Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 82_28 » Fri Oct 21, 2011 7:20 pm
by Nordic » Fri Oct 21, 2011 7:29 pm
82_28 wrote:Psst. Hey you. Yeah, you. Wanna see a double bind in the wild? Yeah, yeah, a real live double bind.
by Jeff » Fri Oct 21, 2011 8:55 pm
I know it's scary to be so close to the high altar of such an evil church. And some of you are nervous right now. You're having memories of your childhood. Some of you are so sensitive, that when you stand this close to the biggest bank in America, you feel how it finances war, how it kills children, how it puts GMO crops into the ground....
by operator kos » Fri Oct 21, 2011 9:51 pm
by Project Willow » Fri Oct 21, 2011 10:55 pm
by Project Willow » Fri Oct 21, 2011 11:04 pm
operator kos wrote:Last night (the 20th) Occupy Oakland got an eviction notice from city administrators stating that they would no longer be allowed to camp overnight. Tomorrow (the 22nd) at noon there's going to be a march from the plaza around Lake Merritt, the first official action of Occupy Oakland. I'd share more details but I'm beat.
by eyeno » Sat Oct 22, 2011 1:57 pm
The march came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said on Friday that he's going to start turning the screws on the Occupy Wall Streeters.
The city is planning to take a harder line on demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park - and insist on permits every time they want to march through Lower Manhattan, he said.
"We will start enforcing that more," Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.
The protesters have a Constitutional right to demonstrate and have mostly been "peaceful," the mayor added.
"There's not been any of the kind of craziness you see elsewhere," he said. "You may not like it, but these people have generally obeyed the law.
Still, the month-long occupation has taken a toll on local businesses and residents and the city needs to come up with "ways to let people protest without infringing those who don't want to protest," he said.
"I'm not trying to duck it," Bloomberg said. "But, you know, it's just not so easy. You can't just walk in and say 'Hey, you're out of here'."
"Zuccotti Park is not a public park," he said. "It's a private piece of property. They have to have it open 24/7 to anybody that wants to go in there by their agreement with the city."
Part of the difficulty for the city is that OWS is made of a number of different groups and nobody speaks for them all.
"It's a little bit complicated by there's nobody to work it out with," he said.
"There just is not any one group, one idealogy, one objective, one person to negotiate with."
Read more:http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/10/21/2011-10-21_bloomberg_city_will_be_stricter_on_occupy_wall_st_protesters.html#ixzz1bWLv3E4N
by wordspeak2 » Sat Oct 22, 2011 4:52 pm
by Project Willow » Sat Oct 22, 2011 6:26 pm
wordspeak2 wrote:What are you doing, protesting a Debi Nathan talk or something? Power to you, whatever it is.
by operator kos » Sat Oct 22, 2011 6:47 pm
by justdrew » Sat Oct 22, 2011 7:29 pm
by Nordic » Sat Oct 22, 2011 9:05 pm
eyeno wrote:*snip*"There's not been any of the kind of craziness you see elsewhere," he said. "You may not like it, but these people have generally obeyed the law."
by vanlose kid » Sun Oct 23, 2011 5:52 am
Is the Occupy Movement Anti-Democratic?
The global protests may actually undermine democracy rather than strengthen it.
By Anne Applebaum|Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2011, at 1:48 PM ET
On paper, it isn't easy to reproduce the oddity of the Occupy the London Stock Exchange rally that took place on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral last weekend. It's all very British—people are cooking pots of porridge on the sidewalk—yet reverent homage is being paid to the original Occupy Wall Street protests, too. The London demonstrators have even adopted the "human mic" used in New York's Zucotti Park—the crowd in front repeats whatever the speaker says, so that the crowd in back can hear—despite the fact that megaphones and microphones have not been banned in London. The effect, as can be heard on the Guardian's online video, was something like this:"We need to have a process" (We need to have a process!)
"This meeting was called for a reason!" (This meeting was called for a reason!)
"We know that you are there!" (We know that you are there!)
"And we have solidarity with you" (We have solidarity with you!)
Unintentionally, it sounds a lot like a scene from the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, the one in which Brian, who has been mistaken for the messiah, shouts out at the crowd, "You are all individuals!" The crowd shouts back: "We are all individuals!"
