Direct Action In Action: Occupy Piccolo
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
A group of parents, students, teachers and activists occupied an elementary school in Chicago over the weekend to protest what the city calls a “turnaround,” which would shake up the staff and put the school under the authority of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a private organization opponents say fails to produce results. Parents of students at Piccolo Elementary School in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood voted overwhelmingly against the proposed turnaround measures and developed a counter proposal, but their voices were ignored by City and Chicago Public Schools officials.
About 15 people stayed inside the school, while more than 100 helped to set up tents out front to show solidarity. Despite the cold, a few dozen stayed in shifts throughout the night, and well more than 100 supporters came back the next day to show their solidarity. Despite being denied food and in one person’s case,…
Anonymous Attacks Chris Hedges Online Panel Discussion
Illustration: FFox
Via Infoshop News:
On Wednesday, February 15, we launched several concurrent denial of service attacks against a website hosting an online panel discussion entitled “Occupying Beyond Divisions: Anarchy, Black Blocs and Protests” with Chris Hedges. After initially only creating a few minor disruptions, it was during the second half of the talk that we were finally successful in taking down the entire website, which remained offline further into the night.
We carried out this action because we regard this sort of institutionalized dialogue with the bourgeoisie’s hatemongering journalists about the nature of revolutionary violence to be a worthless diversion for any movement striving for the complete liberation of the oppressed. Having abandoned all pretensions of providing the public with socially responsible criticism, the once distinguished men and women of letters have reduced themselves to hacks: mechanically churning out one article after another in sycophantic defense of their corporate sponsors. While journalists…
The Movement To Teach The Economy What It Is Doing
In an essay penned over a decade ago titled “In Distrust of Movements”, farmer, author, and critic Wendell Berry beautifully summed up the nature of and need for an Occupy movement. Via the irrisistible fleet of bicycles:
One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs to know — and care — what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.
People in movements…often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not…
Student Protests For A New Society In Chile
Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines visits Chile to look at the student uprisings that have been going on for months. Students have taken over and occupied schools and universities — in opposition to the prohibitively expensive, poor-quality education system and politicians who say that their main priority is to provide “certainty for investors”. Does Chile’s extremely privatized, class-segregated education system provide a warning of where the United States could be headed?
The A-Z Of Occupation
Every social movement I have been involved with, or covered as a journalist, develops its own language of liberation, its own alphabet, and its own buzzwords, rhetoric and discourse.
Here are some of the key words I heard/retained in covering the Occupy Wall Street movement. I am sure there are many words, phrases, and slogans I overlooked, never heard or forgot. Send your favorites to: dissector@mediachannel.org.
These are words that power a struggle and speak to the internal processes that attracted so many to take part, as well as the issues that drive it and the obstacles that face it. They are some of the phrases, terms, sayings and expressions that the occupiers use in their conversations to define themselves and discuss their mission.
A. Adbusters, Anarchy, Arrest, Activist, Action, Anger, Angry, Atrium, Assembly (Freedom of,) Arab Spring, Autonomy, Anonymous. All Night, All Week, Austerity, Autumn Awakening.
B. Bloomberg, Billionaire, Banker, Bank Transfer, Bankster,…
D17: Protests Mark The Third Anniversary of OccupyWallStreet Movement Puts On A “Why I Occupy” Show in Times Square
Saturday marked the third month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. It was also Bradley Manning’s Birthday. It was one of those days that confirmed the validity of the chant: “All Day, All Week, Occupy Wall Street”.
Ok, maybe, it wasn’t a whole week but Saturday felt like a week in one day. The plan for the day, as announced, was to gather at Duarte Park at 6th Avenue and Canal Street to attempt a RE-Occupation of vacant land owned by Trinity Church, more of a real estate company than a house of worship.
