#OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

[Jeff]

Part of Occupy Wall Street? Real World 27 is casting now!

Date: 2011-10-17, 3:15PM PDT
Reply to: job-kt4vx-2654973363@craigslist.org

MTV's Real World is seeking cast members to tell their unique stories on our show. If you are over the age of 20 and appear to be between the ages of 20-24, and the description below sounds like you, we want to hear from you!

Are you a part of the OCCUPY WALL STREET movement?

If so, please contact realworldcasting@bunim-murray.com. Your subject heading should be YOUR NAME and WALL STREET.

Please attach 3 RECENT PHOTOS and a brief BIO, including your full NAME, DATE OF BIRTH (for ID purposes only) as well as your CONTACT INFORMATION including PHONE #.

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/tf ... 73363.html

"Kill yourselves. Seriously."

[Free]

Wordspeak2 wrote:
Chris Hedges is a good writer, but he gives me some pause with his anti-Marxism.

"[Marx] advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class..."

       

. Jeff wrote:
That sounds more Lenin than Marx, doesn't it?

I've often wondered about how much of the top-down government and authoritarianism of Russian and Chinese
communism resulted from it being superimposed on centuries of strict hierarchical rule and paternalistic culture of the Czars and the Emperors.

In North America, we have a very different history. We learned a lot from the Native Americans, the Iroquois nation influenced the formation of our original political system. You can tell by looking at early photos of the Native Americans that they were free, their faces and body language express freedom and dignity. The Europeans that came here learned and copied things from them (not enough, of course) and the land is imprinted with their energy.

That said, I'm convinced that we need to take the best of everything that has worked in all countries and come up with new creative ideas. Participating in the General Assemblies in the past weeks has been such a revelation. When everyone's  views and ideas are heard and traditionally marginalized voices are encouraged, genius flows freely.





Saturday night in Time Square. The only thing missing was the ball drop!

[Twyla LaSarc]

Nice art, Twyla!

Thanks!! As a folk artist, I strive for authenticity: The (quite lovely) piece of cardboard came from a Subway franchise and the *emergency* set of pastels from the big box store due to extreme broke-atude.

The back reads:

PRECARITY: existence without predictability
or security, affecting material or psychological
welfare.
PRECARIOUS WORK: Employment which is poorly
paid, insecure, unprotected and cannot support
a household.
END PRECARITY!

(I got the definitions from the wiki on precarity.)

[Laodicean]

This was Twyla's sign that she made herself. It was photographed often. Down with precarity!

Really love this. I had to share it with my friends on Google +.

[Nordic]

Nice art, Twyla!

Thanks!! As a folk artist, I strive for authenticity: The (quite lovely) piece of cardboard came from a Subway franchise and the *emergency* set of pastels from the big box store due to extreme broke-atude.

The back reads:

PRECARITY: existence without predictability
or security, affecting material or psychological
welfare.
PRECARIOUS WORK: Employment which is poorly
paid, insecure, unprotected and cannot support
a household.
END PRECARITY!

(I got the definitions from the wiki on precarity.)

Learn something new every day. And yeah that certainly defines today's economy for most folks.

[Nordic]

Paulson thinks the protesters should be grayteful that he and his billionaire buddies pay 40 percent of the taxes?

What a motherfucking dumbass.

THAT'S exactly what is getting protested! The fact that a tiny percent of the population is paying the lion's share of INCOME taxes because they get the lion's share of the goddamn INCOME!

This is just absolute proof that these dumbshits don't deserve the responsibility and the power that goes with being that wealthy. If they're THIS FUCKiNG STOOPID they don't deserve to keep their pirated loot.

So to hell with them. Get a rope.

[Jeff]

Saurian Tail posted this in the Fuck Obama thread, but I think it merits a crosspost here. (Er, that is, if it's not here already.)

Going Apeshit

By James Howard Kunstler
on October 17, 2011 8:40 AM

It was amusing to see President Obama try to align himself with the OWS movement. The genial Millard Fillmore update asked them not to "demonize those who work on Wall Street." Of course, demonization proceeds from the failure of this president and his appointed agents in authority to subject those who work on Wall Street to the laws that mere mortals are supposed to follow in money matters. Hence, those who work on Wall Street appear to be something other than mortals. And since their work (on Wall Street) has had a malign influence on the common weal, some might leap to the conclusion that they are malevolent non-mortals, i.e. demons.

In this early stage of the convulsion rocking the western world, especially here in the USA, a peaceful ambience rules. That is because a game is being played. We played the game in 1968. It goes like this. You get people to turn out in the streets. The idea is to promote the right of public assembly as much as to make any particular point. (In fact, banners advocating all sorts of gripes appear.) Eventually, you get a lot of people in the streets. Feelings of happy anarchy sweep the crowd, a feeling that something special is underway, that the usual rules of everyday conduct have been suspended, in a good way. The crowd basks in the sunny glow of its own mass, happy solidarity. Everybody is behaving splendidly - more to feel good about.

