#OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Sep 18, 2013 9:02 am

Hey all you still breathing out there,

On the second anniversary of OWS, here’s a manifesto to fill your lungs:

A Reboot of the Capitalist Imagination

Look outside your window today and admire how permanent everything is.

Cars faithfully zoom in and out of traffic without end. Financial skyscrapers frame the streets, investing your dollars and cashing your paychecks with ease. People pour out of apartments on their way to the office, to visit friends, to look for work. The social order, all the basic interactions of the day, are predictable, normal, most likely the same as yesterday. The sheer rigidity of the political system is not in question.

Now imagine that it all snaps. That everything you know is turned upside down. The coffee shop is closed. The bank door is shut. People stop following even the most basic prompts.

Looking out the window today, we have that same feeling we had on September 16th, 2011, the day before those first courageous occupiers packed up their tents and made their move on Wall Street. Only this time, as we gaze beyond the glass, there is an assuring upward tilt on our otherwise steady lips. We now have a confidence in this generation that we didn’t have before. There are still curveballs that can shock the financial and psychological order. There is a growing conviction that the things that can happen, will happen. The world is still up for grabs.

Revolution is a Rhizome

What we experienced in 2011 is still reverberating around the globe. Most recently, in Turkey and Brazil, that feeling in the guts, that the future does not compute, is vibrant as ever. And because of that gnawing anxiety in the depths of an increasing mass of people, the new mode of activism, what Spanish journalist Bernardo Gutierrez calls a “new architecture of protest,” is spreading like a frenzy: what starts out as simple demands – don’t cut the trees, don’t raise the transit fair, don’t institute that corrupt judge – erupts into an all-encompassing desire to reboot the entire machine.

In the coming political horizon you can expect that wherever there is a crack, scandal, teacher strike or pipeline deception, you’ll find a hornet’s nest underneath. When you have a connected generation, all of their unique and individual demands are connected, too. Protest becomes a cornucopia, not a straight path. And the desire is not to destroy the system but to hack it, to re-code it, to commandeer it … to see revolution not as pyramid but as a rhizome … to see the system not as an unchanging text but as an ever changing language of computation, an algorithm.

More than ever we are seeing the actuality of the modern-day truism, “we are all one.” Now, as we have the technology to organize – who cares if the NSA is listening in, in fact we welcome them to listen in and to be inspired – this first-ever global generation will be able to articulate itself more clearly, more viscerally, more intensely and at a frequency like never before. #OccupyGezi becomes the call of Turkey. Brazilian flags are waved on the streets of Lima and Mexico. #idlenomore inspires indigenous sovereignty and environmental movements across the globe.

Take a look out the window today. It wasn’t always this way. It won’t be this way forever.

A Generation Under Pressure

This generation is under pressure. Leading American pundits like David Brooks and Andrew Sorkin laugh us off as ungrateful kids and milquetoast radicals, people who just aren’t willing to work like the previous generation. But these folks just don’t get it. The engine light of humanity has turned on. But no mechanic of the old paradigm can fix it. We’re experiencing a global system failure like never before. But no programmer of the old language can re-write it. The Earth is getting sick. The culture is in terminal decline. Mental illness is the number one cause of lost workplace hours in America. What other indicator does one need? Rejection is not ungratefulness, it’s a beautiful and sincere longing for a sane and sustainable tomorrow. But as the valves are twisted tighter … well … you can see the result everywhere.

Last July, as hundreds of thousands of protesters were marching in cities throughout Turkey and Brazil, Adbusters creative director Pedro Inoue skipped work to join the magic in the streets. He sent us this testimony from the center of São Paulo, a portrait that became the backbone of one of our most spirited and hopeful publications yet. We’ve long been accused of being too negative … yet here our readers saw a bright light:

It’s something you feel when the lover in your arms is laughing and you feel like your heart is going to break because there couldn’t possibly be any more room for good inside. The high begins to float you away. We were walking to the governor’s house, taking time along the way to talk, look at people waving flags from apartment windows, listen to chants coming and going like waves in this sea of people. I looked into this kid’s eyes. He kept talking but I only remember those eight words.

“Man, what a beautiful world we live in,” he said.

I was mesmerized by the shine in his eyes. Sparks. Flashes. Pulses. Bursts of light. When the global revolution finally arrives … it’s going to shine everywhere like that.


The conditions that spurred on the Greek anarchists, the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, #Occupywallstreet, the Chilean student revolt, Pussy riot, the Quebec uprising, #idlenomore, Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, and the insurrections in Istanbul, Lima, Bulgaria and São Paulo have only worsened. Inequality is reaching obscene proportions in America and many other nations. There is an ever-greater concentration of wealth, ever-bigger banks, a steady increase of high frequency trading (HFT), derivative confusion and outbursts of rogue financial algorithms that send markets dipping and waning beyond any human control. $1.3 trillion in speculative financial transactions keep swirling around the planet every day. The stage is now set for a much more catastrophic market crash than 2008. And inside each and every one of us, the desire for real is growing: Real economy. Real democracy. Real possibilities. Real humanity. Real leadership. Real horizons. Real interactions. Real things. Real life.

Three Metamemes for the Future

Here at Adbusters, we see three big tactical breakthrough ideas, three metamemes, that have the power to veer this global trainwreck of ours from its date with disaster. Make no mistake, the crash is a brutal world – a barbarian reality. It’s a happening that none of us should seek out joyfully. Yet we cannot just go with the flow, sing with the speed and trust the inertia of our current economic doomsday machine.

The first thing we can do is call for a radical re-think of our global economic system. Unbridled neocon capitalism has been riding the back of humankind without opposition for nearly two generations now. It has provided no answer yet and it has no answer for the most pressing threat of the future, namely climate change. Economics students and heterodox economists must rise up in universities everywhere and demand a shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science. We have to abandon almost everything we thought we knew about the gods of progress, happiness and growth. We have to re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money and pioneer a new kind of economics, a bionomics, a psychonomics, an ecological economics that is up to the job of managing our planetary household.

The second thing we can do is usher in a new era of radical transparency … to add the right to live in a transparent world as a new human right in the constitution of nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Current events in Syria are a perfect example of how secrecy by the major powers of the world leads to confusion and the possibility of catastrophic failure. Assad may get away with a type of murderous appetite not seen since WWII, for no reason other than the fact that America can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. Radical transparency is the only path towards a viable global democracy of the future.