For a few weeks, the Occupy Movement had been demanding that the church allow the movement to take “sanctuary” on that land. There were earlier protests and even a hunger strike that made page one of the New York Times. Police in riot gear had ousted the occupiers the last time they tried to take over the space a…
Occupy Wukan? or A Chinese Spring
The village of Wukan in Guangdong province has staged a massive protest over local officials seizing land without compensation for development projects. This type of issue has been sticky in China for quite some time, similar to eminent domain in the U.S. but without much recourse or a court to appeal to. Here is a video posted on YouTube, its in Mandarin but the images are worth it:
The Financial Times also has a decent article and video.
Nation’s Worst Mayor, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, Has Disabled Her Facebook Page
Because there is nothing better than a politician who can’t take the heat. Hey internets, why not make her leave Twitter too. Or better yet resign.
Worker-Owners of America, Unite!
Gar Alperovitz chimes in on the re-evolutionary convergence of capitalism and socialism into a hybrid paradigm in a recent article in the NY Times:
The Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.
But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.
Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses…
OccupyWallStreet Economics
Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
J. D. Suss writes on Stories, Essays, Detritus:
Economics 101 teaches that the quantity of a product or service is determined by the demand, which is reflected by its price and is a function of its quality.
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement might be deconstructed using this same analysis:
The number and size of Occupations worldwide can be determined by the demand, reflected by the price we pay for sympathizing and participating—a direct result of discerning the quality of the values it promotes.
The individual making such a discernment wants an assurance of its quality before committing to the OWS Movement. He or she does not want to be bamboozled by some phony color revolution sponsored by a hidden power elite, or a false flag operation carried out by its governmental minions. An individual requires a solid basis upon which to make a reasoned choice that this Movement is in…
OccupyWallStreet Shuts Down 3 West Coast Ports
Via CBS News:
More than 1,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters blocked cargo trucks at some of the West Coast’s busiest ports Monday, forcing terminals in Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Longview, Wash., to halt operations.
While the protests attracted far fewer people than the 10,000 who turned out Nov. 2 to shut down Oakland’s port, organizers declared victory and promised more demonstrations to come.
“The truckers are still here, but there’s nobody here to unload their stuff,” protest organizer Boots Riley said. “We shut down the Port of Oakland for the daytime shift and we’re coming back in the evening. Mission accomplished.”
Organizers called for the “Shutdown Wall Street on the Waterfront” protests, hoping the day of demonstrations would cut into the profits of the corporations that run the docks and send a message that their movement was not over.
Undercover Police Spied On Occupy Los Angeles In Search Of ‘Extremists’
No word on how much fun undercover officers did or didn’t have during their infiltration of Occupy Los Angeles in search of terrorists. Reuters reports:
Undercover police officers infiltrated Occupy LA’s tent city last month to spy on people they suspected of stockpiling human waste and crude weapons for resisting an eventual eviction, police and city government sources said.
Authorities also used security cameras mounted outside City Hall, where the camp was located, and monitored publicly available Internet chatter and video on social-networking sites such as Twitter, sources said.
They insisted that covert surveillance of the camp was aimed not at anti-Wall Street activists exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression but at those they considered anti-government extremists bent on violence. Civil liberties advocates said they were troubled by law enforcement’s infiltration of peaceful demonstrations, although the LAPD’s undercover efforts were not unique.
In the end, nearly 300 Los Angeles demonstrators were arrested the…
Should Pepper Spray Be TIME’s Person of the Year?
Slade Sohmer asks at HyperVocal:
What started out as a joke has become an increasingly real proposition: Even though it’s not a “person,” we must now begin to debate whether Pepper Spray should grace TIME’s most discussed cover.
No person, place or thing has come to define the absurdity of 2011 more than the “food product, essentially,” this suddenly ubiquitous lachrymatory agent/chemical weapon.
Pepper spray, essentially, gave birth to the national media’s recognition of the Occupy Wall Street movement when NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna cowardly pepper-sprayed some unwitting young women. Without his depraved indifference to the freedom to assemble and the freedom of speech, the national media, and by extension the nation, might never have begun to discuss income inequality in earnest.
The pepper-spraying incidents then moved west: The notoriously corrupt Tulsa police department doused some eyes while evicting the Occupy protesters in that city, then Seattle police sprayed 84-year-old Dorli Rainey as she checked out…
The First Major Electoral Victory For The Occupy Wall Street Movement?