After a while that gets boring, especially for young males with a lot of testosterone surging from loin to brain. They want to do more than bask in the radiance of their own righteous wonderfulness. They want to engage their large muscles, even if in the service of an idea, for instance the idea that they have been swindled. It is at first a vague idea, but large. But pretty soon it coheres emergently: swindled out of our future! Yes, it is so. Thousands of demon-like beings upstairs in the curtain-wall towers around Zuccotti Park, people wearing neckties and cultured pearls in warm offices with cappuccino machines down the hall, are at this very moment setting loose trading algorithms that will swindle us out of our future! You can see them up there at their evil, glowing screens!

That's when the yoga acrobatics and the hat crocheting are put aside and the street people - their ranks swollen into a horde-like meta-organism - start to express things beyond the right of public assembly. Something unseen goes through them, perhaps like the pheromone that transforms a field full of grasshoppers into a ravening swarm of locusts. Being people, they cannot take wing. But they can press forward and up against things, and they can surely break the glass in those sleek curtain-wall buildings (so much for "transparency") beyond which the bankers sit cringing in their expensive clothing.

Surely we are heading toward a moment like that. The bank employees upstairs must be getting a little nervous, anyway, just glancing out the windows at the moiling mob below. This is apart from the tensions internally roiling the banks themselves, not to mention the entire networked system of global banking, with all its fissures and cracks, as the merry-go-round of debt flies apart under the centrifugal force of insolvency. Come to think of it, these events could not have correlated more perfectly. Just as a horrific accident in finance is about to happen, a ready-made revolutionary mob is conveniently parked outside the pilot-houses of the world's great money vessels, so as to receive the crews directly into their open arms after the smash up.

...

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/10/going-apeshit.html

[Elvis]

Estimated 10,000 in Seattle today.

Damn, save some revolution for me!
I've been working 11 hours+ a day in this busy season at my bosses' other store 100 miles from Seattle..

(At least I get to create; I got myself appointed 'lighting & audio guy' in the haunted house we're making.
I run around in a lab coat, climbing tall ladders, testing my thunder & lighting machines etc. Yes, it's fun.)

Word about my participation in the Seattle effort (in a company costume no less. ) traveled ahead of me to this store,
and whenever someone mentions it, I take it as an opportunity to say why I did it, and why everyone should!

haha! My poor boss. At least he's getting into the spirit of it, in his way.


If I make it back to Seattle before Halloween (unlikely), I want to wear a giant cow suit, with a sign that says,


"THE 1% ARE MILKING US"



Just caught up --- so many great things in this thread, thanks to all for news & pics.

[Plutonia]

Saurian Tail posted this in the Fuck Obama thread, but I think it merits a crosspost here. (Er, that is, if it's not here already.)

Going Apeshit

By James Howard Kunstler
on October 17, 2011 8:40 AM

It was amusing to see President Obama try to align himself with the OWS movement. The genial Millard Fillmore update asked them not to "demonize those who work on Wall Street." Of course, demonization proceeds from the failure of this president and his appointed agents in authority to subject those who work on Wall Street to the laws that mere mortals are supposed to follow in money matters. Hence, those who work on Wall Street appear to be something other than mortals. And since their work (on Wall Street) has had a malign influence on the common weal, some might leap to the conclusion that they are malevolent non-mortals, i.e. demons.

In this early stage of the convulsion rocking the western world, especially here in the USA, a peaceful ambience rules. That is because a game is being played. We played the game in 1968. It goes like this. You get people to turn out in the streets. The idea is to promote the right of public assembly as much as to make any particular point. (In fact, banners advocating all sorts of gripes appear.) Eventually, you get a lot of people in the streets. Feelings of happy anarchy sweep the crowd, a feeling that something special is underway, that the usual rules of everyday conduct have been suspended, in a good way. The crowd basks in the sunny glow of its own mass, happy solidarity. Everybody is behaving splendidly - more to feel good about.

After a while that gets boring, especially for young males with a lot of testosterone surging from loin to brain. They want to do more than bask in the radiance of their own righteous wonderfulness. They want to engage their large muscles, even if in the service of an idea, for instance the idea that they have been swindled. It is at first a vague idea, but large. But pretty soon it coheres emergently: swindled out of our future! Yes, it is so. Thousands of demon-like beings upstairs in the curtain-wall towers around Zuccotti Park, people wearing neckties and cultured pearls in warm offices with cappuccino machines down the hall, are at this very moment setting loose trading algorithms that will swindle us out of our future! You can see them up there at their evil, glowing screens!

