#DeadMovementWalking: Occupy Wall Street's Internal Anarchy

As the nascent Occupy movement attempts to revive interest in its radical left-wing agenda, it is burdened with a host of organizational and financial problems left over from some of the bitter infighting that took place during the winter. 

Last night, the two main organizational bodies of Occupy Wall Street were dissolved, and a new group running OWS’s finances is admitting to a lack of transparency, financial discrepancies and poor financial decisions by the previous custodians of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

The movement is beset by a lack of funds, and much stiffer resistance from police and local authorities. A post a week ago from the New York City General Assembly website gives a good sense of the morale of some people in the Occupy movement:

OK now that OWS is ‘officially’ out of money.. and we’v seen our structures like THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, SPOKES COUNCIL and nearly everything we hold near and dear fail maybe it’s high time we look at our VERY foundations and start asking ourselves the following questions:

*Is horizontalism real in OWS and if so is it functional ?

*Who’s accountable if this is a ‘leaderless’ movement?

*How can a General Assembly be effective if its membership don’t practice a HEALTHY consensus and aren’t educated on the issues in the first place?

*What the use of marches or even protests if we have no VISIONS. GOALS or demands?

*Are 500 people in Direct Action going to ‘liberate’ NYC through actions alone? ‘Is that even their goal?

This growing sense of frustration has also found shape in a decision by facilitators to stop attending general assemblies or Spokes Council meetings, which effectively renders these organizational structures useless. As writer Justin Samuels explains:

Facilitation Working Group, the group that more or less acts as a neutral overseer to Occupy Wall Street meetings, has decided to defacto disband the Spokes Council and the General Assembly. Without official facilitators to be present at either Spokes or the General Assembly, any such gathering is not official according to occupy wall street rules. Apparently, no minutes takers or live streams will come to these meetings as well. Both Spokes and the General Assembly depending upon facilitation to post new proposals to www.nycga.net

And in a post on the New York City Gen. assembly website, a user speaking on behalf of the accounting arm wrote:

The original Accounting team wrongly believed that information related to OWS finances had to be kept top secret from infiltrators so while the OWS movement itself calls for accountability and transparency of government officials, those who initially were in charge of the NYCGA donations were afraid to divulge this type of information about their own finances. We now know better. A new, improved accouting team is in place. It has been a learning curve, but we are rapidly getting there. By the time we roll out our Spring/Summer 2012 agenda, we fully expect our finances to be 100% transparent.

For a group that literally desires to remake the world in its image, such realizations come six months late and about about $500,000 short.