#OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

[Project Willow]

^^Yeah, I'm finding some of the reactions both nonsensical and enlightening.

About a dozen arrests in Seatown so far, including one under-aged girl. FB page is awash in people ready to help. It's just a lovely thing to witness, the aid givers, not the arrests.

[eyeno]

Apparently, the Los Angeles City Council just passed a resolution in support of the movement! This could be huge, people!

If this sort of action catches on it will indeed add some huge to the movement.

[Project Willow]

Seattle live feed:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/igxliam

[eyeno]

Deepak Chopra makes an appearance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIw8c6vm ... r_embedded

[MacCruiskeen]

Why are billionaires not abhorred like rapists?

[Aurataur]

Apparently, the Los Angeles City Council just passed a resolution in support of the movement! This could be huge, people!

If this sort of action catches on it will indeed add some huge to the movement.

As a clarification, the City Council has not yet passed the resolution supporting the Occupy Los Angeles movement. The resolution was introduced today and will be voted on Tuesday. Most likely, they will pass it!

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011 ... lution.php

Also, the LAPD seems to have taken a hands-off approach to the movement. During my time there this weekend, I saw very few police, even though we were camped directly across the street from LAPD Headquarters. Perhaps they don't want a PR nightmare like the NYPD has brewing on Wall Street.

I'm going to try to head back there this evening with supplies. They are in desperate need of ponchos, tents, tarps, socks, umbrellas, food, and more. I'll be heading down to the local thrift store to stock up on as much as I can.

Another big rally is planned for this Saturday at 11am. If you're reading this, and in Southern California, come out and show your support! We need all the numbers we can get.

Seriously people, this movement is going to reach the tipping point.

I can't remember the last time I was this excited. We are the vanguard of an incredible moment in history!

[MacCruiskeen]

Good luck to you, Aurataur, and to all of you, from somnolent Germany.

[vanlose kid]

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninsca ... at_r_1.php





http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/vi ... -occupying

*

[MacCruiskeen]

What does "OCCUPY WALL STREET" actually mean? You occupy it, and then what?

[Elvis]

At westlake in Seattle.

Things are ugly. The police are causing a massive disturbance; I counted a dozen parked patrol cars taking up two lanes of traffic on this busy city street. They're still arresting people, not sure for what now that the tents are gone.

As I stood at the south end of the park, three mounted police trotted up to the periphery and formed a line, looking menacing and eager for some "action." they soon had it, as another man was dragged away, yelling "I'LL WALK, OKAY?!....Hey! Take it easy!..." and then screaming in pain as grinning cops clutched his arms tighter behind him.

At the paddy wagon, a couple cops are stanced defensivelyy, as if someone might try to rush them or something.

I chatted with this building's security guards as they stood on the front steps watching the spectacle. One told me, with plenty of amused disdain, "The ones cooperating with the police are already gone. The ones left just want another WTO [i.e. 'Battle in Seattle']." This is a common misconception, as we all know---that the protesters want a violent confrontation.

I study the people out there standing around the periphery. Lots of building security types standing out in front of their places looking stern.

Lots of ENG crews all day. A FOX Noise truck is here, with the telescoping camera boom truck. PBS's Frontline's truck boom goes higher.

More later, as I venture back out early evening. I'm going over there as much as I can, but I have to mostly be here to get this store ready so we can sell a bunch of Chinese-made crap that will end up in landfills in a year or two. sigh...it's a living.

MacCruiskeen---damn good question there.



edited for typos

[nathan28]

Thanks to Aurataur and to practically everyone else in this thread.

And to hell with all the chin-rubbing, nose-picking, ball-scratching, Theory-emitting, nervously smartypants, would-be-authoritarian, pseudo-leftist MANAGERIAL* arseholes who are finding (or rather desperately inventing) reasons to disdain and undermine the very thing they affect to desire: grass-roots action, working-class solidarity and sustained physical movement for real social change.

*the root of all evil. (And Lenin - fuck you.)

