Occupy - surviving the winter

more from al jazeera's fault lines, chronicling the occupy movement...

Occupy Wall Street: Surviving the Winter

Fault Lines follows key Occupy organisers through the winter as they continue to build a movement even after violent evictions across the country.

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Reverend Billy and his gospel choir join OWS in targeting Romney fundraiser

reverend billy and the gospel choir of the church of stop shopping sings outside the waldorf astoria hotel in new york city where a fund-raiser was being held for mitt romney...

On March 14, 2012, over one hundred people from Occupy Wall Street and other groups rallied against corporate tax breaks, against corporate spending in politics, in support of the Dream Act, and AGAINST Mitt Romney (because he is on the wrong side on all those issues).

Mitt Romney was holding a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria for his presidential campaign.

i'm a self-confessed fan of the reverend billy and his gospel choir...

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Adbusters: Prepping for the upcoming G8 and NATO meetings in Chicago

here's a follow-up on my post from january 26 where adbusters calls for support for the #OCCUPYCHICAGO effort to focus world attention on the failure that is capitalism during the g8 and nato meetings in chicago in may...

TACTICAL BRIEFING #26

Anarchic Swarms – The Emerging Model

[...]

The stage is set for a climactic showdown in Chicago.

The crisis of capitalism is deepening. Youth unemployment has reached 50% in Spain and Greece… 30% in Portugal and Italy… 22% in the UK… almost 20% in the US. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are waking up to the fact that their future does not compute… that their lives will be a never ending series of ecological, financial, political and personal crises… and that if we don’t rise up and start fighting for a different kind of future, we won’t have a future.

That struggle ignites again May 1.

#OCCUPYCHICAGO will be the focal point of this global spiritual insurrection… 50,000 of us will converge on the windy city and confront the G8 and NATO leaders with an ultimatum. We will set up impromptu encampments throughout the city and wage a full-spectrum memewar backed up by new tactics of anarchic swarming. Our militant in-your-face nonviolence will inspire thousands of towns, cities and campuses around the world to rise up in solidarity just like they did last October.

This is a worldwide, multi-front mutiny against the way our economic and military leaders are running the world.

[...]

Occupy has taught us all. It innovates, fractures, grows resilient and more diverse. In this spirit we celebrate the Gandhian ferocity of the Zuccottis who launched this movement with their magical assemblies and nonviolent ways … we extol the growing crop of working groups with their desire for a positive program of social and political change. And on the wild side we honor those in Oakland who have lost their fear against all odds. With this rainbow coalition, we hold our heads high and embrace the heady days of Spring.

it'll also be good practice for the upcoming republican and democratic national conventions...

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Occupy reduced violence in Oakland

rebecca solnit in tomdispatch...

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland," the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city.

interesting statistic...

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The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things

thoughtful perspective from william greider writing in the nation...

In Occupy Wall Street, we are witnessing a rare event—the birth of a social movement. Ordinary people are engaging in sustained grassroots protest against the political order and against citizens’ exclusion from the decision-making that governs their lives. They seek to rearrange the distribution of power, and they are doing so by injecting a creative, often playful vitality that has been missing in our decayed democracy. The protesters have slipped around the soul-deadening, high-gloss marketing of mass-communication culture. Instead, they insist that politics starts with citizens talking to one another and listening—agreeing and disagreeing with mutual respect. The open-door, non hierarchical membership commits people to engage in what historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls “democratic conversation.”

The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things. Their ambition reflects a core mystery of American democracy—the fact that humble people can acquire power when they convince themselves they can. Warmhearted and broad-minded, these citizens audaciously claim to speak for the 99 percent—and despite initial ridicule and dismissal of them by much of the press, polls show they have strong public support. The Occupiers have even managed to make uptight reporters write about corporate greed.

[...]

