Gray Lady Goes Yellow: Joshua Wong Cast as Bobby Sands

I have been critical of the Umbrella Movement protesters not because I believe they are insincere but rather because they are being used by Western powers as the latest iteration of a color-revolution scheme designed to create problems for adversary nations; in this case, the People's Republic of China.

Events of the last week, beginning November 30 with the failed attempt by students to expand their Admiralty occupation to include government buildings, followed by the short-lived hunger strike by student-leader Joshua Wong and the staged surrender to the police of Occupy Central leaders this past Wednesday, make clear that the Umbrella Movement is a Utopian one. Hong Kong students are fighting for something that exists nowhere on the planet -- completely unfettered elections.

While protesters in the United States, a continental-sized nation of 316 million people, are outraged at the continuation of lethal police brutality and racism and have been mobilized since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, predating the Umbrella Movement by a month. I would wager that if you tallied the amount of space devoted to the Hong Kong democracy protests compared to the racial justice/police brutality uprising caused by Michael Brown's murder you would find that the Umbrella Movement comes out on top.

If we include in the comparison events after grand juries refused to indict police in both the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases then, probably, the weight of coverage favors the racial justice protesters.

But this doesn't change my thinking that the Western "media clergy," as Samir Amin referred to the Fourth Estate in a recent Monthly Review article, has engaged in boosterism when it comes to the Umbrella Movement.

To see what I mean all one need do is read "A Frail Face Becomes a Defiant Focus of Hong Kong’s Waning Protest Movement" by Chris Buckley and Alan Wong. The story appeared on Friday. The next day Joshua Wong scrapped his hunger strike.

HONG KONG — A spindly, stooped teenager in a blue windbreaker shuffled from a tent on the edge of Hong Kong’s main remaining protest camp. Dozens of onlookers applauded, shouted to him or just stared. Cameras snapped and journalists leaned in to catch his soft voice.

The teenager, Joshua Wong, who embodied the hopes of the city’s pro-democracy street movement in its headiest days, has become the exhausted yet defiant focus of what looks to many like the movement’s final throes. 

Mr. Wong, 18, on Friday entered the fourth day of a hunger strike at the very place where he had instigated the confrontation that ignited months of street demonstrations. On Sept. 26, students occupied a gated forecourt of the local government’s offices after Mr. Wong shouted encouragement. Hong Kong residents took to the streets in large numbers two days later, after the police tried to disperse the students with tear gas.

This week, Mr. Wong and four other students on hunger strike huddled in tents next to those same steel gates. On Friday, one of the students gave up, and Mr. Wong and the others appeared increasingly spent. 

“I’m quite tired from the hunger strike right now, but I will persist in fighting,” Mr. Wong said in an interview on Friday, hunched, pale and occasionally slumping on a chair. 

Under a canopy, he and the other strikers lie wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags in their one-man tents, surrounded by supporters and given constant attention. Doctors visit every few hours. Mr. Wong and his fellow hunger strikers periodically post information about their blood-sugar levels and other health indicators on the social media they use compulsively.

It goes on like that. You would think Wong is at death's door approaching Bobby Sands status of two-months without food.

Mr. Wong occasionally emerges from his tent, his slight frame even lighter than its usual 99 pounds after days without nourishment, apart from a teaspoon of sugar mixed in water and 100 milliliters of an energy drink taken on doctors’ advice. A friend steadies him as he makes his way to a public toilet. On Friday, Mr. Wong used a wheelchair, his legs under a blanket. 

Still, he and the other hunger strikers have mustered the energy to speak to hundreds of protesters who gather around the camp’s main stage at night. On Friday night, Mr. Wong was perched on the stage and in a quiet voice urged the demonstrators to remain steadfast.

This is four days without food. This is yellow journalism. Nowhere, for instance, will you find the Gray Lady similarly following Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons.

As I said, Joshua Wong gave up his fast this past Saturday. And now, as the Hong Kong government has politely alerted the remaining protesters that their two encampments will be taken down, the Umbrella Movement is fracturing with some calling for resistance.

****

UPDATE: In fairness to the Gray Lady, there was an excellent unsigned editorial this morning, "Release the Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos," about the Guantanamo hunger strikers and the U.S. policy of force-feeding them.