The third thing we can do is take inspiration and learn lessons from a new tactical breakthrough in global activism – the revolution algorithm. The internet has reversed a centuries-old power dynamic. The street now has unprecedented power. Through hacking, rhizomatic organizing, viral memes, it can paralyze cities, bring whole countries to a standstill … protests and uprisings can spook stock markets into plunging 10% in a single day, as happened recently in Turkey, and, if we the people are angry and fired up enough, we can force even the most arrogant presidents and prime ministers to the democratic table.

In the 21st century, democracy could look like this: a dynamic, visceral, never-ending feedback loop between entrenched power structures and the street. In this new model, corporate power will be forever blunted by sustained and clearly articulated demands for new economic, political and environmental policies, for visceral debates and referendums on critical issues, for the revocation of the charters of corporations that break the public trust and for new laws and constitutional amendments on democratic fundamentals like secrecy, corporate personhood and the rules by which nations go to war. Every government department, every minister and the whole political establishment, right down to the think tanks, media pundits and CEOs, will be under the gun, on an almost daily basis, to bend to the ever changing pulse of the people.

As this second anniversary of Occupy passes, perhaps with raging flames, perhaps with only a few sparks, we can take solace in one thing: Our current global system – capitalism – is in terminal decline … and while its corpse is still twitching, our jobs, yours, mine, all of us, are to stay vigilant and to keep working on our own lives … We shy away from the megacorporations, we refuse to buy heavily advertised products, we meticulously seek out toxin-free information, we eat, travel, socialize and live as lightly as we can … we fight for our happiness … we build trust with each other and play the #killcap game at least once every day … and most important, we focus our eyes on the horizon and wait for our next moment to come.

— Kalle Lasn and Darren Fleet
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jun 17, 2014 10:14 am

Where are the Occupy protesters now?
Social media makes it easier and cheaper to build movements quickly – but bypassing the business of creating decision-making infrastructure means they can disappear just as fast

Todd Gitlin
theguardian.com, Tuesday 17 June 2014 04.55 EDT

Where have all the chanters gone; the gospel-minded Christians and the denouncers of ‘banksters’ and tyrants; the homeless and the indebted and unemployed who filled our urban squares in 2011-12, crying out such slogans as "We are the 99 percent" and "The people want the end of the regime"? Where are the leaderless revolutionaries who turned cities around the world upside down?

The simple answer is: they were dispersed. When the sometimes public parks were swept clear of troublemakers, many dispersed into a scatter of left-wing campaigns. Other activists now escort visitors around bare, fenced-off Zuccotti Park near Wall Street. In London, free bus tours with guides in top hats carry the curious around the City and Canary Wharf (“Make your very own ‘credit default swap’ and find out how to create money out of thin air!”).

One Occupy London stalwart, a sermon-on-the-mount Christian who negotiated with the Bishop of London at St Paul’s in 2011, emails me to say: “Many of us from Occupy London have ended up going all over the world. Our decisions to travel to the far-reaches were probably inspired by Occupy in many cases, although not all of us are working as activists in other countries. We remain in touch with each other, and support the hardcore group that are fighting fracking in the UK now … B returned to the USA, C is in Pakistan, D in Spain, E in Tunisia, F in Greece, others are in India, Africa, Thailand … I am currently living in Kuwait, teaching the young to be critical thinkers.”

After the dispersals, game efforts were made to rally Occupy spirit, not only on streets and in public parks that were being privatised, but also in bookshops and on news stands, in parliaments and city halls. It’s a cliche, a true one, that the Occupy movements of 2011-12 changed the conversation. Reform mayors like New York City’s Bill De Blasio (theme: "a tale of two cities") were elected.

On talk shows, best-seller lists and the business sections of newspapers – even, yes, in university economics departments – inequality is all the rage. At the time of writing, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century ranks #4 among all books on US Amazon, and #15 in Britain. In the US, this subversive little theme has infiltrated the rhetoric of the Democratic Party and even right-wing populists among the Republicans, including the libertarian David Brat, who up-ended House majority leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary on 10 June, declaring: “All the investment banks in the New York and [Washington] DC – those guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, they went on Eric’s Rolodex, and they are sending him big cheques.”

Thirty-three months ago, Occupiers easily outnumbered investment bankers, filling public places with mostly young, urban, multiracial, anarchist, libertarian and sometimes reformist folk, mostly in the more prosperous (though reeling) countries. But after weeks or months, city governments, coordinated nationally, dispersed them – irrespective of the formal guarantees of ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble, to petition the government for redress of grievances’, to quote a little-noted passage in the First Amendment to the American Constitution.

Even more resounding were the political uprisings that either overthrew governments or restored some hope that, against rightward and neoliberal turns throughout the world, popular movements of the left had a future. If 2001 was the Year of the Towers, as Anthony Barnett wrote, 2011 was the Year of the Squares. Now, for the most part, the squares are emptied. In Cairo’s Tahrir and Istanbul’s Taksim, the police still fire tear gas, rough up reporters, and fire water cannon to ‘cleanse’ these scenes of uprising potential, while kept media in Russia, Turkey and Egypt, in the time-honoured way of authoritarian regimes, blame outsiders and their alien ‘agendas’.

Squares still fill — namely Kiev’s Maidan and the occasional crowd at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where signs recently appeared bearing slogans like ‘Ni generales ni reyes. ¡Elijimos nuestros jefes!’ (‘Neither generals nor kings. Let’s elect our leaders!’) But overall, the rage is diffuse and the issues are (as almost always they must be) local. Political focus goes fuzzy. The clamour is like tear gas that escapes its container: everywhere but nowhere.

The new movements, as Cambridge sociologist Gören Therborn has pointed out, are city movements, not national ones, yet most of the changes they want, either explicitly or implicitly, require action by nation-states. Implicitly, many of Spain’s indignados recognised this when they supported a new party of ‘decent ordinary citizens’, Podemos, which captured 1.25 million votes in the Euro-parliamentary elections, catapulting it overnight into position as the country’s fourth largest party. Not surprisingly, this disjunction between turf and at least short-term political outcome poses special problems for how to continue and what to accomplish.

What happened to the occupations? Well, what made them mushroom so spectacularly was what also made them collapse once the police stepped in — their dependence on social media. The Turkish-American sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has rightly noted that “these huge mobilisations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale”. She explains the paradox well: it’s much easier to pull off spectacular events with digital technologies than to knit together lasting organisations. And it’s also easy to mistake the former for the latter.

The problem arises, Tufekci adds, “not because social media isn’t good at what it does but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: before the internet, the tedious work of organising that was required to circumvent censorship or to achieve a satisfactory-sized protest also helped build infrastructure for decision-making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.”