But will it last? Skeptics are entitled to their doubts, but for important reasons I am confident this movement will endure. First, because it is very unlikely the establishment will respond substantively to OWS’s grievances—and that will only make the protesters more determined. OWS has brilliantly focused its many complaints on the very sector—the megabankers and financiers—on whom the politicians are dependent. In different ways, Republicans and Democrats are aligned with the greedheads and are thus unwilling to punish their crimes or cut them down to size.

[...]

In any case, this movement is not about electoral politics—not yet, anyway. It is about saving the country, an objective bigger than politics and politicians. Its vision is nothing less than halting the degradation and fostering the rebirth of the nation’s original democratic promise. It is the nature of authentic movements to seek large and majestic goals that seem impossible to pedestrian politicians—and, at first, to most citizens. Standing up requires both uncommon courage and severe provocation.

[...]

[R]adical reform will originate only from ordinary citizens—not policy experts and their Wall Street supporters, who led the nation into ruin. The movement can inspire the people to become creative citizens again. Are we up to it? Let us find out. Let the democratic conversations begin.

i'm more than happy to bask in greider's optimism... i sincerely hope it's justified...

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How can our overlords keep the underclass bickering while they continue to rob us blind?

i'm sure there's nothing more terrifying to our super-rich, elite overlords than watching the global awakening that's taking place...

Much like Anonymous, OWS is a new wave of protest, a direct and significant challenge to the elite who are unaccustomed to such confrontation.

And the one percent find such evolved protest—this kind of global awakening—absolutely bone-chillingly terrifying. If the elites can no longer exploit xenophobia, red state–blue state civil war, racism, sexism or homophobia, how will they keep the underclass bickering while they run off with the country’s wealth?

what i find particularly heartening is the sense of global solidarity that not only embraces the spirit of occupy movements across the country but sees the very real common ground shared by the protesters in tahrir square...

The Occupy protesters talk about Tahrir and Egypt’s youth not like they’re some foreign, abstract concept, but rather comrades in a common struggle. They express genuine love and solidarity for people who live 5,000 miles away from them, whom they’ll never meet, but with whom they recognize they have more in common with than Bank of America’s CEO.

and what's the next evolution for occupy...?

[T]here has been some indications that in the coming cold winter months, the occupations will move indoors to condemned buildings and foreclosed homes. Such a maneuver would again place Occupy at the forefront of creative protest.

[...]

If ever there was a protest group equipped to attempt such a feat, it’s Occupy.

i'm heading down to a general assembly later this morning... let's see what they're talking about as next steps...

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More on Black Friday: legal - insane greed; illegal - speaking out about it

i don't know how the insanity of my country could be captured any better than this...



courtesy of twest young via kevin at firedoglake...

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Next steps for Occupy

from democracy now...



highlights:

Michael Moore:

This is one of the most remarkable movements that I’ve seen in my lifetime, precisely because it really isn’t a movement in the traditional sense. And I think that it has succeeded because it hasn’t followed the old motifs that we’re used to, in terms of organizing.

[...]

It has been the most uplifting, heartening thing to see: so many Americans of all stripes deciding that they’re just going to occupy. And they don’t have to call in to central command for permission. There are no dues to pay. There’s no leader to get permission from. There’s no meetings, subcommittee meetings, you know, all these things you have to go through.

Patrick Bruner:

This isn’t a protest. This is a way of making a new space. We have taken Liberty Square. We have renamed it, and we have rebuilt it into something that we believe is a better model. Maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s not what we’ll come out of this with. But it’s a way to at least start a discussion, a real discussion, about all of the things that ail us on a daily basis, the things that are never really discussed.

Rinku Sen:

I think that the Occupy movement has—needs to have some autonomy. It does. And I really think it was very, very smart not to have demands, you know, right out the gate. It’s not a campaign. So, organizations do campaigns, and movements do something else. They shift the public will. And so, the Occupy movement has to retain its ability to do its primary job, as I understand it, which is to keep shifting the public will and making that psychic break happen and supporting that psychic break.

