Report from Wall Street: Since I couldn't get to my workplace today, I schlepped back home and watched some TV

A preview for this past week's episode of How to Make It in America, which imparted the timeless wisdom: "Don't you think that comes at a price?"

by Ken

I couldn't get to work this morning, because of the attempt by the OccupyWallStreet demonstrators to actually occupy Wall Street. (See "Nearly 200 OWS Protesters Arrested in Clashes with Police.") As I've mentioned, the company I work for, although having nothing to do with the financial-services industry, has for several years now been housed in the epicenter of Manhattan's Financial District, in the building that adjoins (and is part of the same security zone as) the New York Stock Exchange on the block of Broad Street between Wall Street and Exchange Place.

Yesterday our office manager passed on a memo from the building management warning about problematic access this morning but assuring us that efforts would be made to ensure that, however cumbersomely, access would be possible for workers in those buildings from both the Wall Street and the Exchange Place sides. (Even in "normal" times -- which is to say "normal" post-9/11 times -- we have to pass through one of those check points to get into the buildings, where we go through airport-style security every time we enter.) We were warned that we might have to show our IDs extra times, and advised to allow extra time, and I did that, and I still couldn't figure out how to get anywhere near the Exchange Place checkpoint.

I thought I was being smart taking the "southerly" route, even though it meant taking the longer subway route via the no. 1 train. I had allowed enough extra time that it was still 10 or 15 minutes before nine when I got off the train, but approaching Broadway I saw that large crowds had already gathered. I couldn't see any possible access to Exchange Place from the Broadway side, so (and this apparently was my mistake) I headed south -- the enormous block to Beaver Street -- and then headed over to Broad, but it was clearly no go from there, and I couldn't even get access to anybody official-looking to ask how the daredevil feat I wanted to attempt might be accomplished.

So I continued along the "southern perimeter" of the occupying police forces' blockade, and managed to get as far north as Exchange Place on William Street, but still I saw no access or anyone to ask. So I headed another block east to Hanover Street, where at least (at last!) I found 10 or 12 cops not doing anything that I could see, and I asked if they could confirm that there was no way to gain entry, which they quite jovially confirmed. I guess they thought it was a game. One cop said, "Call in sick." I was kind of steamed but know better than to try to mix it up with New York's Formerly Finest, and just shot back, "I'm not sick."

I thought maybe I had overthunk the situation by trying to approach from the south side; maybe the access was only being provided from the Wall Street side, but I've had enough experience of that approach during the OWS era to doubt that I could have gotten anywhere near Wall Street, even if I could have figured out how to circle around to the northern approach from where I was. So I headed back toward the subway -- at this point my only practical transit option, and by this time (9:15 or so) found it an accomplishment just to retrace the ground I'd covered 20-25 minutes earlier.

The total round trip took about 2½ hours, and I can't say it was a total waste. I got some reading done in my current New Yorker and New York Review of Books issues -- notably Calvin Trillin's characteristically delightful "My Repertoire" in the Food Issue of The New Yorker and a really informative NYRB piece about Qatar (lots of stuff about which I had no idea). Also, I ate the peanut-butter sandwich that I had packed for my lunch.

The other day in my "quick note on the Zuccotti Park blitzkrieg" I mentioned that Digby seemed to me to have already written the story before it happened, in her Aljazeera.com column "Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC." Here's the start of that piece:

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it's supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as "kettling") against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and "rubber" bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

And here's the conclusion:

The United States has never had fully militarised police before, armed with the kind of high-tech surveillance and weaponry that would never be allowed if the National Guard were called up in an emergency. And neither have we ever had such a malleable definition of what constitutes an emergency. At a time of increasing citizen unrest, it's a volatile combination.

Certainly the government seems to have been preparing for such confrontations for some time now.

Whether the people will accept high-tech "pain compliance" to "modify" dissent remains to be seen. If the attitude towards Tasers is any guide, many won't have a problem with it and "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist suspects has become, at best, a moral grey area for many in the US.

We have essentially normalised torture and created a high-tech police apparatus with more capability than any military in history. Human nature suggests that if you build it, they will use it.