Waves of uprisings like those of 2011-12 are rare. In 1848, most of the liberal-nationalist insurgencies of Europe and Latin America were crushed. Many defeated Germans ended up in America, where they supported the anti-slavery cause. Some defeated rebels, like Richard Wagner, veered hard right. Gustave Flaubert withdrew from politics. Britain’s Chartist movement peaked, but most of its programme was subsequently passed. Some of the 2011-12 activists of Tahrir and Gezi have been murdered, jailed, hospitalised, or exiled. Others scramble to find continuations. While appreciating what the movements accomplished, many realise how isolated they were (“Cairo is not Egypt”, as the astute Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey warned in March 2011). No grail to compensate for the isolation of passionate democrats has been found.

Above I mentioned tours of Zuccotti Park. An Occupy activist named Cecily McMillan was one guide there this year, showing the site to relatives and friends who, in early May, had gathered to hear the jury’s verdict after her trial for felonious assault on a police officer during the forcible clearance of the park on 17 March 2012. The officer testified the attack had been unprovoked. According to McMillan’s testimony, he had grabbed and groped her, then hurled her to the ground, bruising her badly and causing her seizures.

Forty-eight hours later, after a trial where the jury was prevented from seeing and hearing much exculpatory evidence, McMillan was on her way to Rikers Island, the city’s decrepit, immense jail complex, awaiting sentence, which turned out to be 90 days (she could have been sent away for up to seven years) despite a letter to the judge from a majority of the jury asking that she not be sent back to jail at all. At Rikers, where she is one of more than 12,000 prisoners, McMillan has been denied medication. She has also been denied bail (her lawyers are appealing). She’s had enough of New York, though, and plans to move back to her hometown of Atlanta – a kinder, gentler city.

As to bigger pictures: what imprint have the Occupy moments and movements left on our cities? Cascades of activism, for one thing. Inspiration wafts through the culture, bubbles of energy and precedents for other struggles and tactics. It’s easiest to see around universities, where campaigns for divestment from fossil fuel corporations are picking up, spurred in part by Occupy ‘graduates’. Campaigns against massive student debt (currently estimated at about $1 trillion in the US) that will saddle graduates for decades have gotten off to a ragged start but probably have a future. While many Occupiers returned to regular, out-of-park life, some unknowable number of these debt-saddled young people – who felt, for a moment, they could get their hands on the levers that move the world – got a whiff of a feeling some of them want to get more of.

In New York City, energy flowed into campaigns against police stop-and-frisk practices and to help victims of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Occupy experience put organisers in touch with community members normally scornful of ‘weirdos’ but resolved to fight corporate power. One experienced organizer, fresh from Occupy in Missouri, went on to help launch the Take Back St Louis initiative, subtitled Reclaiming our Tax Dollars for a Sustainable Future. The group gathered more than 22,000 signatures of registered voters, more than enough to put on to an April 2014 ballot a measure to "stop the city from giving tax breaks and other incentives to corporations that mine coal, gas and oil, and any corporation doing $1m of business with a mining company"; to "create a sustainable energy plan in the city that would invest public money in and open up land for renewable energy and sustainability initiatives like weatherisation programmes, urban farms and solar arrays". In other words, to create sustainable jobs – against the retrograde claim that measures to halt global warming are ‘job-killers’.

There is, it happens, one mining company headquartered in St Louis, and it’s a giant: Peabody Coal, the world’s largest company that mines the dirtiest fuel. Working together, the mayor and Peabody Coal lawyers convinced a judge to grant an injunction, declaring that coal companies share equal rights with people (citing the recent ‘Citizens United’ Supreme Court decision), but the coalition is appealing to a higher court. Meanwhile, the cascade rolled on: students at Washington University in St Louis, never before a hotbed of activism, sat-in for more than two weeks at the university president’s office to protest the membership of Peabody’s president on the university’s board of trustees. The anti-corporate spirit rides high among them. Occupy fanned such flames.

As for the executives in corner offices and boardrooms around Wall Street and Canary Wharf, in state houses and Washington, are they relieved that the rabble were swept away? Do they believe that partial financial reforms will insulate them against risings to come? Beyond growing attention to public relations (probably a growth centre for future employment), are they mindful, as they make policy, that those who once awoke to fill the streets and parks may awaken again? Do they suspect, late at night, that youngsters in sleeping bags might turn out to be the modern equivalent of peasants with pitchforks?

Political rationality, if not fear, may well make elites more responsive. Rumblings on the Right are not the only noises emanating from Europe. The sparks that set Occupy on fire fell on inflammable tinder, and this is how history goes: one spark, then another, ignites a whole landscape. The Occupy ‘graduates’ hope that their time will come again. They might turn out to be wrong – until, one day, they’re right.

Todd Gitlin teaches at Columbia University and is the author of 15 books, including, most recently, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 17, 2014 2:35 pm

There was no Occupy central committee, and if there had been, it would have been That Socialist Sect You Don't Remember.

All these helpful authorities pointing out the obvious, that there was no set program, no specific demands, no leadership, no structure, too much process... all the things that supposedly kept it from sweeping the nation (um, in addition to a big police crackdown, oh yeah). Ironically, if these missing elements had been present from the beginning, the thing would have never taken off in the first place! It worked because it was a situation, not an organization or a cadre. And it fell apart for the same reason, but it also got further than all the helpful authorities did with their organizations, and prompted vital transformations in the social landscape that create the potential for a far more powerful movement (not guaranteed). I've seen literally a thousand organized socialists whine about this, as if their formula has been more effective during the pains of the last 20+ years.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

*

Postby IanEye » Sat Dec 27, 2014 9:40 pm

Image

bumping, because the NYPD have apparently decided demonstrations are a-ok.
User avatar
IanEye
 
Posts: 4863
Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2006 10:33 pm
Blog: View Blog (29)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Apr 06, 2015 10:45 am

Occupy Wall Street Didn’t Just Fizzle Out

Remember when a bunch of anarchists met in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, to denounce Wall Street’s role in the perpetuation of global inequality and mass impoverishment? Remember when it became Occupy Wall Street, and then Occupy Everywhere Else? Remember when it, like, ended? Yeah, that.

A piece published Thursday in the New York Times reminded us of the worldwide movement that lasted through the fall of 2011. The Times’ Colin Moynihan detailed his experience on Occupy Wall Street, the Tour, in which guide Michael Pellagatti, who was active in the movement, takes visitors to Occupy‘s landmark sites like Zuccotti Park and Cipriani Wall Street.

Intended to fight the corporatocratic sham they claim the U.S. democractic process has become, the Occupy movement targeted Wall Street in particular for bringing on “the greatest recession in generations,” the 2008 financial crisis, the official Occupy Wall Street notes.