William Greider:

[W]e know it’s a high-risk enterprise to try to build an authentic social movement. Many arise and fail, or get crushed. And the ideas are literally pushed back out of the public square. But they go back—they continue somehow and maybe come back a generation or two generations later. So we have to—I think we have to take that sort of long view of what we’re doing.

Naomi Klein:

[W]hat I find exciting is the idea that the solutions to the ecological crisis can be the solutions to the economic crisis, and that we stop seeing these as two problems to be pitted against each other by savvy politicians, but that we see them as a single, single crisis, born of a single root, which is unrestrained corporate greed that can never have enough, and that is that mentality that trashes people and that trashes the planet, and that would shatter the bedrock of the continent to get out the last—the last drops of fuel and natural gas. It’s the same mentality that would shatter the bedrock of societies to maximize profits. And that’s what’s being protested.

i hope we're all awake and paying attention...

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The Cairo prostesters in Tahrir Square have no intention of being bamboozled again

following the egyptian situation definitely gives a different perspective to my worry that the occupy movement may be fading... those egyptians are a real inspiration...!

from democracy now...

Egyptian protesters continue to fill Cairo’s central Tahrir Square over the ruling military council’s refusal to immediately transfer power to a civilian government. In a televised address on Tuesday, the head of Egypt’s military council, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, said he has accepted the prime minister’s resignation and that the military is ready to relinquish power if Egyptians call for that in a referendum. But protests only intensified after Tantawi’s speech and security forces unleashed a barrage of tear gas. Over the past five days at least 38 people have been killed, thousands injured, and at least 15 journalists attacked as Egypt has witnessed the largest protests since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

fool me once...

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Cairo, Tahrir Square: November 19 - 22

a round-up of the last four days of the egyptian revolution... a very important compilation of key events...



this certainly puts our occupy efforts in stark perspective, doesn't it...? the egyptians have no delusions that their super-rich elites and the military that empower them have no intention of going quietly into that good night... we here in the u.s. are just starting to wake up to that fact... god forbid that we have to deal with their level of violence and repression but seeing what has been taking place in places like uc davis et al, i'm not so sure it isn't coming quicker than we might think...

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Occupy UC Davis General Strike Nov. 28

if i'm not doing anything else, i might just drive over the hill and check it out...

Occupy UC Davis Calls Nov. 28 General Strike to Shut Down CA Campuses, Block Regents' Austerity Vote

In response to the intolerable effects privatization and austerity and the horrific repression of student dissent that has occurred throughout the last month, the GA, as a governing body of all concerned UC Davis students, will prevent the Board of Regents from continuing its unbridled assault upon higher education in the state of California.

This will entail total campus participation in shutting down the operations of the university on the 28th, including teaching, working, learning, and transportation, as we will collectively divert our efforts to blocking their vote[s]. In doing so students, faculty and workers assert the power—and the will—to effectively represent and manage ourselves.

as one occupy sign puts it, when you arrest one of us, two more appear...

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The vision and goals of Occupy Wall Street

We Envision:

[1] a truly free, democratic, and just society;

[2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus;

[3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making;

[4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others;

[5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments;

[6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few;

[7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings;

[8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible;

[9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.

works for me...

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You may be watching us, but by God and sonny Jesus, we are watching you

it's been readily apparent to me for quite a few years, actually well before 9/11 and the exponential increase in domestic surveillance, that literally everything we do via any electronic network - from atm withdrawals to sending emails to cellphone calls to credit card transactions, even to swiping our supermarket affinity cards - is being at least "sniffed" and most likely recorded...

that already unacceptable and constitutionally illegal level of surveillance is now rapidly expanding to include tracking vehicle movements via the recording of license plates with surveillance cameras mounted on traffic lights and on roadsides, and even tracking us as pedestrians courtesy of cameras located in building lobbies and literally everywhere else a "case" can be made for needing heightened "security"... the spreading use of facial recognition software means that, if someone decides we're a "person of interest," we can be tracked anywhere, inside or outside the country...

william rivers pitt...