(The part in between is terrific and important too, but I'll leave it to you to check that out onsite.)

It's still difficult and painful for me to try to write about the whole matter of OWS. I really liked Ian Welsh's description of OWS as "necessary but insufficient," and this crucial analysis, in "Revolution Basics #1: Who cares what you think?":

Bloomberg and Wall Street may not like Occupy Wall Street, but they aren’t going to negotiate in any meaningful sense.

Why should they?

What are the consequences, for them, of not cooperating? They have to see some noisy people. Does it appreciably reduce their income? No. The men or women they get to sleep with? No. The amount of power they have over DC? No. Their actual physical safety, or the safety of those they care about? No.

For Occupy to be successful, on its own terms, will require shutting down Wall Street and probably all of NYC. There must be so many people on the street that it is impossible to arrest them all or to get rid of them without resorting to a lot more than a whiff of grapeshot. The elites must be be faced with a decision tree “negotiate or lose a ton of money and be massively inconvenienced or shoot hundreds of thousands of people and build mass detention camps.” That will require two or three million people occupying New York City.

Remember, modern elites are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. If the cost to them of not giving in is less than the cost of not giving in, they won’t give in. It took trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. They take home billions of dollars in personal bonuses. You must cost them, personally, more than that, for them to want to give in. . . .

Maybe my reluctance to write more about the OWS phenomenon-movement is my deep-seated conviction that it's necessary but hopeless. I really don't want to minimize its importance, but as Ian notes in the above extract, the overwhelming likelihood is that for the ruling elite its passing is just a blip in time. Are we really ready to make a revolution?

Back home this morning, I e-mailed a colleague, so that someone in the office would know where I was, assuming there was anyone in the office. She e-mailed me back that she had trudged in via Exchange Place with all the other working stiffs heading toward the blockaded buildings. So I guess the experience will cost me not just the lost 2½ hours but a PTO day. Oh well. At least I had a chance to catch up on some some stored-up TV via the DVR, including this week's episode of HBO's How to Make It in America. (You can watch it here.)

Plotwise, what you need to know for the following exchange is that no-longer-so-young Ben (Bryan Greenberg) and his friend Cam (Victor Rasuk) have been trying to carve out a chunk of reality for themselves with a line of clothing aimed at hip young folk, and they've succeeded in generating enough buzz for Crisp to wangle a legit order, but for a quantity of hoodies vastly beyond their capacity to produce. Their supposed rep Nancy (played by that terrific actress Gina Gershon) with a deep-pocketed entrepreneur-hustler, who just happens to be her husband. Yosi (Nick Chinlund) not only can get the job done for them but has plans for making Crisp a big-time operation.

Now the guys have learned that there's a catch. Yosi intends to call the line "Crisp by Yosi." Ben thinks Nancy will make it all right, no doubt deluded by her having let him fuck her. When he confronts her, they reach this exchange:

Yosi (right) shows Ben and Cam his sky's-the-limit plans for the guys' cherished Crisp line -- oops, make that "Crisp by Yosi."

NANCY: You want my two cents, for whatever it's worth? License Crisp to Yosi.
BEN: Do you have our back?
NANCY: Listen, I know this feels really weird right now.
BEN: Yeah.
NANCY: But as soon as those checks start coming in, you're gonna feel a lot differently. Trust me.
BEN: It's not about the money.
NANCY: Yeah? Well, it should be. This is a business. Ben, do you know how many new brands I see crash and burn every day? You are being handed the keys to the kingdom. [Long beat.] Don't you think that comes at a price? [Emphasis added.]

This is another of those things that may not resonate for everyone. But man, I can't get that line out of my head:

Don't you think that comes at a price?

Doesn't everything? Come at a price, I mean. I suppose this is true even for billionaire plutocrats, for the Kochs, say, and for Mayor Mike. One important difference is that they can afford to pay prices that for them are mere pocket change. Ironically, the plutocrats tend to be rich and powerful enough to have the clout to redirect sizable chunks of the tab to us the people they're screwing. Just consider, for example, the way costs are absorbed for the Official Paramilitary Enforcement Network Services (OPENS) rendered by all levels of government to banksters and the rest of the 1%.