Occupy Wall Street spread from Lower Manhattan to more than 1,500 cities until even the most stubborn news outlets were covering it.

And then, in what seemed like a Wall Street minute, it was all over.

But, why?

Media outlets declared Occupy Wall Street dead in the water a few months in, but Occupy‘s Dan Kaplan says this was a case of news manufacturing on the part of the very force the movement seeks to oppose.

That force, Kaplan said in a letter to the media, is “the elite of this country who rely on our existing system to enrich themselves and seize power at the expense of everyone else.”

And according to a Huffington Post article, the power-hungry elite have plenty of minions to do their dirty work.

In 2012, Huff Post was one of many news outlets to divulge the contents of top-secret papers obtained via a Freedom of Information Request by the Partnership for Civil Justice fund. The papers revealed that companies, including banks, who feared a backlash from the Occupy Wall Street protests, “coordinated extensively” with the FBI, in New York as well as Memphis, Anchorage, and other cities, to have the movement closely monitored.

The Huff Post says the Occupy Wall Street protests were labeled “domestic terrorism” in certain parts of the document.

In December of 2012, The Guardian‘s Naomi Wolf discussed the contents of the document, confirming the FBI, DHS, and police joined forces to ensure “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent.”



How Wall Street Used Government Forces to Crush Occupy

It has been over two years since the Occupy Movement was brutally destroyed by a coordinated national effort led by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Since that time, much documentation has been released under the Freedom of Information Act. Even though they are heavily redacted, these documents provide a frightening window into how far corporate America along with the federal, state, and local governments acting as their agents were willing to go to destroy a populist social movement like Occupy. Despite all the documentation we have, there are still many out there who are in denial about these facts. After reading some recent comments that misrepresent what happened to the Occupy Movement, I decided to review how Occupy was so brutally squelched by Wall Street and corporate America using government forces as their agents acting upon their behalf.
Terrorism. The word alone can bring about unwarranted fear in otherwise normal people. The images of the twin towers of the World trade Center were deeply etched into the American psyche and created a climate of intense fear which provided the rationale for the current “war on terror.” But what is terrorism and how is a terrorist organization defined? Let’s start with Merriam Webster’s dictionary which defines terrorism as thus:
the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal


This definition seems fairly straight forward. But then if we look at the FBI’s definition of terrorism, the definition of terrorism becomes more muddied. There are multiple definitions of terrorism, but for this diary we are looking at the definition of domestic terrorism. The FBI’s own definition requires a three part test and yet the Occupy Movement was branded as a terrorist threat before the first tent was placed in Zuccotti Park. Let’s examine just how FBI’s open ended interpretation of their own definition of terrorism was and can be selectively used to squelch public dissent such as was the case with the Occupy Movement..
“Domestic terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics: - Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law; – Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and -Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.


The first subsection of the definition is particularly important in that it requires an organization to be engaged in acts that are dangerous to human life and violate state and federal law. I would argue that the Oath Keepers guarding the Bundy Ranch definitely met this part of the definition in that they physically threatened federal agents with high powered military style weapons. Yet they were not treated as a terrorist organization. When the government’s reaction to the Oath Keepers’ threats upon federal agents is compared to the Occupy Movement, it is almost laughable that the FBI could consider Occupy a terrorist organization at all. There was never any remote indication that the Occupy Movement intended to do anything enumerated in subsection two. But the FBI decided to categorize the Occupy Movement as a terrorist organization early on in its inception as evidenced by the FBI’s own documents that were obtained under the FOIA. (note: my bolding added for emphasis)
FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests. These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.


Not only was Occupy, a peaceful public protest group, categorized as a terrorist organization for no legitimate reason other than they challenged corporate America and the big money on Wall Street, but the FOIA documents showed another equally disturbing aspect to the government’s coordinated effort to shut down and destroy the Occupy Movement. Early on in the movement, the FBI was collecting data on many of the protestors, particularly those who may have appeared to in leadership roles. This was clearly in violation of laws protecting the public from such intrusive investigations without a warrant or cause.
The FBI denied the surveillance accusations by saying that its investigation did not include “unnecessary intrusions into the lives of law-abiding people” and that its prohibited from investigating Americans “solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of other rights.” Of course, if you classify the actions as “domestic terrorism,” other rules apply.


The documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund clearly show that the Occupy Movement was targeted by the federal government as a terrorist threat from its very beginning even prior to the initial occupation of Zuccotti Park.
…the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”


Below is Part one of a video in which Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez interview Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.


Part 2 is a continuation of the same interview with Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. If you watch only one part, watch Part 2, keeping in mind that Edward Snowden’s revelations had not yet come to fore. Ms. Verheyden-Hilliard’s remarks are very prescient, in light of the knowledge about the NSA and the security state. It is fascinating to watch these videos from late 2012, knowing what we know today.


As detailed at multiple sources, including an excellent article in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf, the extent by which the government and private corporate interests had merged their surveillance and ultimately coordinated the brutal crackdown on the Occupy Movement is shockingly reminiscent of other totalitarian societies. (note: my bolding added for emphasis)
The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.


So why was Occupy singled out for such brutal treatment while other, more violent and extreme organizations have been given a pass? There can be only one reason. By its presence and its message, Occupy posed a huge political threat to the big money power brokers on Wall Street and elsewhere in the corporate America. Occupy’s message about the 99% had the potential to make it become such a strong nationwide social movement that the politicians would not be able to ignore it. Occupy had to be stamped out early on and its participants had to be made an example of to deter future public social movements that might challenge the power of big corporate money.One thing is abundantly clear despite those who defend the current administration’s action on this, and that is that Occupy was targeted by a nationwide effort which was coordinated through the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security acting on behalf of big money and corporate America to ensure that it would not succeed. What happened to Occupy should serve as a warning to everyone about the dangerous fusion of corporate interests and our public institutions. The corporate capture of our government institutions is dangerous to us as a free people. Those who fail to learn from the history of how the Occupy Movement was suppressed will be doomed to have it repeated upon them.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Jul 15, 2015 5:00 pm

Occupy Wall Street just won

By Tom Toles July 15 at 7:00 AM

The leaderless, agenda-less, amorphous blob that camped out in New York and Washington and various other cities before disappearing without a trace had become a symbol of how not to achieve political change. Until it won.

It was a movement born out of frustration and idealism and eventually wore out and was swept out of its soggy civic encampments by the municipal broom. There it was, and then there it wasn’t.