Advertisement
To my American ear, the resemblance is reinforced by the fact that the speakers are British, and thus sound as if they belong in a Monty Python movie anyway. But this isn't unusual: Inevitably, the Occupy movements—also known in Europe as the Indignados, after Spanish protests which started last spring, have taken on different national flavors in different places. The Occupy Tokyo marchers shouted slogans about nuclear power. The Occupy Sydney protests fizzled out because, as a spokesman regretfully admitted, "we don't have the depth of crisis here in Australia." In Rome, where radical politics have historically had a violent fringe, marches have already turned into riots and caused millions of Euros worth of damage.
Of course these international protests do have a few things in common, both with one another and with the anti-globalization movement that preceded them. They are similar in their lack of focus, in their inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions. In New York, marchers chanted, "This is what democracy looks like," but, actually, this isn't what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary, and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul's cathedral or chanting slogans on the Rue St. Martin in Paris.
Yet in one sense, the international Occupy movement's failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians. As I wrote at the time of the first Greek riots a few years ago, nobody much admires powerless leaders. Nobody much sees the point in voting for people who can't stop another wave of economic pain rolling in from Beijing, Brussels, or New York. If one is upset about the austerity program being imposed on one's country by indebted banks on the other side of the world, it doesn't seem logical to complain to the mayor of Seville.
The emergence of an international protest movement with no coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one with no obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy only works within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A "global community" cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.
Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom both the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world. They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation. But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their own borders. Although I still believe in the economic and spiritual benefits of globalization—along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade—globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.
"Global" activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout that "we need to have a process!" Well, they already have a process: It's called the British political system. And if they don't figure out how to use it, they'll simply weaken it further.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/ ... than_.html
UPDATE IV: In Slate, Anne Applebaum actually argues that the Wall Street protests are anti-democratic because of their “refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions.” In other words, it’s undemocratic to protest oligarchic rule; if these protesters truly believed in democracy, they would raise a few million dollars, hire lobbying firms filled with ex-political officials, purchase access to and influence over political leaders, and then use their financial clout to extract the outcomes they want. Instead, they’re attempting to persuade their fellow citizens that we live under oligarchy, that our democratic institutions are corrupted and broken, and that fundamental change is urgent — an activity which, according to Applebaum, will “simply weaken the [political system] further.”
Could someone please explain to her that this is precisely the point? Protesting a political system and attempting to achieve change outside of it is “anti-democratic” only when the political system is a healthy and functioning democracy. Oligarchies and plutocracies don’t qualify.
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/17/what_ar ... singleton/
by 82_28 » Sun Oct 23, 2011 12:27 pm
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - When Occupy Wall Street protesters took over two parks in Portland's soggy downtown, they pitched 300 tents and offered free food, medical care and shelter to anyone. They weren't just building, like so many of their brethren across the nation, a community to protest what they see as corporate greed.
They also created an ideal place for the homeless. Some were already living in the parks, while others were drawn from elsewhere to the encampment's open doors.
Now, protesters from Portland to Los Angeles to Atlanta are trying to distinguish between homeless people who are joining their movement and those who are there for the amenities. When night falls in Portland, for instance, protesters have been dealing with fights, drunken arguments and the display of the occasional knife.
However, many homeless say the protests have helped them speak out against the economic troubles that sent them to the streets in the first place.
"The city wasn't giving us what we needed," said Joseph Gordon, 31, who trekked his way from Cincinnati two months ago and noted that there is nearly always enough food but never enough shelter. "You can't feed your problem away. It took this camp to show people how it really is."
As protesters across the country try to coalescence around an agenda in the coming weeks and months, they are trying to make life work in camps that have become small-scale replicas of the cities in which they were erected. And just like those cities, they are dealing with many of the same problems the local governments have struggled for decades to solve.
Some organizers see the protest and the inclusion of the homeless as an opportunity to demonstrate their political ideals. They see the possibility to show that the homeless are not hopeless and that they, too, can become a functional part of society.