UPDATE: SO THE RULE OF LAW ISN'T ENTIRELY
DEAD -- SOME WELCOME NEWS FROM ARIZONA

I just noticed Howie's tweet linking to David Nir's DailyKos report: "Arizona Supreme Court overturns Colleen Mathis' ouster from redistricting commission." Ah, some good news on a day that could stand some. Looks like another case of sociopathic-wingnut overreach.

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Are ballads and epic poems written to celebrate renegades who stand defiantly outside the reach of a mandatory software upgrade?

No, this isn't my office computer -- and it won't
be after I'm mandatorily upgraded either.

by Anonymous
[see? they can't prove nuttin'!]

I thought you folks might enjoy this tale of life in My Company. It even comes with a surprise twist at the end!

Since our office move last fall into the belly of the New York Stock Exchange security-zone beast, we peons who don't have offices are just about completely exposed to everyone's view -- when you walk down the aisle between cubicle row, it's almost impossible not to look in everyone's cubicle as you pass. As a result, I have established that, unless I've missed somebody somewhere, I am the only person in the office still using a CRT monitor, as opposed to a flat panel screen. From which I conclude(rather proudly, I must say) that I have the privilege of having the oldest and crappiest computer still in use on the premises.

OK, "crappiest" is perhaps a bit judgmental. The fact is, it's perfectly adequate to my job needs, and I've learned to live with the limitation that I can't make any changes of any kind to the software on it, all of which would require a password known only to IT. And so, while the rest of the Mac world has marched on through the operating-system world of Tiger (OS 10.4) and on into the paradise of Leopard (OS 10.5), I'm still firmly grounded in yesteryear's Panther (the final version of it, OS 10.3.9). Which also means that I can't use most any current-release software, which increasingly requires OS 10.4 or later -- even if I could install such software, which I can't.

(True, I could ask for luxuries like a more recent version of Flash, to enable me to open Web pages that my old version won't. Yes, I could ask. Maybe the answer would be yes, maybe it would be no, but either way my permanent record would indicate that I was the troublemaker who asked. One of our highest-ranking officers is a gentleman whose principal, er, gift is remembering such things.)

Now, to the story. We began hearing awhile back that we were all going to be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008. This is actually not much of a deal for me, since I hardly ever use any of the components of whatever version of MS Office I've got. When the HR director circulates attached documents, they're usually in MS Word format -- that's about the extent of my excursions into Office.

Nevertheless, we soon began to hear about commencement of the "mandatory upgrade" to Office 2008 -- are there other companies where a software upgrade can be made to sound like a punishment? The memo drumbeat indicated that the upgrade was closing in on us. From our IT guy in, apparently, San Francisco (we have a SF office?) comes word of arrangements made with Microsoft for free online training courses!

Then came the memo from the IT guy in our Las Vegas office (now, I knew we had one of them!) who is apparently in charge of Mandatory Upgrades, asking us in the New York office please to leave our computers on when we left the next few nights, since it will be easier for him to perform the upgrades while we're out of the office. The procedure should take 20 minutes, Mr. Las Vegas says.

Of course, since the memo wasn't sent till 5:53pm our time, and as the clock ticks down to 6 I don't usually keep checking for e-mail, I didn't see the memo till the next morning. (It's true that I would know I had an e-mail waiting if I kept my "dock" permanently displayed, but unlike all my coworkers with their bigger monitors, I can't afford to give up that chunk of screen real estate, since I'm trying to display magazine pages in readable form.) But I figured I wasn't likely to be in the "chosen" group of First NY Upgradees.

And then it occurred to me: Can my computer even run the "mandatory upgrade" software? I figure there's no way it will run in poor old OS 10.3.9, and sure enough, Office 2008 is a member of the OS 10.4 or Later Club. (OS 10.3 is the now-antique Panther; OS 10.4, the already-aging Tiger; and OS 10.5, the still-current Leopard. Here comes Snow Leopard! And no, I'm not making that up.) And while my mind has detoured into wondering if my computer has enough RAM to handle an OS upgrade (the leaps in memory requirement for successive iterations of the Mac OS have been so enormous that I believe Apple is now measuring it in gazillionbytes), my eye, continuing to rummage through the system requirements for Office 2008, notices that if your computer processor happens to be of the heirloom G4 species, it has to be at least 500 MHz. I have no idea what mine is, but I check and discover that it is -- ta-da! -- a 450 MHz G4!