It was criticized for its lack of agenda items, and if you visited it while it was around, it was all a little vague as to what was going on. It was essentially there as a witness, to an idea. The idea was that economic and social inequality were getting out of hand, and that financial and corporate power were running away with the game.

They did achieve one thing in their not-all-that-brief moment in the sun and not-so-sunny, and that was to put the idea of the 99% into the public discussion.

And now, with Hillary’s latest speech where she followed Bernie Sanders into Occupy turf, we have the Occupy worldview dead center in a presidential election campaign. Not a bad day’s work for hippies.

The secret to having your idea gain traction is to get the idea right. That’s what Occupy did. They didn’t know what to do about it because the game was fixed at every level. No agenda items they proposed stood a chance until more people got clued in to how the political terrain had frozen. So they stood there in the rain and cold, and the idea got into the back of everyone’s head that maybe they had a point. Some further reflection was all it took.

Now it’s all anyone is talking about.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Elvis » Thu Jul 16, 2015 1:11 am

Luther Blissett wrote: Hillary’s latest speech where she followed Bernie Sanders into Occupy turf



:barf: :grumpy


Image
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:43 am

City of London police put Occupy London on counter-terrorism presentation with al-Qaida
Anti-capitalist campaigners described as ‘domestic extremism’ and put on slide with pictures of 2005 London bombing and the 1996 IRA bombing

Police in London have been criticised for including activists from the city’s Occupy protests alongside al-Qaida and the IRA in a presentation being given to prepare nursery and primary school staff for potential terrorist attacks on the UK.

The presentation, which was obtained by the Guardian following a Freedom of Information request, is part of an expanding City of London police initiative dubbed Project Fawn.

It is aimed at preparing nursery and school staff for the possibility that London could be hit by attacks such as on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, Mumbai and the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis, which it names. However, it also refers to domestic extremism, student protests and climate issues.

The presentation – which gives advice on dealing with bomb threats, screening mail and hostile reconnaissance – covers the threat posed and methodologies used by Isis, al-Qaida, so-called lone actors and dissident Irish Republicans.

Under the heading of domestic extremism, it also refers to “xrw” and “xlw” (apparent acronyms for extreme left and right wing), as well as single issue groups, animal rights and politics.

David Copeland, a neo-Nazi who carried out a nail-bombing campaign in 1999, is listed among examples of extreme rightwing terrorists. Another page lists: Shac/Animal Alliance (a reference to the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty group), climate issues, Occupy, student protests and urban explorers.

A separate slide, headed History in City of Terrorism and Domestic Issues, features three images: one from the July 2005 London bombings, one from the 1996 Provisional IRA bombing of London’s docklands and an image from the 2011-12 Occupy London protests.

A coalition of police monitoring groups, the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol), accused the City of London police of conflating protest with terrorism and violence.

Image

Kevin Blowe, a co-ordinator of Netpol, said this was repeated around the country and was the “result of including ill-defined labels, like ‘domestic extremism’, within the language and strategies of counter-terrorism”.

“Programmes like the government’s Prevent strategy overwhelmingly target and stigmatise Muslim communities, but as Project Fawn shows, they also provide plenty of scope to include almost any group of political activists that the police dislike or consider an inconvenience.

“These slides show a real disdain for legitimate rights to exercise freedoms of expression and assembly in a free society, which leads to individuals having their lawful activities recorded and retained on secret police intelligence databases.”

Jamie Kelsey-Fry, a supporter of Occupy London, said: “If you were to measure the power in an idea by the extent to which it is suppressed, then Occupy were articulating something profound.

“Not only were we likened to terrorists at the time, called a cancer by Boris Johnson and witnessed brutal policing on several occasions back then, but even today, the City of London Corporation’s own police force are busy ensuring that those who challenge the disastrous current economic system are portrayed as a bogeyman.”

A spokesman for City of London police said: “The City of London police engages with a range of audiences on topics including crime, terrorism, personal safety and online protection in order to protect and educate people. The presentations are delivered alongside officers from community policing, as well as representatives from the City of London Corporation.

“A section of the presentation mentions protest groups. This is not an attempt to label them as terrorists, but an opportunity to discuss other policing issues that could affect educational establishments in the Square Mile.”
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Nordic » Mon Jul 20, 2015 5:03 pm

Luther Blissett » Wed Jul 15, 2015 4:00 pm wrote:
Occupy Wall Street just won

By Tom Toles July 15 at 7:00 AM

The leaderless, agenda-less, amorphous blob that camped out in New York and Washington and various other cities before disappearing without a trace had become a symbol of how not to achieve political change. Until it won.

It was a movement born out of frustration and idealism and eventually wore out and was swept out of its soggy civic encampments by the municipal broom. There it was, and then there it wasn’t.

It was criticized for its lack of agenda items, and if you visited it while it was around, it was all a little vague as to what was going on. It was essentially there as a witness, to an idea. The idea was that economic and social inequality were getting out of hand, and that financial and corporate power were running away with the game.

They did achieve one thing in their not-all-that-brief moment in the sun and not-so-sunny, and that was to put the idea of the 99% into the public discussion.

And now, with Hillary’s latest speech where she followed Bernie Sanders into Occupy turf, we have the Occupy worldview dead center in a presidential election campaign. Not a bad day’s work for hippies.

The secret to having your idea gain traction is to get the idea right. That’s what Occupy did. They didn’t know what to do about it because the game was fixed at every level. No agenda items they proposed stood a chance until more people got clued in to how the political terrain had frozen. So they stood there in the rain and cold, and the idea got into the back of everyone’s head that maybe they had a point. Some further reflection was all it took.

Now it’s all anyone is talking about.



Well if that isn't a lovely piece of propaganda.

It's a lie because all anybody should be talking about is Eric Holder. He went right back to the same comfy bankster-protecting job that he had before being the guy who was SUPPOSED to investigate and prosecute his old bosses.

It's such blatant corruption and it's nothing that anybody is talking about. Instead everybody is talking about is Donald Trump and the escaped drug lord from Mexico, El Chapo.

When what we should be doing is dragging Holder out of his comfy office and into a jail cell.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
Nordic
 
Posts: 14230
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2006 3:36 am
Location: California USA
Blog: View Blog (6)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jul 21, 2015 11:00 am

Yeah, I don't think anyone is even registering the dissonance of Hillary's "mentioning" of the "99 percent" and who her owners are.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 20, 2018 12:47 pm

- www.counterpunch.org

Three Lessons of Occupy Wall Street, With a Fair Dose of Memory
By Nicholas Levis
September 20, 2018

Seven years ago, on 17 September 2011, I attended the first Occupy Wall Street manifestation in New York City. The event had been announced in clever and enigmatic ways online, in particular evoking the recent and enormous M15, Syntagma, and Tahrir Square uprisings of the Mediterranean.