Mac, maybe in educated Europe this is less of an invocation of the status quo, or your second-wave feminism (where any degree of specialization, or even the development of proclivity, was often seen as an evil) speaking. Anarchist anti-intellectualism is nothing if not petty bourgeois, especially in the United States. I can't help but think of what some guy, I can't remember who, said about people claiming to not have a theory usually being in the grip of a long-dead thinker. If "[t]heory" is so evil, why are teach-ins scheduled every day there and why have I seen so many nervous-smarty-pants Ph.D.s photographed? I can't help but think that as a strategic effort the OWS might want to attract people capable of thinking and using words pointedly. Having an editor isn't an effort to enact "would-be-authoritarian" tendencies, it's a way to produce a better thing, to develop human potencies and powers, in a social way. I am not on the ground there and cannot be short of a sudden injection of cash and a ghostwriter, and I know enough about how these things to know that you don't know what's going on if you aren't there, so I can't speak to the degree to which this is going on, but in a lot of the anti-anti-anti-anti-reactions like yours it's apparent that there's a totally-unfounded claim to understand what is.

[Project Willow]

Long time no see Nathan, hope you are well.

Elvis, I'll see you shortly.

[Plutonia]

Good luck to you, Aurataur, and to all of you, from somnolent Germany.

#Occupy Germany:

OccupyBerlin OccupyBerlin
#OCCUPYBERLIN und Oktober 15 #O15! SEI DABEI! Organisiere Dich hier: map.15october.net/reports/view/45 occupyberlin.de.vu
7 hours ago

OccupyFrankfurt OCCUPY TOGETHER
Wichtige Information please RT : 15.10.2011 12:00 an der Hauptwache Wearethe99% #OccupyFrankfurt
5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

http://15october.net/de/

http://www.attac.de/aktuell/eurokrise/e ... ktion/?L=2

https://www.facebook.com/Occupy.Germany

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158239247594320

Take the Square Germany:

Berlin

15M Berlin.
Web: http://www.15mberlin.net
E-mail: contact@democraciarealyaberlin.com
Mail list: http://groups.google.com/group/democrac ... -ya-berlin
Social Network: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/529592/15m-berlin/ http://www.facebook.com/15MBerlin

Echte Demokratie Jetz! aCAMPada Berlin.
Web: http://acampadaberlin.blogspot.com/
Social Network: http://www.facebook.com/groups/aCAMPada/
Twitter: @acampadaberlin

Real Democracy Now – Berlin GR.
Web: https://realdemocracynowberlingr.wordpress.com/

International Group Berlin.
Social Network: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/173039/interna ... up-berlin/ http://www.facebook.com/groups/200774709980798/
Mailing list: international-group-berlin@lists.riseup.net

North Rhine-Westphalia

Echte Demokratie Jetzt! NRW
Web: http://www.echte-demokratie-jetzt-nrw.de
E-mail: rene@echte-demokratie-jetzt-nrw.de
Social network: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Echte-Dem ... 5698117312
Ruhrpott: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Echte-Dem ... 0114976736
Wuppertal: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Echte-Dem ... 8489989378
Twitter: @acampadaruhr and @acampadanrw
Skype: none

And more http://takethesquare.net/squares-around-the-world/





I dunno, there might be more out there Mac. It seems that you may not be alone in Deutschland.

[Project Willow]

Wall Street Media
By Janet Thomas
October 5, 2011

The supercilious crap-mongers of mainstream media are once again perpetrating their peculiar sound-byte stupidity onto the rest of us as they “report” the news of the activists on Wall Street. As usual, the media is minimizing and ridiculing the demonstrators and ignoring the issues—which are complex, profound, deeply rooted in the past and totally threatening to the future. It is a very big story and the mainstream media doesn’t do very big stories. They do personality first of all, and they perform for one another most of all. The idea that journalism is responsible to the depths of issues is inconvenient. So is the commitment to a thoughtful, mature, and discerning public. Mainstream media is addicted to its own disposable cleverness. It needs to get into a recovery program.