So now I know: My company has "mandated" a software upgrade that, as best I can tell, won't run on the computer it has mandated me, even if it's possible to run a more nearly current OS on it. I add this newly discovered info to the memo I have begun writing to Mr. Las Vegas pointing out that my computer is still running in OS 10.3.9, and I really can't afford to have it further slowed down by an OS upgrade if I'm to get any work done. I finish the memo by promising to leave my computer on as requested, apologizing for having shut it off the night before and explaining about not having seen the 5:53pm memo.

I don't know how many more nights I'm supposed to leave my computer on, but heck, I'm not the one paying the electric bill. I haven't heard anything more from anybody in IT, in Las Vegas or San Francisco or even New York. (Yes, yes, it has occurred to me that perhaps I should have brought this whole thing to the attention of our IT guy here, who's a good guy. But if he's not already in the loop on this, I'm afraid that dragging him into it may just result in my being ratted out to the Chief Punishment Officer in the head office in Florida.

I can't help wondering if the "mandatory upgrade" is turning out to be perhaps not absolutely, unmitigatedly mandatory.

NOW FOR THE SURPRISE TWIST!

The above was in fact written on Monday of this week -- that is to say, the 16th. I held off posting, or even thinking seriously about whether I really wanted to go ahead and post it, because later that day I got word from our NY IT guy -- who's both a good guy and utterly competent -- that the next day I and a colleague who does basically the same job (putting us pretty near the bottom of our food chain, it seems) would be upgraded to G5 computers. I have to guess that our great IT minds had collectively spotted this chink in the MS Office "mandatory upgrade" project.

There was some e-discussion of when our schedules would make it easiest for the NY IT guy to get at our computers. I explained that I don't really go out at any set time, but could almost surely work around his schedule, provided I knew when it was going to happen. A couple of hours' notice is what I was offered, and I responded that that should work.

So with developments developing on Monday, and theoretically scheduled to finish the process on Tuesday, I shelved the whole question of this post. After all, if and when the promised computer upgrade was to happen, there was still the question of what kind of equipment I would actually wind up with.

For one thing, I already knew that the equipment wasn't going to be new, and around here when we get a recycled computer, there's always the risk that it came from someone, like from the Art Dept., who had been upgraded because he/she had beaten the living daylights out of the old beast by performing the computer equivalent of mechanical-bull-riding.

I was once "upgraded" to one of these poor victim machines, which it turned out our IT folks at that time already suspected of being a victim of such abuse. Apparently it was easier to recycle and hope for the best than to actually check it out. That poor thing was swapped out for a hardier survivor, and presumably set aside for reassignment to some even sappier sucker. (Of course, at the moment the likeliest source of recycled equipment hereabouts would be stuff left behind by the fallen comrades from our January round of layoffs.)

Perhaps more important, while the software would undoubtedly be more up-to-date, there seemed no reason to assume that I would be equipped with stuff that enhances my actual computer use, at least not without asking, and having "troublemaker" notations added to my permanent record etc. etc.

These were all issues it seemed most prudent to deal with after I got my "new" computer. And who's to say that after being so gifted I might not feel churlish airing such unkind sentiments?

That was Monday, you'll recall. By my count this is Saturday. Monday's "tomorrow" has long since gone the way of the emu, leaving me still waiting for that famous couple of hours' notice. I guess I can suspend the wait for today and tomorrow. But starting Monday (again), it could happen at any time, with just those couple of hours' notice.

Meanwhile, I retain my "rogue" status in the face of the "mandatory upgrade" crusade. A rebel, or just a troublemaker?

POSTSCRIPT

Rode down in the elevator with the IT guy. He says Monday, only he can't tell exactly when. Says he'll give me an hour's notice. The old "couple of hours" window seems to have shrunk.

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