Some of the first publicity for OWS came from the Vancouver collective responsible for Adbusters, a magazine for anti-advertising guerillas to which I had once subscribed. They created the famous poster of the dancer on the bull, tagged curiously with the question, “What is our one demand?” Another online appeal set out lengthy procedures for assemblies that would occupy Broadway block-by-block, each independently holding a sidewalk and seeking consensus of everyone present in formulating their demands. None of this was actually followed at the real thing, of course. The rules included an implicit concession that consensus did not extend to the police. If harrassed by law enforcement, assemblies were to dissolve and reconvene on a different block.

But the first real-world humans of OWS came largely from the earlier “Bloombergville” tent village at City Hall. For months they had protested the city’s gentrification, lack of affordable housing, and routine barbarism toward the homeless. On 17 September, the initial assemblies around Bowling Green (the old park near the Wall Street bull sculpture, for those of you who don’t know it) were boisterous and ideologically mixed: a convergence of suited organizers-for-life and 24/7 agitators festooned with buttons, not a few bank employees alongside the homeless, hippies and punks, yoga fiends and academics, David Graeber urging a debt jubilee, six brands of sectarians each with their own banners, a sad whiff of Tea Party, and a bunch of Jane and Joe Does like me and you.

I was there with two friends I’d originally met on the Internet. We left in the evening, after the remnants of the undirected marches and gong-soundings and impromptu seminars on finance, which at their high point had numbered 2,000 people at most, converged on Zuccotti Park and started setting up a camp. My friends and I believed that it would be cleared by the police that same night. I should have accounted for the possibility that my supposed experience with how things work is not a seamless guide to the future. Who was it that said history is the history of surprises?

The next day and the next week I was thrilled to learn that the encampment had remained in place, in part thanks to the brilliant exploitation of a legal loophole regarding privately-owned public spaces in New York City. By contract between developers and the city, such places are fully public but not under Parks Department jurisdiction, and thus not subject to the city park curfew. The National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU showed up to get some orders staying the dispersal of the assembly. But above all Occupy Wall Street remained because a few hundred people gathered that night had decided it would be so, and I thank them and the many thousands who joined them in the next two months.

The camp grew, turned into a carnival with a kitchen and a library, with performers and side-circuses and a running general assembly that exposed everything and could decide on nothing, which perhaps was not really the point. I was working long hours most of that time. A few days I showed up at 7 am to throw a twenty and a few cigarettes at the media table, before running off to the job. By this, I wish also to admit that I did not build this. I was one among millions who were excited and moved by it. I later took part in Occupy Astoria-LIC and Occupy Alternative Banking, one of which is still a circle of friends, while the other continues today and has been among the many sparks in the rising movement to change the way money works. Besides efforts to bring Occupy to the neighborhoods, I was also part of the beautiful if brief Turkish-Greek-Brazilian revival of Occupy Wall Street in June 2013, on which more in some future piece.

After two weeks of near-complete silence from the corporate media — this is often forgotten — the conglomerates finally acknowledged the congregation of thousands downtown. As the saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then…” As if by a switch, or perhaps as cattle stampeding at the snap of a twig, the TV, the punditry and the tabloids activated a 24/7 campaign of misrepresentation and trivialization. This came not only from the “mainstream” and conservative outlets, but also from the workhorses of intermittent opposition at Comedy Central. Is a pack of wolves the better metaphor?

At least this helped in spreading the occupations to many other cities and towns, even to set off a wave of solidarity protests abroad. Too bad the latter manifestations dwarfed almost every physical gathering in the United States! Yet it was also true that suddenly, “Our ideas are in everyone’s heads.” Everyone was talking about OWS, and at length. Even a bunch of pharma executives at a meeting to receive a Hollywood pitch, which I happened to witness as the Last Factotum present, spent the first hour agreeing that it was important. Granted, this group included the kind of 1%ers who do not condemn popular manifestations, but instead wonder which part they should fund. Meanwhile, a great many trade union activists understood that something important was happening, and they too provided big numbers for many of the Zuccotti and post-Zuccotti actions.

Occupy Wall Street in its original incarnation was not “the movement” for very long, yet today its spirit persists in a dozen movements that mostly existed before, came together in it, cross-pollinated, and emerged catalyzed, determined to disrupt Business As Usual, to pursue a revolutionary transformation of society and system.

Did it work? I mean, besides reminding Obama to reinsert some populism into his rhetoric, with just enough lead time to secure his 2012 reelection? Its workings still weave their way among us, my dears. Its ideas and tactics, or rather the ancient and new ideas and tactics that OWS expressed and embodied for a time in certain spaces in certain ways, are still everywhere available. OWS is history, and we are still writing it. It is evident as a strain of thought and action in many movements of our day that I will not list here, to avoid the misunderstanding that I am giving credit to OWS for the people working for and driving the vital movements of today. Agency is in the living, no matter their inspiration, and its sources are not always evident.

The story I wish to write now instead is not about how OWS was the beginning of “the movement,” but to identify three reasons why it was one of the most effective catalysts for social justice movements in decades. These are given with no claims that they tell all. And if you have a different list, make sure to write it down.

ONE: What Was Our One Demand?

Contrary to doctrinaire readings, Occupy Wall Street had a clear and compelling demand. In fact, the demand was written into the name of the action itself. Three words. The call was radical because it was directed to the people, and to the movements for justice and peace, and not to the government, and not to the establishment, or to the Congress, or to six liberal pundits who wished to dissect its meaning, a process necessarily preceded by its killing. Not all of the latter institutions should be simplistically seen as “enemy” in all cases, by the way; but if these boulders in our way ever roll toward meaningful change, it will only be because a wave of people power has pushed them along.

Occupy, a verb in the imperative — one that can also serve as a synonym for “disrupt” or “strike” — urged popular action against an object, two nouns identifying the biggest concrete enemy that needs to be disrupted: Wall Street, meaning the dominance of the private capital sector as well as the profit imperative that governs all. The name urged popular movements to acknowledge that reform, or revolution, will not happen only because it is reasonable, because it speaks to real and compelling grievances, or because it is possible and worth the effort. It takes a fight. In fact, it takes many fights, many fighters dancing and suffering together for a long time, before the moment when change suddenly appears, self-evident, inevitable, freshly hegemonic.

TWO: “Who Is In Command Here? I Thought It Was You.”