Bad as It Is, Failure of Umbrella Movement's Straw Poll Is Even Worse Than It Looks

The Umbrella Movement is one-month old. 

At some point the Gray Lady stopped referring to the Hong Kong pro-democracy sit-in as a "Revolution" and started calling it a "Movement." I thought that by the end of the sit-in's first week it was basically over because by then it was clear that the police were not going to make the mistake they made initially, which was the police mistake made during the Seattle WTO ministerial of responding to peaceful protesters with massive amounts of tear gas and pepper spray and flash-bang grenades. When the police respond with massive force to a non-violent demonstration it actually brings more people into the streets.

By the end of the first week in Hong Kong the crowds were thinning. The first burst of enthusiasm had spent itself.

At this point there are two main encampments: one in the Admiralty district and one in Mong Kok. The Zuccotti Park encampment, the hub of the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement, managed to survive for two months, from September 17 to November 15, 2011 before Mayor Bloomberg's police force broke it apart early one morning.

I'm sure the leaders of the Umbrella Movement are aware that the clock is ticking and something needs to be done soon to avoid the fate of Occupy Wall Street; hence the planned straw poll designed, most likely, to generate momentum to get officials back to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, as Chris Buckley and Alan Wong report in "Pro-Democracy Movement’s Vote in Hong Kong Abruptly Called Off," the vote crashed on the launch pad:

HONG KONG — Organizers of a planned vote among Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators abruptly canceled it on Sunday, exposing tensions and confusion over how to sustain the movement a month after protesters occupied major streets to demand free elections. 

Student leaders and organizers of Occupy Central With Love and Peace, the group that laid the groundwork for a civil disobedience campaign for democracy, had urged people to vote at protest sites on Sunday and Monday as a way of registering their support for student negotiators seeking political concessions from the government. 

The referendum boiled down to two simple questions: Did voters endorse demanding that the Hong Kong government press Beijing to make democratic concessions on election rules, and did they agree that the changes should apply to city Legislative Council elections in 2016 and the race for chief executive in 2017?

But hours before the balloting was due to start on Sunday night, organizers announced it was off and apologized. They said there was too much disagreement over the wording and value of the vote. “We acknowledge that there was not enough consultation with the public,” they said in an emailed statement. 

At a news conference, some organizers were contrite, while others cast their surprise move in the best possible light.

“It won’t affect the morale of this movement,” said Alex Chow Yong Kang, the secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students. “This decision can rebuild the trust between us and the protesters. Protesters have all along shared a single goal; it’s just that they may have different views about the execution.”

But even before the cancellation, the vote, intended as a display of unity, had brought into focus tensions among protesters over how to hone their broadly shared aspirations into durable demands and strategies. Such strains could deepen as the protesters face fatigue in their own ranks and the refusal of the Hong Kong government and Chinese Communist Party leaders to make the major concessions demanded by demonstrators, said David Zweig, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

“The question becomes: What’s the endgame?” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he was visiting. “Once they didn’t pull out earlier and declare victory, they needed something from the government to be able to declare victory. Now they need to find some endgame, and I think that they’re not going to find it without compromise.”

Although supporters of the protests were unlikely to disagree with the two wordy propositions on the canceled ballot, some feared the vote could pave the way for unacceptable compromise or premature withdrawal from the street occupations in three parts of the city. Benny Tai, an associate professor of law who is a co-founder of Occupy Central, earlier denied that intention and said he had no power over deciding when protesters left the streets. Occupy Central had initially envisioned a much smaller, briefer protest in Central, the main financial district of Hong Kong.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Tai said that he could not say how to sustain the protests into a second month. “You can just go down to the plaza and ask the protesters who have stationed there for so many days, how long do they prepare to stay. I think you can get a good answer.” 

But protesters have voiced a range of opinions on the future of their grass-roots movement. Some have wavered from the demand that voters be allowed to put forward candidates for chief executive without vetting from Beijing, while others said that demand, called civic nomination, could not be weakened.

Peter Lee wrote recently on the Counterpunch web site, "Democracy in Hong Kong: The Unelected Battle," about a document dump "of the meeting minutes of the Alliance for Democracy, a grouping of pro-democratic organizations engaged in Occupy-related issues."