In Portland, the protest has swallowed up two square blocks. There are shaggy haired college kids, do-gooder hippies, and couples with their young children. They came by the dozen, in cars and vans, on bikes and on foot and in rides hitched on the highway. Rain falls daily and dry socks are at a premium.
At the center of the camp are the medical, information, library and wellness tents. Along one side are families, who established a play area for children. On the opposite side is the "A-Camp" - for anarchist. It's where the city's anarchist faction and long-term homeless sleep.
"We're here to spoil each other," said Kat Enyeart, a 25-year-old medic who says she spends half her time tending to the homeless, some of whom are physically and mentally ill. "It's a big, messy, beautiful thing."
As the occupation enters its fourth week, divisions have begun to emerge. Without the ability to enforce laws and with little capacity to deal with disruptive or even violent people, the camp is holding together as it struggles to maintain a sense of order and purpose.
One man recently created a stir when he registered with police as a sex offender living in the park. A man with mental health problems threatened to spread AIDS via a syringe. At night, the park echoes with screaming matches and scuffles over space, blankets, tents or nothing at all.
Last week, a homeless man menaced a crowd of spectators with a pair of scissors. Micaiah Dutt, a four-tour veteran of the Iraq War, and two other former soldiers had no problem tackling and subduing the man. Other members of the protest's volunteer security detail have been punched and threatened with knives.
Dutt said he felt helpless at times and noted that the man he helped subdue could, in theory, press assault charges against him.
"I served four tours in Iraq, and I felt more safe there at times than here," he told a gathering of protest organizers under a drizzly evening sky. "There, I had a weapon and knew the people around me were with me. Here, I don't know."
Dutt said the protests are not just about the radicals and the politicians. "It's about our community taking care of itself because the city, county and federal governments have neglected this population," he said.
In Los Angeles, protesters are dealing with similar issues: Homeless transplants from the city's Skid Row have set up their tents within the larger tent city. No violence has been reported, but protest organizers are attempting to discourage people who are only at the encampment for the amenities.
Some, like Steven Pierieto, said they've fallen on difficult times but are at the protest because they support the movement. They scorn those who come for the sandwiches but never lift a protest sign. Life in camp, Pierieto said, is far better than life on Skid Row.
"I'm very comfortable right here," Pierieto said. "I don't have to smell urine. I don't have to see people smoking crack. I have porta-potties right here. It's peaceful."
In Oakland, Calif., where the camp on the City Hall lawn has become a tourist attraction, organizer Susanne Sarley said getting along for a common cause will be an ongoing challenge. "This is the homeless people's turf," Sarley said. "This area we're occupying is their home. We can't move them. We have to cooperate and respect the community that we're in."
The friction between the homeless and the protesters has not been the case in other cities. In Atlanta, for instance, it has been a benefit. The homeless have helped newbie protesters learn how to put up tents that can withstand wind gusts, maintain peace in close quarters and survive the outdoors.
Billy Jones, 28, provides security at the protests. Jones said he's not just looking for free food.
"Don't have the misconception that most homeless people are always out for a meal," Jones said. "I'm here because there are things I can lend that are helpful to the movement. I can get food anywhere. I don't have to be at Occupy Atlanta to get food."
In Salt Lake City, protesters see working with the homeless as an opportunity to demonstrate their political views. "We can help people get out of homelessness," said organizer Jesse Fruhwirth, 30. "We have already surpassed any effort the state or city has ever made to create a sober, happy space for the homeless."
Brent Jackson, 46, is one of the homeless who has been recruited as a volunteer and is an active member of a planning group. He said the protest's message rings especially true with homeless people. "The homeless are the bottom of the 99 percent," Jackson said, referring to the percent of Americans the protest says it represents.
"We have a lot of disillusioned Americans, but they don't think what happened to us can happen to them," he said. "Except it can."
---
Cristian Salazar in New York, Christina Hoag in Los Angeles, Harry R. Weber in Atlanta, Josh Loftin in Salt Lake City and Terry Collins in Oakland. Calif. contributed to this report.
by Laodicean » Sun Oct 23, 2011 4:04 pm
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 26 guests
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
Site design by Likely Arts based on "Deluxe" by Artodia.