Despite its self-evident targeting of the financial sector that had produced the 2008 crash through witting fraud and come away from the ruins with bailouts and even greater power, OWS created an open and at-first physical platform for popular grievances at exactly the right time to resonate. If anything it was too late by a couple of years, for it should have started in 2008, but that’s not the fault of the activists. Many groups had, in fact, staged protests in the Financial District in the years after the crash, some even larger in numbers for a day, yet without the same effect. It was through its direct democratic process, later much-maligned, that Occupy achieved a breakthrough at Wall Street that the prior hierarchically organized efforts had not managed. That was also thanks to the initial joy of it, the unleashed creativity, the encouragement for all to participate as equals, to have their say and have it amplified by a hundred others repeating it in unison.

That doesn’t mean “horizontality” is the right way to organize in all situations, or that it is identical with and the only way to be a democracy. The right move at the right time also fostered the subsequent inability to adopt a more sustainable form. The process-anarchism of “no demands, no leaders, no organization” that set off the carnival also served, in part, to break it up once it came under pressure. For one thing, it was a magnet for agents and malefactors of various sorts. More fundamentally, the high promise of manifesting the desired new society within a contained space ringed by a police fortress came under inevitable strains. Was the function of Zuccotti to build movements, or was it supposed to start a commune on a spot where it could least be sustained?

Spoiler alert! The real killer was none of the above!

The American occupation wave of 2011 ended abruptly with a federally-coordinated national police-state crackdown on almost all of the sites simultaneously on 11 November, 2011. Sometimes this, too, is forgotten, even by some Occupy activists when they are engaged (as they are rightly) in self-criticism. Philadelphia and Oakland told different stories, but that is how it went most everywhere else. During the suppression action in New York, the Bloomberg administration made use of a bunkered joint “counterterror” command and surveillance center that included desks not only for the NYPD, state troopers, FBI and other federal, state and city alphabet agencies, but also for the New York Federal Reserve, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Pfizer, among others.

This reality, too, provided an important object lesson that cannot be emphasized enough. We all know how the saying often attributed to Gandhi continues: “Then they attack you.” At some point, they also apply the counter-insurgency manual, no matter how well you stick to non-violent civil disobedience. While I disagree that counter-violence has a hope in hell of defending against the modern state, counter-organization is a must. It is not enough to dissolve your assembly and reassemble elsewhere. I am not sure there is any defense in the American context, other than being public and building a movement of numbers so huge we are immovable.

If the occupations had continued and survived into the spring of 2012, it is impossible to say what might have happened, good or bad. Transformation of the encampments into a truly mass movement for economic revolution is only the rosiest possibility, and there were also darker ones depending on what reactions a sustained disruption of Business As Usual might have engendered. Of course, it all might have just fizzled out in the cold.

What remains in my heart came a few days after the eviction, when I witnessed the largest march of radicals in New York in decades, a street-winding mosaic of causes and cultures in which, at long last, after decades, almost all of the marchers were younger than I. I do not speak for all, but in my observation these 20,000 people with 200-odd organized contingents who snaked through the often dangerously narrow police barricades each had their primary reasons for coming together as groups or for showing up as individuals, but all were united around two shared demands: upholding the freedom of speech and assembly that had been denied to OWS; and addressing the planetary elephant.

And now to the shocking conclusion: What planetary elephant would that be, you ask?

THREE: “And Then You Win?”

OWS highlighted political economy as the central. unifying system of rule. Some may disagree, but this is inherent and obvious in the rhetoric of the 1% and the 99%. This language, too, was nothing new, but it had been contained for decades and breaking it out remains, for now, the most obvious legacy. The occupations achieved a long-needed breakthrough in restoring a popular vocabulary for seeing that there is a ruling class, seeing that it is a class of the owners of the means of production, and seeing that this ownership and the associated power-elite of institutional management is concentrated among the fewest, far fewer than even “1%” would indicate. (The bottom of the 1% is mostly just a bunch of doctors, architects and shopkeepers, by the way. As the dataheads might say, the inequality curve is asymptotic.)

At the same time, OWS never posited a false binary between class struggle and the struggles of subaltern and historically oppressed social groups, as we see in certain forms of liberal identity politics that contribute to divide and rule and are currently much in vogue.

On the contrary, the initial “Declaration of the Occupation of New York” held clearly that “all our grievances are related,” and they are related through a system of political economy commonly called by the name of capitalism. In this struggle, there is no contradiction but common ground and the need for coalition between labor organizing, women’s rights, securing the justice and equality denied to African Americans, providing rights and safe havens for immigrants and refugees, equal protection for all regardless of whom they love and how they identify as individuals, and achieving the human rights of healthy food, health care, housing and equal access to well-funded education for all. Or, inseparable from all of these struggles, protecting the human rights of political speech, press, assembly, protest and petition.

There is no contradiction but common ground between ecological and economic justice for the impoverished and dispossessed, the struggle to end the debt peonage of students — and the majority of the people! — the struggle to protect families against home foreclosures, and the vision of a rational, socialized system of money and finance that directs capital to needs and not to maximizing private return. This change cannot be piecemeal, or it will not be.

Joining all of these causes at the hip is the need to take back and redistribute the power seized and the swag plundered by the criminal billionaires (that would be all of them), to end the periodic pre-programmed crashes and crises of capitalism with their always-escalating human costs and violent consequences, to begin immediately and on a global scale the transformations in energy and production and food needed to secure our life and civilization on this planet, to end the dominance within the state of military spending and the Pentagon system, to end the empire and its perpetual war that seems like mere business to those of us removed from the fronts, but by its own logic one day must end in peace or global annihilation.

Capitalism didn’t invent every problem, it may not be the historic source of everything we call out as racism, sexism, imperialism and hate, it may not have even always been the worst option available to humankind; but today it drives all elements of oppression toward a wet, apocalyptic convergence. It is bereft of solutions, offering only increasingly delusional and simple-minded visions. The latter have many of the remaining “best and brightest” in their grip. Some are techno-utopian; some theocratic; some flat-out fascist. All three of these strains are at work in the current U.S. federal administration.

The time, finally, has come to occupy the relative heaven on earth that our GDPs claim has already arrived. Protecting the sick and the old and the disabled and the young is one and the same struggle as slowing down the treadmill of work, gorge, dispose, pay, return to work, repeat until you die.