The basic idea behind setting up this incredibly invasive system, if you listen to its advocates, is that security is paramount in the aftermath of 9/11. There were plenty of people, after the Towers came down, who were very happy to surrender their liberties in the name of security, despite Benjamin Franklin's warning about deserving neither and losing both.

[...]

The advent of the Occupy movement, the length of time that movement has been able to hang fire, and the vast number of cities in which it is taking place, has led to an astonishingly violent reaction from the very state we are supposedly trusting to watch over our every move. There have been a dozen incidents of gruesome official violence against peaceful, non-violent protesters, including the near-murder of an Iraq war veteran by police in Oakland...violence the likes of which has not been seen in America since the dogs and firehoses days of Birmingham, Alabama.

Last Friday, students at UC Davis in California were subjected to an attack by police that beggars likeness.

[...]

Memo to the police and the surveillance state you represent: you are not working in the dark anymore. You may have your own system of surveillance, but We The People are watching you just as closely, and we have our own system of surveillance. It's called exposing your vicious, anti-American and thoroughly unnecessary strong-arm tactics for all to see.

[...]

You may be watching us, but by God and sonny Jesus, we are watching you.

smartphone video, cellphone cams, the internet and social networking all offer us the unparalleled opportunity to beat back the surveillance state by capturing and reporting on events as they happen and, consequently, driving a stake through the heart of the twisted media propaganda spin that would otherwise be our only way to "know" what's going on...

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A year ago, no one imagined an Arab Spring, and no one imagined this American Fall

rebecca solnit...

When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.

[...]

Does an 84-year-old woman need to be tear-gassed in Seattle? Does a three-tours-of-duty veteran need to be beaten until his spleen ruptures in Oakland? Does our former poet laureate need to be bashed in the ribs after his poet wife is thrown to the ground at UC Berkeley? Admittedly, this is a system that regards people as disposable, but not usually so literally.

Two months ago, the latest protests against that system began. The response only confirms our vision of how it all works. They are fighting fire with gasoline. Perhaps being frightened makes them foolish. After all, once civil society rouses itself from slumber, it can be all but unstoppable.

[...]

[T]he grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream. A year ago, no one imagined an Arab Spring, and no one imagined this American Fall -- even the people who began planning for it this summer. We don’t know what’s coming next, and that’s the good news. My advice is just of the most general sort: Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now.

i confess... i'm a hope junkie... i keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, there will be a breakthrough and we'll see some real change... how that will happen, when it will happen, if it will happen, i couldn't begin to guess...

this morning, i visited the occupy reno site and caught up on what's been going on there while i was out of town... the good news is they're still there and still cranking away... they're going to be at the mall at midnight on black friday and plan to project the bat signal the way it was done on the verizon building in nyc... a lot of people will be gathered waiting for the doors to open so they can trip all over each other in their mad rush to part with their money so it will be a captive but not necessarily receptive audience... i'm thinking i'll join them just to see how it goes...

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Occupy Davis general strike is starting right now

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Now that Occupy isn't just about tents and occupying, where do we go...?

occupy reno is moving into community service...


chris hayes talks with laura flanders about whether or not the media will stop paying attention...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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NYPD Captain Ray Lewis joins OWS [correction]

good stuff and very interesting... an obviously very intelligent and thoughtful guy...


Police Capt Ray Lewis Joins Protest - Says Police Are Corporate Mercenaries!



[Correction]

ray lewis is a retired captain with the philadelphia police, not the nypd...

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OWS - the continual necessity for acting and thinking boldly

i regularly think back to my time in kosovo this past february, glued to the al jazeera livestream from cairo... i was thrilled beyond words to see the people in egypt rise up and insist on taking their power back from one of the world's most decidedly corrupt regimes... the fact that mubarak had been a long-time ally of my own country was not a small part of my jubilation...

when the ows movement began here two months ago, i was equally thrilled... while that thrill has dissipated somewhat, i am still of the firm belief that ows is the most exciting development in the u.s. in my lifetime...

i worry over what, if anything, the next evolution of ows will look like... as the author of this excerpt, recently returned from egypt, states, whatever evolves, it must be big and bold... we are at a time in the history of our country and of the world where only big and bold will do...