In the minutes, Benny Tai, the chief legal mind for Occupy Central with Love and Peace, frets that direct nomination -- the goal of the Umbrella Movement -- is not an international legal standard:

Unless the [document dump] report is repudiated, the pro-dems don’t have a legal leg to stand on within the framework of the Basic Law and the NPC; what’s more surprising is that they recognize that they don’t even have a particularly strong legal case for direct nomination under the “international standards” for democracy the students are currently trumpeting.

Claudia Mo, a Civic Party stalwart and ex-AFP reporter (which might explain why she has appeared a few times in AFP’s Occupy coverage as a quotable notable), observed that “international standards” seemed unclear.

Benny Tai, whose job is presumably to make an airtight legal case for the action, instead observed that international practices don’t demand popular nomination. In fact, the UK doesn’t have direct nomination, as a HKSAR representative pointed out during the student dialogue. The key stipulation is a matter of principle: Do citizens have real choice? Do the candidates represent different needs and backgrounds? The best he could say was that popular nomination would unequivocally meet international standards, not that it was the only way.

Even more problematically, perhaps, the UK opted out of the Article 25 of the Universal Covenant of Civil and Political Rights for universal suffrage and direct elections for Hong Kong during its merrily undemocratic colonial years, and the PRC succeeded to that treatment when it took over in 1997. The OHK legal case rests on the rather frail legal reed that Beijing inadvertently surrendered its reservation by holding legislative elections.

And that is the best that the cream of the Hong Kong legal profession and the NED—whose job it is to twist Beijing’s knickers on these kinds of treaties—has been able to come up with after over a decade of determined lawyering. 

Remarkably, Benny Tai also voiced the concern that another popular referendum might be necessary to legitimate OHK’s demands and allow it to achieve standing as a negotiator, another tip that the case is not a legal slam dunk. (I might point out parenthetically that I approve of this state of mind, since otherwise we’re left with the metaphysical, undemocratic, and dare I say borderline-putschlike idea that the students can claim the right to speak for “Hong Kong” simply by putting feet on the street.)

So the struggle is in its essence political, not legal. 

Without a solid legal strategy, therefore, OHK has turned to a political strategy, that is, to create a rumpus in Hong Kong sufficient to discredit the HKSAR report and reopen the issue.

In other words, absent any legal standing, a popular vote, even a straw poll held in the main protest encampments, became a necessity. The fact that it couldn't get off the ground bodes ill for the Umbrella Movement. Judged by the standards of Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park, it has a month left.

The highly politicized U.N. Human Rights Committee in Geneva weighed in with an assist for the Umbrella Movement late last week. Michael Forsythe reported, "U.N. Human Rights Panel Urges China to Allow Free Elections in Hong Kong," that

The United Nations Human Rights Committee urged China on Thursday to allow elections in Hong Kong without restrictions on who can run as a candidate. The move appeared likely to draw strong criticism from Beijing, where officials decided in August to set strict guidelines for the 2017 election of the city’s next leader, prompting mass sit-in protests.

The 18-member panel in Geneva said that Hong Kong needed to do more to ensure that its people had not only the right to vote, but also the right to run for office. 

“Hong Kong China should take all necessary measures to implement universal and equal suffrage in conformity with the covenant, as a matter of priority for all future elections,” Cornelis Flinterman, a member of the rights panel from the Netherlands, said on Thursday, referring to an international agreement on political rights.

The committee focused on the Aug. 31 decision by China’s Communist Party-run legislature to adopt guidelines for the 2017 election that would effectively keep anyone not approved by Beijing from appearing on the ballot for chief executive, the city’s top post. 

Under the guidelines, candidates must get the approval of more than half the members of a 1,200-person nominating committee, which includes many of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing tycoons as well as representatives of other social groups friendly to the central government. The city, Asia’s most important financial center, was transferred from British to Chinese control in 1997, and its legal and administrative system is separate from that of the rest of China. 

Yuval Shany, a member of the rights panel from Israel, said the nominating committee was “not fully representative of the Hong Kong population.”