But the daily operation of the beast knows only more enclosures and privatizations and pollutions of water and air and land and time and eyeballs and minds, more division and conflict among the many, ever lower wages and pensions for the median household and below with the precarity reaching ever higher, more intense work regimes beating on human bodies forced to offer themselves up as “free labor,” more plunder and burn for the rich caught up in spacebound fantasies, more heatwaves and hurricanes and landslides and wildfires and oceans turned to plastic, constant updates of toys for those who can pay, the loneliness of boxed consumption and a pill for every mood, our minds finally filled with an infinite entertainment program in which Kayfabe Politics has become the Biggest Show Ever and the screen now watches you more than you watch it. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to sing kumbaya, or that there are no real conflicts and contradictions among the 99% that must be acknowledged and not buried in working-class unity rhetoric. But truly understanding the big picture of “all our grievances are related” — through a political economy and its systems of ownership and incentive — defines a common mission, one that long ago became more than a question of socialism or barbarism, but of survival or extinction.

THE END?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/20 ... of-memory/

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: RI Meetup at the Occupy Wall Street Campaign - 9/17

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 20, 2018 1:11 pm

Hm, just discovered my notes from 17 September 2011, posted above. The first part was written joinly with Bruce Dazzling while we took a break from the initial Bowling Green protests. The second in the evening after I got home. I see my differs on some details from my memory (in todays article) but not so that it makes a substantive difference.

Bruce Dazzling » Sat Sep 17, 2011 2:16 pm wrote:
Wombaticus Rex wrote:David Graeber has been doing play-by-play coverage on Les Twitters: http://twitter.com/#!/davidgraeber

and, of course, hash tags: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23OCCUPYWALLST


Riddler and I just listened to Graeber wax on about the end of the empire, etc, in a really detailed, but listenable way.

I have to re-read the Graeber thread now, as I only skimmed it before.

Lots of interesting ideas there.

As of this writing, there are about 600 people at the protest. It's spread along an entire block of downtown, and there are several things going on at once. It's like protestapalooza.

There's a crowd of chanters in front of the Smithsonian at the foot of Bowling Green.

There's a more quiet crowd around a smaller group of speakers (including Graeber), and there's even a yoga circle!

The police presence is fluctuating. We haven't seen any arrests, but it's clear that they're ready to get serious at a moment's notice.

Here's JackRiddler in a guest post (can't log on separately from here).

The Internet can magnify expectations among those most distant from the events here.

Anonymous and Adbusters sent out an Internet-only call to "occupy Wall Street" promising tens of thousands of protesters and providing rules for spontaneous assemblies on different streets as though we're already on the level of the Indignados, but that was never going to happen on that basis alone. Where was the organizing and the presence in the city itself? Who made an effort to get the message out to the unemployed, the poor, workers, antiwar groups, residents, all your populations that have a stake in this?

So for a fact, when you get here, you see a conventional demonstration that was called on short notice by Workers World Party, who have been doing most of the Wall Street actions so far. Their network is at least half of the people who came, and one could not have rationally expected otherwise.

Don't get me wrong: This is a good thing, and I'm for it. But occupying Wall Street or more generally shutting the system down means a lot more persistent organizing beforehand, and starting in more protected space where a crowd can actually gather -- tough one in New York but la policia is just not going to allow the initial critical mass to form here. Such an encampment has to form elsewhere and ultimately get so big that it can shut down downtown. (Getting at Wall Street itself by the way is a tall order, given that it's a shut-down fortress on all sides already, but a million people only need to make the city stand still, the exact spot isn't so important in itself.)

Having an interesting time regardless, lots of energetic young people with a sense of purpose, happy to have briefly met Prof. Graeber (with a bit of fan-swarming perhaps) and heard the speakers, now we'll return to the scene and see how it's developed.

Don't expect the revolution today. Work for it as an inevitability.

/


Then, after I got home, I posted this above:

I have no idea what's happened in the last few hours, however here is my report...

By around 3 or 4 pm the manifestation had moved to the small park (a block's worth) bordered by Liberty and Trininty, at a corner of WTC, below the Black Tower of Finance. With everyone gathered there our numbers were up to about 1000 people. Here was an open mike (at relatively low volume, given the lack of a sound permit) with some worthy speaking. There were two assemblies running, as well as food and at one point a non-denominational worship with these kids in monk outfits. The energy was better, I must say, than the earlier straight-demo feel at Bowling Green. This was a new feeling, a new mode for protests in this city. We can only hope it grows. I'm very glad this is happening, it is infinitely better than nothing. My bones are a touch worn these days, I could not stay past 6. Until then the cops were hands-off but well-deployed for a later move (all-parks curfew is 11 pm, I believe). You couldn't see the surveillance copter from where we stood, but it was loud and a pain!

I have no idea how it's going as we approach 11 pm. It wasn't enough of a mass to occupy Wall St. today, but these kids make me hopeful that this is a beginning. This idea should back off from immediate occupation and try to catch on, to get bigger every weekend, also visit different locations along the way, Union Square, Times Square, Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, until we can really begin to speak of a Tahrir (it also took a long time in Egypt).

What else did I see? Roseanne Barr speaking (quite well, and with a few on the edge doing fan-orgasms). A big truck painted with "Wikileaks" and "Free Bradley Manning." Some great rants from the mike. A real Christian kid (you'll know what I mean if you've followed my posts) convinced the group could and would stay overnight (I don't know!). He had been part of Bloombergville, but this is different because it's aiming to shut down the banksters' business. A LaRouche chorus did a song a capella about the need to restore Glass-Steagal (excellent orchestration, gotta give them that, and lots of youth and energy, they always amaze me that way). A goodly number of Anonymous masks after all, the crowd became less WWP-dominated as the day went on. Fucking Luke Rudkowski striking poses. Committed Ron Paul campaigners. Kids who wanted to go on the mike and explain fractional reserve banking as sin, though you'd learn more from the Wikipedia entry, honestly. A "Socialist Libertarian" from the Aaron Burr Society who said, "Don't end the Fed, nationalize it!" Some relatively unconscious but highly energetic white boys, of the kind I love. A young black woman asking who here goes to college (many) and then asking where the college custodial personell are. Sarcastic signs from what I figure was the Reason Mag contingent ("Capitalism fired everyone except my parents, and they gave me money to stand around here.") Aron Kay the pie man, getting ancient. A few others I'd recognize from other events, one good friend. Many new and young faces. Many more people than I have described here. A whole bunch of surplus peanut butter and bagels, possibly dumpster-dived and I have no problem with that.

Those are my impressions.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby Elvis » Thu Sep 20, 2018 4:19 pm

JackRiddler wrote:Three Lessons of Occupy Wall Street, With a Fair Dose of Memory


Good thought-provoking look back—and forward.

Congrats on another CP byline!
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:00 pm

Nice piece, Riddler. I'm going to use this with my students.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:07 pm

That will be an honor. Thank you.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 52 guests