[T]he most valuable organizing nugget I carried back with me [from Egypt] is the continual necessity for acting and thinking boldly. As an organizer here in the US, I was taught to be pragmatic and practical - go for what you can win in a specific time horizon. As an organizer, we ask leaders to dream, to name the things that hold them back from being happy, free and prosperous. And then, we set limits on those dreams, or cut them into bite-sized chunks that are so small, they sometimes bear little resemblance to the massive, audacious canvas that the leaders first painted for us. We negotiate ourselves down before we even get to the real negotiation table.

Before Egypt, I was taught that politics is the art of the possible. After Egypt, I question whether we should all be reaching for the impossible and ludicrous. Who knows who else might agree? A common call for the laughable and ridiculous widens the possibility for what can and should happen.

this takes me back to what i posted earlier - i believe we should be giving serious consideration to a constitutional convention...

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Don't co-opt OWS and the case for a Constitutional Convention

from macleod cartoons...



i just came back from a journey of the heart where i visited with a very good friend whom i have not visited for way too many years... he is a man i would unabashedly describe as "great," a man who thinks, reads, comes to his own conclusions, and, now in his early 70s, is always unfailingly out ahead of not only his peers but also those of every age group... while the basis of our friendship is clearly based on our intellectual compatibility, his greatness is considerably enhanced by the fact that he chose to spend his working life as an aircraft mechanic and devoted his spare time to raising children, building houses and collectible race cars, and crafting a relationship with a fine and strong woman which will culminate next month in a 50-year wedding anniversary celebration...

in the extended conversations i was privileged to have with him over the few days we spent together, conversations that, as you might expect, ranged all over the map, we honed in on most of the salient political and social issues of the day... i shared with him my somewhat peripheral involvement with the occupy movement and my experiences working, traveling and living in many foreign countries, and we ended up mutually reaching for some sort of macro solution to the problems that are dogging our country...

interestingly enough, the solution he has in mind and one that i would be at great pains to disagree with, is convening a constitutional convention... he is a student of howard zinn and agrees with zinn that our system has been seriously flawed from the beginning... while my gut reaction was to immediately want to defend the u.s. constitution as the unimpeachable product of the founders, it didn't take me but a few moments of reflection to follow his reasoning...

here's glenn struggling with the current state of the occupy movement and expressing his profound hope that it doesn't get pulled in to the political/electoral morass...

I disagree with the prevailing wisdom that OWS should begin formulating specific legislative demands and working to elect specific candidates. I have no doubt that many OWS protesters will ultimately vote and even work for certain candidates — and that makes sense — but the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it. Integrating it into that system is a way of narrowing its appeal and, worse, sapping it of its unique attributes and fear-generating potency. Even if you believe the U.S. has some sort of vibrant democracy — rather than a democracy-immune oligarchy — not all change needs to come exclusively from voting and electoral politics. Citizen movements can change the political culture in ways other than working within that pre-established electoral system; indeed, when that system becomes fundamentally corrupted, working outside of it is the only means of effectuating real change.

[...]

I hope OWS, at least for now, remains a movement that refuses to reduce itself into garden-variety electoral politics. What is missing from America is a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions of the consequences of their continued pilfering, corporatism, and corrupt crony capitalism, and only this sort of movement — untethered from the pacifying rules of our political and media institutions — can re-impose that healthy fear.

inspiring "a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions," as laudable as that goal is at this moment in time, doesn't get us to where we so desperately need to go - a re-imagined, workable, transparent, equitable system that works for all of us... to me, THAT is the desired end state and absolutely nothing else will do... now, how do we get there...?

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MN Rep. Keith Ellison on OWS and the 99%

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