew up 
in  Hawthorne, New York, a Big Apple bedroom community where she developed a  
reputation for trouble—police might knock on her door to inquire about, 
say, a  suspicious fire in a neighbor's front yard. In middle school, she once 
got  busted for bringing a knife to class. But she was smart and earnest, 
and as a  high school sophomore she founded The Free Thinker, an underground  
newspaper that tackled subjects like littering in the cafeteria. Her 
classmates  voted her "Most likely to do things for the school." They also voted 
her "Most  likely to do things to the school." 
In 1983, after graduating from Skidmore College, Fithian spent a year  
following _Abbie Hoffman_ 
(http://www.pbs.org/opb/thesixties/topics/revolution/newsmakers_2.html) , founder of the anti-war Youth International  Party 
(a.k.a. the Yippies), tending his garden and "picking his brain." Three  years 
later, a coalition of activists outraged by the CIA's covert wars in  Central 
America hired her to organize a blockade of the agency's Langley,  Virginia, 
headquarters that ended with 600 arrests. She hit the streets with  fellow 
protesters—including the black-clad anarchist kids she calls "the smashy  
smashies"—to disrupt the World Trade Organization's _1999 meeting in  Seattle_ 
(http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/) . And in 2005, she teamed up with 
fellow radicals and former Black  Panthers to launch _Common Ground Relief_ 
(http://www.commongroundrelief.org/) , a group that rebuilt houses while  
clashing with police in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward of post-Katrina New  
Orleans. "When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I create crisis,'"  
Fithian told me. "Because crisis is the leading edge where change is  
possible." 
"When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I  create crisis,'" Fithian 
says. "Because crisis is the leading edge where change  is possible."
Fithian's résumé has made her a target for people hoping to discredit the  
nascent Occupy movement. In a single week this past October, conservative  
activist _Andrew Breitbart_ (http://www.breitbart.com/)   ran nine stories on 
his website painting her as an anarchist bent on "the total  annihilation 
of the American political and economic system." In fact, Fithian  has a long 
history working with mainstream groups such as the _Service Employees 
International Union  (SEIU)_ (http://www.seiu.org/) . But Max Berger, an organizer 
of Occupy's moderate wing who cut his  teeth working for Howard Dean's 2004 
presidential campaign, sees her credibility  with young radicals as 
crucial. "Nobody is going to say that what Lisa does is  not badass," he says, "so 
she is in a very strategically important position of  teaching kids who want 
to be badass to be smart." 
Case in point: On September 17, the first day of Occupy Wall Street, police 
 told the protesters they couldn't affix their cardboard "Liberty Plaza" 
street  signs to utility poles around Zuccotti Park. Many people wanted to 
give the cops  the middle finger, but Fithian offered a compromise: They would 
take down the  signs and find new ways to display them. The important thing, 
she stressed, was  to keep occupying. 
On Day Two of Occupy, Fithian left New York to coordinate anti-bank 
protests  in multiple cities on behalf of a coalition of religious and community 
groups.  The overlap of her consulting gig with the birth of the Occupy 
movement was  sheer coincidence, but Fithian made the most of it. She shuttled 
around to the  encampments popping up in cities like San Francisco, Los 
Angeles, and Chicago,  schooling the fledglings in protest tactics and enlisting 
them to help her  occupy banks or defend foreclosed homes. "It showed a lot of 
us how it is  important to connect the larger message of inequality and 
corporate control of  politics to more local issues," says Kelvin Ho, an 
organizer with Occupy  Chicago. 
In late October, Fithian was called back to Manhattan to help the movement  
catch its stride. While Occupy Wall Street was succeeding beyond its 
organizers'  wildest dreams, its internal politics were a mess, and meetings of 
its  quasi-governing body, the Spokes Council, often devolved into shouting 
matches.  Fithian, an old pro in dealing with nonhierarchical groups, agreed 
to help  facilitate. "We are not going to be making tons of decisions but 
streamlining  our work, making this a more functional process," she announced, 
kicking off a  Spokes Council meeting a few days after police razed the 
protesters' encampment  in Zuccotti Park. As each of the committees known as 
"working groups" voiced  their needs and concerns, Fithian took notes on a 
sheet of construction paper,  but she stopped writing when Sage, a homeless 
occupier in fatigues, _began  rambling_ 
(http://www.nycga.net/2011/11/18/nycsc-11-18-2011/) . When she tried to cut him short, Sage protested loudly about 
"a  line between the haves and have-nots of language." Fithian cut him off 
again,  holding out her palms as though blocking a pit bull and offering a 
quick  summation: "How about, 'Respect for diversity of expression'?" With Sage 
 appeased, the meeting could proceed. "I heard a ton of people mention  
afterwards, 'Oh my God, I wish that we had a facilitator like that before,'"  
recalls Logan Price, a movement organizer. "She helped the Spokes Council get 
to  the point where people felt comfortable about continuing it." 