The irony of Israel lecturing China about providing full representation for Hong Kong passes, of course, without comment by Forsythe. One wonders why the Human Rights Committee doesn't implore the United States to allow candidates to run without restrictions. Better yet, why not an official U.N. rebuke for the myriad voter identification laws being passed by Republican legislatures to disenfranchise poor people?

One possible silver lining is that the Umbrella Movement is creating a new international standard, "Civic Nomination," one that is not practiced in the industrialized core Western democracies. This can be used, as it is in London, to reignite Occupy Wall Street.

The Contradictions of the Umbrella Revolution + Big Drought and Heavy Debt in Thailand

An obligatory part of any political campaign is taking credit or claiming victory (no matter how large the defeat) once the campaign is over. Proof that the Umbrella Revolution has already folded up comes in the form this morning of pro-democracy leaders claiming success because dialogue has begun between protesters and the Hong Kong government. Michael Forsythe and Alan Wong write this morning in "As Hong Kong Protest Ebbs, Organizers Claim Small Gains" that

Although the protest leaders and the remaining participants, who still numbered in the hundreds, insisted that the so-called Umbrella Revolution was a long-term project that was far from over, there was a sense on Monday of a winding down and, after 11 days of overnight street protests, a dissipation of energy. 

“I’m very, very, very tired,” said Dennis Chan, 28, letting out a melodramatic sigh as he prepared to go home to sleep after 10 days at the sit-in near the government center. “We all are.” 

“It won’t end today, but maybe tomorrow, maybe later, too, when there are fewer and fewer people,” he added. “It’s hard to say that we’ve won this battle. But it’s been positive in making pressure on the government to open a conversation with the students.”

Even the protest leaders, as they began to reflect on what the movement achieved and where it failed, were already adopting the past tense. 

“All gates were closed before,” Yvonne Leung, a spokeswoman for the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said in a phone interview. “We have now won some space for dialogue, and we’ve seen a growth in our civil society. The people used to be unaware of their own power, but now they know.” 

On Monday, the student groups that are the driving force behind the protests honored a commitment they made to the government the night before to clear the barricades enough to allow civil servants to return to work. By early Monday morning, all the entrances to the main government office complex were open, and workers were streaming in. 

Protesters remained at the camps and some roads remained blocked at the two main protest sites — at the central government offices in the Admiralty area downtown and the Mong Kok neighborhood across the harbor in Kowloon — but just steps away, it was business as usual in this bustling financial hub.

But if Occupy Wall Street (OWS) taught us anything, it is that once the encampments are taken down and cleared away it is very hard to put them back up. Popular movements are fickle. People are ruled by the "Been There, Done That" mindset. Movement leaders can't just push a button and expect another mass uprising.

So the students will get a few meetings with government officials, officials who are already offering the carrot of a some sort of pro-democracy participation in the nominating committee that sparked the Umbrella Revolution to begin with:

Mr. Ho, who along with founders of the protest movement, called Occupy Central With Love and Peace, are advising the student leaders in the talks, said Beijing and Hong Kong needed to “go back to the drawing board” and include the views of the democratic protest movement in a report to the National People’s Congress. “Everything is in the hands of Beijing,” he said.

But the government has all but ruled out such a reset.

Two Hong Kong government officials said that the current process for drafting a new elections law already calls for a new round of public consultations but is limited to how a nominating committee will be structured. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was highly unlikely that the Hong Kong government would agree to revisit the decision of the National People’s Congress, which it considers the final word on the matter. 

That demand by the students and democratic lawmakers was unrealistic, they said. “Sooner or later, it’s going to sink in with them that what they’re asking for, they’re just not going to get,” one of the officials said. 

Moreover, the talks provide a useful delay for the government, helping to sap the energy of the protests without promising a meaningful compromise. 

Michael Tien, a pro-Beijing member of the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, said that was a conscious element of the government’s strategy. 

“Time is on the government’s side,” he said in a telephone interview. The talks “keep the Occupy movement under certain constraints so that it really doesn’t affect the day-to-day business in Hong Kong.” 

He said the students should focus on realistic goals, such as working to adjust the composition of the nominating committee that will vet candidates for the territory’s top job starting in 2017.

The students have demanded an open election for chief executive, without a vetting committee on nominations; the resignation of the current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying; and to revisit the entire process that led to the National People’s Congress decision. 