That's when the yoga acrobatics and the hat crocheting are put aside and the street people - their ranks swollen into a horde-like meta-organism - start to express things beyond the right of public assembly. Something unseen goes through them, perhaps like the pheromone that transforms a field full of grasshoppers into a ravening swarm of locusts. Being people, they cannot take wing. But they can press forward and up against things, and they can surely break the glass in those sleek curtain-wall buildings (so much for "transparency") beyond which the bankers sit cringing in their expensive clothing.

Surely we are heading toward a moment like that. The bank employees upstairs must be getting a little nervous, anyway, just glancing out the windows at the moiling mob below. This is apart from the tensions internally roiling the banks themselves, not to mention the entire networked system of global banking, with all its fissures and cracks, as the merry-go-round of debt flies apart under the centrifugal force of insolvency. Come to think of it, these events could not have correlated more perfectly. Just as a horrific accident in finance is about to happen, a ready-made revolutionary mob is conveniently parked outside the pilot-houses of the world's great money vessels, so as to receive the crews directly into their open arms after the smash up.

...

http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/10/going-apeshit.html

That is something that I've wondered about for a few years now - whether there isn't some ultra-high level agenda to provoke a violent uprising in the US in order to initiate the lucrative opportunity of balkanization and the bargain sell-off of US military assets. I mean the outrages against the citizenry have been escalating in their egregiousness and there is no effort to silence inflammatory gas bags like Alex Jones.

But even if so, I do think it's possible to co-opt their planned (if it is) insurrection, just as they have done to so many of our collective efforts.

Anyway, it's worth considering IMO.

[Plutonia]

Mr 53% was a fake.

[Nordic]

THAT is awesome. I have a weird thing about handwriting, can't explain it, but I could just look at that handwriting and tell it didn't belong to the guy in the photo.

[blanc]

The handwriting is odd. If only because the person can spell, but the form of the words, irregularity of the size of individual words, and aggressive underlining, suggest lack of education. Its as if someone tried to make it look like a spontaneous outburst from a man of the people.

[Project Willow]

Woah, imagine this meeting...

Our 2nd circle of Occupy Your House happened tonight and was the beginning of an historic alliance between representatives of the Kitsap County Tea Party and the Bainbridge Island Progressives...Ben Kuhner, head of the Kitsap County T party and David Korten were our invited guests, joining the circle and spicing it up...once again, the young people showed up a bit late, and didn't get in the photo.

I like the idea, start an "Occupy Salon".

I don't think I've followed Korten since the WTO and When Corporations Rule The World. Reviewing now, and what an EEEinteresting CV has he.

Has anyone here read The Great Turning?

Korten's 2006 book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community argues that the development of empires about 5,000 years ago initiated unequal distribution of power and social benefits to a small portion of the population they controlled. He also argues that corporations are modern versions of empire, both being social organizations based on hierarchies, chauvinism, and domination through violence. The rise of powerful advanced technology combined with the control of corporate as well as nation based empires is described as becoming increasingly destructive to communities and the environment. The world is shown as about to face a perfect storm of converging crises including climate change, peak oil, and a financial crisis caused by an unbalanced economy. This will cause major changes to the current economic and social structure. These crises present an opportunity for significant changes that replace the paradigm of "Empire" with one of "Earth Community". Korten's "Earth Community" is based on sustainable, just, and caring communities which incorporate mutual responsibility and accountability.

[Sounder]

Thanks Free for the report and for representing on the street.

Free wrote...

That said, I'm convinced that we need to take the best of everything that has worked in all countries and come up with new creative ideas.

We will need to dig deep beneath the morass of corrupted meaning content to have any hope for shifting the center of dialogue from money, objects and protecting creditors toward people and right relationships.

Participating in the General Assemblies in the past weeks has been such a revelation. When everyone's views and ideas are heard and traditionally marginalized voices are encouraged, genius flows freely.

Imagine a world where genius flows freely. Widely distributed genius is the secret weapon that will remake this world.

Project Willow,- great idea on the occupy salon

And Twyla,- very cool signage

[wordspeak2]

. Jeff wrote:
That sounds more Lenin than Marx, doesn't it?

I've often wondered about how much of the top-down government and authoritarianism of Russian and Chinese
communism resulted from it being superimposed on centuries of strict hierarchical rule and paternalistic culture of the Czars and the Emperors.


I would agree with that. To say that Marx advocated violence and is responsible for further "enslavement of the working class" is disingenuous, imo.
Just an aside.

More importantly, I'm just wondering- how long are people going to stay out there? Cause here in the northeast it starts to get cold... pretty darn soon. It's already too chilly for my blood.
How do we move this energy inside? Have I missed some conversations about this?