This is a long-standing opinion on my part. But it is founded on facts. In 1999, I was on the streets of WTO Seattle and a living, breathing, thinking witness to the immense issues represented. My experience became a book: “The Battle in Seattle—The Story Behind and Beyond the WTO Demonstrations,” but more important was the way it changed my life. I lost my global virginity; I grew up to the immensity of the abuse being perpetrated on the planet and its people by a sociopathic corporate culture that has all the rights of personhood and none of the responsibilities. The streets and living rooms and classrooms and stadiums of WTO Seattle were full of scholarly dialogue, impassioned human rights discussions, economic analysis, environmental concern, and the voices of educators, airline pilots, farmers, steelworkers, students, religious leaders, concerned parents and visionary artists and writers from all over the world. And every one of them had a story, a reason for being in Seattle that went far beyond the label of “demonstrator” or “activist.” They were there representing their lives, the lives of their loved ones and the life of humanity. They were there for the big reasons. The media represented it all with images of one burning garbage can and a couple of broken windows—over and over ad nauseum until they literally created an obscenity of perception and a travesty of the truth. This is what they do best—through short-sighted, self-serving, gratuitous and sensation-greedy “reporting,” they create a false, shallow and callow version of reality that is so far from the truth that it becomes its own lie. It stinks of irresponsibility.

And here they are at it again on the streets of New York and all the other cities in which ordinary folks with extraordinary dreams, commitments, values and vision are showing up to speak up for nothing short of a global future. The demonstrators aren’t yearning for fame and fortune, for their ten minutes of tabloid attention; they are there because the globalized corporate system is taking down the planet. They want to shake the shackles of greed that are—in ways large and small—depriving humanity of its humanness and the earth of its life. They are there for moral reasons. For reasons of principle and human dignity, for the well-being of the future. They are sick and tired of watching self-serving politicians, CEO’s, stock market minions and media morons twist the life out of life.

Personally, I am ashamed at the ways in which my generation, the “baby-boomers,” has been co-opted by this media version of “reality.” We should all get off our self-serving, self-satisfied and too-toned butts and get out on the streets with those who give a damn. These are issues of life and death, of extinction and survival, of meaning and meaninglessness. It’s time to give this media clap-trap circus a mirror and send them off to media masturbation purgatory where they can entertain each other and get out of the way so the rest of the population can get down to the business of healing the wounds and the wounded and preserving the heart and soul of what it means to be alive on this planet.

If the mainstream media had paid attention to WTO Seattle , we might not be in the global mess that we are in now. Back then, it was all about jobs, loss of benefits and wages, destruction of the environment, unfair and disreputable banking practices, global economic and social justice and corporate disease. It still is. If Thomas Friedman and his ilk had done some thoughtful reporting about WTO Seattle, who knows where we might be? At the time, Friedman wrote a piece titled “Senseless in Seattle” in which he wrote of “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix…” How ironic that few years later he wrote, “The Earth is Flat.” In 1999, Friedman wrote his careless WTO piece as a way of getting his own “fix.” That’s what the media does. They gotta get their fix, no matter what the price to the rest of the planet and its inhabitants. As I said, time to check in to a recovery program. Get a grip. Get a life. Get responsible.

[wintler2]

Mike Moore vs. CNN:
..CNN: "She wants you to go on live tomorrow night with her."

Michael Moore: "No. I think she should come down here and talk to the people here. I am not the voice of this thing. I am a citizen and a participant in this. I am an equal with everyone here and she should come down here and talk individually to different people and hear their stories -- hear their stories about what it's like to live with no health insurance. She has health insurance. She has a secure job. She's not facing foreclosure. It's very easy for her to sit there in Columbus Circle and come after innocent people who are struggling to survive. So she should come down here ... and spend some time and meet with people and talk to them. But I'm not the spokesperson for this movement. There are millions of spokespeople for this movement. They live in every neighborhood in America. ... And I am just one voice at this meeting and I'm proud to be one voice."

Beautifully played by Moore, if everybody can stick to that line they'll avoid a heap of MSM smearing and give the cointel creeps migraines. The Occupy mobs can expect increasing infiltration & co-option by heirarchical institutions offering resources and pulpits, imho they should accept support but resist any quid pro quo, stay anarchic and focus on the events and experiences of occupying rather than some please-sir list of demands.