Yet in a sign of the gulf that lies between even the more realistic positions of the two camps, Mr. Ho said that cosmetic adjustments to the nominating committee that Mr. Tien suggested were off the table. “We are totally uninterested in it,” Mr. Ho said.

If Occupy Central sticks to this bargaining position it is going to come away with nothing. Why? Because OWS-type uprisings are one-off events. A core can remain as an info clearinghouse and pressure group able to stage smaller actions, but the ability to repeat prolonged mass sit-ins is just not there.

That is of course unless the protest movement is actually paid for by the oligarchy and has support of elements within the government, as we saw in Thailand this year with the Bangkok-based protests against the government of prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra that acted as a prelude to the military coup.

Thomas Fuller has an interesting story in today's paper, "Household Debt and Signs of Drought Squeeze Economy in Thailand," about drought in Thailand hitting the country's rice farmers, many of whom are highly indebted. Bad news for the military junta:

“The economy is the bread and butter of legitimacy,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. “When it comes to politics, the military can command and control — they have very little open opposition. But they cannot control the world economy. And they cannot control the weather.” 

In a country with seven million farming households, mostly small landholders, the water shortage will affect the poorer segment of the population. 

Kuakoon Manasumphunsakul, a senior technician in the irrigation department of Chiang Mai Province, says the flow of runoff into dams is half the historical average because of an inadequate number of storms during the rainy season, which ends in about a month.

“We have to be prepared for a drought — it’s definitely going to happen,” he said. “If we don’t start saving water, it will be severe.” 

The dam closest to the city of Chiang Mai is at 17 percent capacity, the second-lowest level since it was built two decades ago. 

Although the water shortage appears to be mostly the result of lighter rainfall this year — dams in Thailand’s southern neighbor Malaysia are also sharply below their average levels — Nipon Poapongsakorn, an expert on rice cultivation at the Thailand Development Research Institute, says the problem has been amplified by decisions of the previous government to release too much water from dams over the last two years to avoid a repeat of the devastating floods of 2011.

Now the prospect of drought is leading to what Mr. Kuakoon calls “water wars” among the hotels and residents in cities, factories in industrial areas and farmers in the countryside. 

In addition to the north of the country, the authorities have warned farmers in the rice basket of the country, the basin of the Chao Phraya River, against planting a second crop this year because of the lack of water. 

Ms. Ampai, the farmer, said the ban on planting rice was announced through the municipal loudspeakers. She now hopes to plant other crops, possibly onions or garlic. But they will also require water from the dam. 

“If they don’t release the water, we will go and protest,” Ms. Ampai said. “They are transferring too much water to the city.”

The Bhumibol Dam, one of the country’s largest and the source of irrigation for a large part of the rice-growing heartland, is at only 40 percent of capacity, a water level seen only three times since it began operations in 1964. 

The Thai central bank says farmers have among the highest debt levels in the country. But they are by no stretch the only Thais with debt problems. 

Total household debt has doubled during the last four years, to over 10 trillion baht, or $306 billion, in the second quarter of this year, the equivalent of around 80 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and one of the highest rates in Asia. These numbers do not include the thriving business of black-market loans. 

Amara Sriphayak, who retired as an assistant governor of the central bank last week, recently warned that debt could cause a “huge decline in household spending rates” and created risks to the country’s financial stability. 

Pawnshops are a growth industry in cities and towns around the country. The Chiang Mai municipal government opened a fourth pawnshop last year and plans to open another this year.

A contradiction of the Hong Kong student-led protest movement is that it proceeded as if it had more support that it actually did. It called itself "Occupy" in emulation of Occupy Wall Street but tactically it was more akin to Thailand's People's Alliance for Democracy or Yellow Shirts, the popular front of the Thai military and Bangkok ruling elite. Yet there is no indication that the Hong Kong ruling elite support the students and Occupy Central. The ruling elite everywhere want to keep making money and protect their position at the top of the food chain.

So at the end of the day you have a mass pro-democracy youth movement tactically emulating a fascist popular front (not OWS because OWS never staged multiple street sit-ins in several locations throughout one city) egged on by slanted reporting in the Western media. Given all the contradictions, I suppose the Umbrella Revolution has to be considered something of a success.

