The question now is which fork in the road will Occupy take?

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Occupy's Spiritual Quest

The fork in the road ahead.

Dear occupiers, jammers, dreamers,

Three years after the May 1968 uprising that swept the world, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault observed that a key strategy of power is to “appear inaccessible to events.” Power, Foucault argued with a nod towards 1968’s failed insurrection, acts to “dispel the shock of daily occurrences, to dissolve the event … to exclude the radical break introduced by events.”

Forty years later, in light of Occupy, Foucault’s observation still strikes home. Despite achieving the impossible at unprecedented speed – sparking a global awakening, triggering a thousand people’s assemblies worldwide, and giving birth to a visceral anti-corporate, pro-democracy spiritual insurrection – Occupy is now struggling through an existential moment. Our movement has been dealt a blow: our May 1 and follow-up events have been dissolved by power; the status quo has shown itself to be far more resilient than many of us expected.

Now a passionate debate is emerging within our movement. On one side are those who cheer the death of Occupy in the hopes that it will transform into something unexpected and new. And on the other are patient organizers who counsel that all great movements take years to unfold.

[...]

The fire in the soul of Occupy burns from Oakland to Quebec, Barcelona to Chicago, Wall Street to Moscow and Frankfurt… the question now is which fork in the road will our movement take?

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

i'm less interested in the direction the movement will take than i am in how we can accelerate the collapse of the house of cards which may or may not be connected with any "movement"...

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City of London, the home base (besides Wall Street) of the world's banksters, is upset

add this whine to that of jamie dimon's sad bleating about basel from monday (see my previous post and related link)...

Britain to sue ECB over threat to City

Britain is to sue the European Central Bank for setting rules that allegedly handicap the City of London and would force one of the world’s largest clearing houses to decamp operations to the euro area.

The unprecedented legal action underlines the depth of ministerial concern over the ECB policy, which comes as the UK engages in a turf war with France and Germany over Europe’s financial markets infrastructure.

An ECB policy paper, released in the summer, requires clearing houses to be based in the eurozone if they handle more than 5 per cent of the market in a euro-denominated financial product.

Britain will ask the courts to strike down the rule on the grounds that it restricts the free movement of capital and infringes on the right to establish cross-border businesses across a multicurrency European Union.

The policy, if enforced by the ECB, would undermine London’s financial market infrastructure since it would require that clearing houses shift many of their operations to the eurozone – most likely Frankfurt or Paris.

British diplomats have long feared that Paris was leading attempts to rig market regulations in a bid to shift the centre of gravity for financial services from the City to the continent.

The UK fought off French attempts in recent months to insert into an EU directive a requirement for clearing houses to have access to central bank liquidity – a measure effectively confining most euro-denominated clearing to the eurozone.

of COURSE france and germany want not just a BIGGER piece of the pie, they want the BIGGEST piece... ain't it fun to watch the global banksters and their gang of crooks go to war with each other...?

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Redefining the term "long day" [UPDATE]

it's almost 3 p.m. and i'm sitting here in the frankfurt airport waiting for a flight to d.c... i've been up since 3:30 this morning to catch an early flight from prishtina to vienna where the frankfurt flight was delayed... no biggie since i had almost 5 hours of layover in frankfurt anyway... i get to d.c. at 8 p.m. local time and two hours later board on a flight to buenos aires where i will arrive at about 11 a.m. local time on saturday... i already feel like something the cat dragged in but i guess i'll be able to stumble on through to tomorrow... if you never see any more posts here, you'll know i've succumbed to terminal jet lag...

[UPDATE]

an hour before departure time, frankfurt got about a half inch of snow meaning that the plane had to be de-iced before we could leave... it took them an hour and a half to do which wiped out whatever respect i had for german efficiency... we rolled in to the gate in d.c. at 9:20, not quite an hour and a half late which gave me a little more than half an hour to clear immigration and customs, re-check my bags and get to the gate... tight but within the bounds of possibility...

but...! guess what...? the immigration and customs area in the midfield concourse was C. L. O. S. E. D. so they had used the once-upon-a-time-in-the-distant-past very innovative but now hopelessly antiquated dulles people-mover thing to get everybody, terminating and connecting passengers both, over to immigration and customs in the main terminal, guaranteeing a big slowdown... to top it off, i was selected for screening at customs, so by the time they finished poking through my bags, i would have had to teleport across the field to the gate and even then, they probably would have already closed the door...

SO-O-O-O-OOOOO...

i'm at a hotel for the night and am re-booked for tomorrow night which means i will miss the baptism and family celebration for a friend's twin daughters in buenos aires on sunday...

bah... sometimes travel is SUCH a pain...

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