A new problem arose in _November_ 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/occupy-oakland-general-strike-hijacked-by-vandals-criminals/2011/11
/03/gIQAGdE5iM_blog.html)  when a spate of graffiti and window smashing at 
a  march in Oakland, California, fueled notions that the movement's tent 
cities  were full of thugs. Some Occupy protesters supported the mayhem, citing 
the need  for "diversity of tactics." But Fithian countered in an _open 
letter_ (http://starhawksblog.org/?p=675)  that  "diversity of tactics becomes 
a code for 'anything goes,' and makes it  impossible for our movements to 
hold anyone accountable for their actions."  Stephen Lerner, an SEIU executive 
board member who has worked with her for 18  years, believes Fithian's 
widely read statement helped cement the movement's  nonviolent culture: "When 
she says it, I think it has a different kind of  credibility because of her 
own history." 
As Occupy marches on, perhaps its greatest internal  tension is between the 
reformers—pragmatists with concrete goals—and the  revolutionaries.
Even criticism from Fithian's peers is tempered with admiration. "She has a 
 reputation for taking things over by accusing other people of taking 
things  over," one prominent occupier told me, but "I think she has stuck with it 
and is  a smart person and has done great work building bridges." 
As Occupy marches on, perhaps its greatest internal tension is between the  
reformers—pragmatists with concrete goals—and the revolutionaries, 
idealists who  feel that asking anything of a corrupt system only marginalizes the 
movement.  "This isn't a protest movement, because protest movements are to 
address issues  that the power structure could conceivably be willing to 
give up," a black-clad  occupier named Max Bean told Fithian over lunch in 
early December. "We are  asking to dissolve the power structure. And you can't 
ask for that. You can't  protest for it. All you can do is grow until we are 
so big that we are  everything." 
Fithian weighed her response carefully. "Movements build because people 
have  some sense of hope and victory and accomplishment," she replied, setting 
aside  her plate of steamed kale. "We might win on the millionaires' tax in 
the next  six months. That's gonna be fucking huge." She smiled as Max gave 
her "twinkle  fingers," the Occupy hand signal for approval. "So it's the 
balance between  reforming and revolutionary things. And that's why this 
movement is so  beautiful, because it holds both." 
The SEIU sent Fithian to Washington three days later to coordinate _Take 
Back the Capitol_ (http://www.99indc.org/#lpoint) , an  Occupy-style assault 
on corporate lobbyists. Bona fide occupiers were flown in  to help union 
members blockade K Street and take over congressional offices—part  of a labor 
strategy to forge alliances with Occupy—but some occupiers chafed at  the 
union's unwillingness to risk more than a few symbolic arrests. Fresh out of  
jail and gumming a wad of Copenhagen, Joe Carriveau of Occupy Milwaukee told 
me  he was "done with this Democratic coalition crap. We are supposed to be 
down  here for some radical action." 
The following day, in a tent on the Mall, Fithian helped run a session 
aimed  at easing tension between the two factions. She let almost everyone else 
speak  before taking the floor. "One of the problems is when people are 
doing different  shit, we are starting to disrespect each other because we are 
thinking that your  way is not as rad as our way," Fithian said. "We are 
bringing in all these  judgments, and it's very destructive. We have to accept 
what each movement's  gifts are, and where we can be in alignment." 
Union members and occupiers can work together to "interrupt the space 
between  corporate America and democracy," she went on, to murmurs of assent. 
"It's not  about getting our elected officials to do something. Shit. They 
ain't  gonna do shit." 
She spoke faster and faster, running her words together, before stopping  
abruptly 90 seconds later. "Sorry, I talked a lot," she said sheepishly. But 
no  one seemed to mind. For once, the crowd abandoned its twinkle fingers 
for  applause.



 
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