Umbrella Revolution Folding Up After Only a Week

I should be clear. I am not opposed to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

What I am opposed to is the official narrative of the protests as told in the Western mainstream media. That narrative goes something like this: a peaceful, industrious, capitalist people struggles to free itself from the tentacles of a totalitarian Communist China by embracing the kind of democratic reform we enjoy in the egalitarian, modern West.

It is a crock of shit, a lie, part of the larger narrative of official enemies. There are bad actors on the global stage, according to the Gray Lady, and these number Iran, China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, as well as others. The official enemies found in the mainstream media almost always align with those that the U.S. State Department considers antagonists.

Take today's paper for instance. the number of major stories devoted to Occupy Hong Kong equal that of the West African Ebola outbreak. All this week there have been saturation levels of coverage of the pro-democracy protests; Occupy Wall Street never garnered anywhere near the attention.

So what are we to make of this? The obvious, I would think: We are dealing with an official enemy here, the People's Republic of China; so no expense will be spared. In the case of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the enemy in question was the be-all and end-all of the U.S., "capitalism in one country" state itself, a nominally democratic massively plutocratic neoliberalism.

As the Hong Kong Occupy protests begin to splinter today, it is interested to note the differences and similarities with Occupy Wall Street. Of significant differences, I think there are two. First, Occupy Wall Street was very careful never to articulate specific political demands, as have the two main student groups and Occupy Central With Love and Peace have in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong the two demands are that chief executive Leung Chun-ying resign and that going forward his successor can be elected by popular vote without first being approved by a nominating committee selected by Beijing. OWS was a Utopian movement, a grand gesture rejecting pretty much the entire cultural project of the West -- its consumerism, its pay-to-play representative democracy, its pauper's wage slavery careerism. There have been indications that this sensibility is also at work in Hong Kong. Good.

Second, the street occupations in Hong Kong are more akin to what went on in Bangkok in the run up to the military coup there than Occupy Wall Street and its various epigones across the United States. OWS was very careful to choose parks, usually located downtown and relatively small, for its occupations. Marches would proceed from those spaces. But mass sit-ins at several locations of the type that protesters in Hong Kong are undertaking were never a feature of Occupy Wall Street -- for the simple reason that, without a doubt, the police would crack down quickly and harshly and be applauded in the prestige press for doing so.

The main similarity between OWS and Hong Kong is the commitment to leaderlessness and consensus in decision making and a lateral rather than hierarchical social structure. This is creating the obligatory splintering and chaos, as Austin Ramzy and Keith Bradsher describe in "Hong Kong Leader Refuses to Resign, but Deputy to Meet With Protesters":

“We don’t have a leader,” said Irene Ng, an English major at Hong Kong Baptist University. “This is trying to be a democracy, but then you try to reach a decision and you can’t. Nobody can decide. The ultimate problem is it might split us apart.” 

The protesters interviewed gave no indication that a retreat was imminent. But many wondered how long they could sustain the turnout necessary to block crucial roads in the city and just what would constitute an acceptable victory. 

Tim Lam, an engineer who said he had joined the sit-ins every day since Sunday, said he expected the occupation to last another week at most. “That’s about how long the protesters’ passion can last,” he said. “After one, two weeks of occupation, protesters would start to think about how it affects the economy, the everyday lives of people.” 

Further escalation by the protesters could alienate members of the public resentful of a demonstration that affects their daily lives. But without more aggressive steps, the protests could fade. “If we take rash actions, we may lose people’s sympathy,” said Niko Cheng, a recent college graduate and protester in Mong Kok, a densely populated area of Hong Kong on the Kowloon Peninsula. “But if this drags on — it’s already turning into a carnival, with people dancing, singing and all that — people may forget what they’re here for.” 

Prominent voices in the pro-democracy campaign have indicated that there is no consensus on what, short of an unlikely reversal of the central government’s position, would lead to an end of the protests.

Umbrella Revolution Through the Prism of Occupy Wall Street

It started in Tunisia in December 2010 when a food vendor set himself on fire to protest his treatment by a local government official. Mass protests over joblessness, inflation, corruption -- the whole hopeless condition we have become familiar with over the last 20 years -- followed, leading to president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fleeing to Saudi Arabia in January 2011.