…In South Korea, not the United States. The newly elected mayor of Seoul is Park Won Soon, a longtime activist and human rights lawyer who ran on an explicit “Occupy Wall Street platform” of challenging social inequality. Could this happen here as well? Via New Left Project:
Park Won Soon, the newly elected mayor of Seoul, is “perhaps the first politician to win with an Occupy Wall Street platform”.
Park Won Soon ran on a platform of social justice. The previous mayor of Seoul had resigned over the issue of school lunches, Park pushed for the universal provision of lunches to all Seoul school children. He also promised to direct social services to helping the poor and disadvantaged. Korea has become increasingly divided in terms of rich and poor, and Seoul has some of the richest and some of the poorest people in the country. Park pledged to be the mayor of…
Income Disparity Threatens to “Unravel Social Contract”
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
The gulf between the rich and the poor continues to grow exponentially and stands to “unravel the social contract in many countries,” according to a report released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 17 out of 22 countries the OECD measured, income inequality has risen steadily for more than three decades and now sits at the highest levels in recent history. The study found the average income of the richest 10% of a population is nine times that of the poorest 10%. The income gap in “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Demark and Sweden rose from 5 to 1 in the 80’s to 6 to 1 today, and in America, the income gap is a staggering 14 to 1.
Inequality in wages and salaries is the largest contributing factor to the rise in income disparity. Other factors include an increase in part time work…
Who Is Winning The War on Wall Street? Making It Personal Is One Way To Seize The Initiative
Wall Street has become a battleground, defended by a battalion of New York Cops, and under surveillance around the clock. There’s a war under way after months of protests and assaults by the non-violent warriors of Occupy Wall Street.
So, who’s winning?
On the surface, despite major layoffs and economic setbacks, you would have to say that the epicenter of our financial markets is alive, if not well. The exchanges and banks remain open for business, even if their costs for security are up, and their long-term optimism is way down.
Attempts by occupiers and activists to “shut it down” have so far failed, but they have slowed it down and forced its defenders on the defensive. A sharp critique of out of control capitalism that was barely heard in the media before the movement began. It is now everywhere. The Movement has changed the national conversation.
The gluttons of greed are, at least…
The Protests in Washington, DC …
Via Nation of Change:
Roughly 3,000 unemployed workers from around the country are expected in the nation’s capitol next week for four days of protests with labor, religious and social justice groups that say Congress cares more about America’s wealthiest 1 percent than it does the masses of struggling middle-class families.
Piggybacking on the Occupy Wall Street movement, the three-day “Take Back the Capitol” protest will open Monday with construction of a “Peoples Camp” on the National Mall as a base of operations. On Tuesday, protesters will hit Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress about extending federal unemployment benefits. The group walks to K Street on Wednesday to protest the political influence of corporate lobbyists.
And on Thursday, they’ll host a national prayer vigil for the unemployed on Capitol Hill. At the same time, the AFL-CIO will coordinate simultaneous protests at congressional district offices across the country to call for extending unemployment…
Occupy Melbourne Tent Monsters
Occupy Melbourne protesters pull a pleasing prank on local police — in their city, it’s illegal to camp in parks, so they realized that turning tents into clothing would make the perfect cop-baiting outfits:
Everyone Wants to Know: Where Does the Occupy Movement Go From Here?
Regarding the Occupy movement, the question on everybody’s mind seems to be: well, what the fuck now?
Or, more appropriately, “Where Does the Occupy Movement Go From Here?” I began writing an article on precisely this topic, working myself to the bone and pausing only to get dead stinking drunk for a couple weeks. Upon sobering up I started researching again and realized, to my embarrassment, that I had been beaten to the punch by practically every writer in the US (and some abroad) that follows the movement.
No, really! Type that question into a search engine and you’ll see this.
Well, it is an important question — this isn’t Tunisia or Egypt, one cannot count on the amount of popular support combined with near-suicidal rage necessary for a protest to topple a government. The US is a different animal and this is a different struggle. So what to do?
Miles Mogulescu, over at the…