That same month protesters occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo. By February president Hosni Mubarak had stepped down, handing power to the Council of the Armed Forces.

There was a feeling of jubilation. Old, rotten systems could be swept away by people power. That was the feeling the Arab Spring inspired.

In September 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement began in Lower Manhattan in emulation of the Tahrir Square protests. “America needs its own Tahrir.” Copycat Occupy encampments shot up all over the United States and Europe. We were all giddy with hope.

Once Zuccotti Park -- the central protest site of Occupy Wall Street -- was cleared early one morning in November by NYPD, the party was over. Other Occupy encampments would linger on, but without the central, symbolic site of resistance in Wall Street, the movement shuffled off the stage.

I was a supporter of Occupy Wall Street; I supported financially and participated modestly in the activities of the Occupy Seattle.

My assessment is that weather is an issue for peaceful sit-ins/occupations of the type that Hong Kong is embarking on with its Umbrella Revolution. (Thank goodness it has been named something other than another color.) Rain, constant rain in the fall here in the Pacific Northwest, turned the Occupy Seattle encampment, once it had been moved from downtown's Westlake Park up to Seattle Central Community College, into a fetid frigid filthy swamp populated by what seemed to be mostly junkies and homeless youth. It went from being a tightly run, clean, compact encampment with a busy field kitchen serving nutritious hot meals to a post-apocalyptic slum.

The gist of Keith Bradsher's article this morning, "Hong Kong Government’s Strategy on Protesters: Wait Them Out," is that the decision makers, following Sunday's orgy of  tear gas and pepper spray, have gotten a handle on things:

The wait-them-out strategy appears to have the support of the city’s influential tycoons, many of whom are out of town during this holiday week in any case. The tycoons derive the bulk of their income from leasing out their many commercial, office and residential properties, and their tenants have to keep paying Hong Kong’s famously high rents even as protesters restrict access to many businesses.

The hope of the Hong Kong government, and of Beijing, is that this economic pressure will turn owners of small businesses and other members of the middle class against the demonstrators. Local officials hope that the public will come to see the protesters as people who inconvenience others, not as icons of democracy, as the students occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing became in 1989 before China’s brutal crackdown.

“This is a Cultural Revolution revival, this is not Tiananmen — they think they are doing the right thing, so they can infringe on other people’s interests and therefore make the government kowtow to them,” said the person heavily involved in the government’s decision-making. 

The government adviser said officials were actively trying to avoid a Tiananmen-style crackdown. “We cannot repeat the mistake of 25 years ago,” the adviser said.

The rainy season in Hong Kong is in the spring. Autumn is supposed to be pleasant. The cool winter months can be spent easily outdoors with the proper amount of layering. So the Umbrella Revolution could be lengthy. Bradsher hints at a possible concession that the PRC is willing to make:

The central authorities in Beijing have allowed Hong Kong officials to manage the political crisis here as long as they do not promise fundamental changes in how the next chief executive is chosen in 2017. The Hong Kong government has been mulling, with Beijing’s support, a small compromise that might allow democracy supporters to say later that they had achieved something. 

Beijing has mandated that while all adults will be allowed to vote in 2017, only names approved by a nomination committee will be allowed on the ballot. The nomination committee is to be drawn in equal shares from four sectors of society; one of these, for example, is the “industrial, commercial and financial sector,” which tends to be dominated by pro-Beijing tycoons. 

The Hong Kong government is willing to broaden the number of people who participate in each sector’s selection of delegates, said the person heavily involved in local decision-making. But while a few pro-democracy politicians have been willing to discuss such a change, there has been no such interest from protesters. They mainly want the general public to be allowed to nominate candidates, an idea that officials have firmly ruled out.

The primary difference between Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Central with Love and Peace is that OWS rejected the whole neoliberal system where the 99% are ruled by their 1% overlords who controll the predatory casino capitalist economy and the democratically elected representatives. The Umbrella Revolution doesn't want to change the neoliberal system; it just wants to change Hong Kong's Basic Law to allow for direct elections of freely nominated (meaning not pre-selected by Beijing) candidates for chief executive. In other words, the goal of the Umbrella Revolution is no revolution at all.