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In this Oct. 18, 2011 photo, an Occupy Wall Street protestor speaks into microphone for a live-streaming online interview at the media area in Zuccotti Park in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)   From its inception, the Occupy movement has had a contentious relationship with the mainstream media. On September 17, a few hours into the first day of the occupation, as a couple of hundred people assembled in Zuccotti Park, some demonstrators were already complaining of a "media blackout." I was there, as an enthusiastic participant, yet even I wasn't convinced the event was particularly newsworthy: in May more than 10,000 people had marched through nearby streets airing similar grievances; a month later protesters camped for two weeks outside City Hall as part of a protest called Bloombergville. Yet accusations flew through the Twittersphere. The traditional media are ignoring us! Why aren't we big news? About the Author Astra Taylor Astra Taylor is the director of the documentary films Zizek! and Examined Life. She has written for Monthly Review,... Also by the Author Occupy Wall Street on Your Street (Occupy Wall Street) Banks trying to foreclose on homes are surprisingly vulnerable to direct action-a fact that Occupy Our Homes intends to exploit. Astra Taylor 7 comments The Other Prison Population (Movements, Disability Rights Movement) Disabled people march on Washington to protest policies that keep them out of sight, out of mind. Astra Taylor Related Topics Entertainment Religion Social Issues Technology War Before long, Occupy Wall Street would be. When protesters managed to hold their ground through the weekend, sleeping on hard concrete and eating pizza donated by well-wishers from around the world, reporters began dutifully to file stories. But the charge of a media "blackout" persisted until September 24, when shaky video of several young women being cordoned off and pepper-sprayed point-blank by a white-shirted police officer was up

THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT AND THE NATURE OF COMMUNITY by Akim Reinhardt I'm currently at work on a book about the decline of community in America.  I won't go into much detail here, but the basic premise is that, barring a few possible exceptions, there are no longer any actual communities in the United States.  At least, not the kinds that humans have lived in for thousands of years, which are small enough for everyone to more or less know everyone else, where members have very real mutual obligations and responsibilities to each other, and people are expected to follow rules or face the consequences. One of the fun things about the project has been that people tend to have a strong reaction to my claim that most Americans don't live in real communities anymore.  Typically they either agree knowingly or strongly deny it, and I've been fortunate to have many wonderful conversations as a result.  But for argument's sake, let's just accept the premise for a moment. Because if we do, it can offer some very interesting insights into the nature of the Occupy movement that is currently sweeping across America and indeed much of the world. One of the critiques that has been made of the Occupy movement, sometimes genuinely and thoughtfully but sometimes with mocking enmity, is that it still hasn't put forth a clear set of demands.  It's the notion that this movement doesn't have a strong leadership and/or is unfocused, and because of that it stands more as a generalized complaint than a productive program.  That while it might be cathartic and sympathetic amid the current economic crisis, the Occupy movement doesn't have a plan of attack for actually changing anything. While I disagree with that accusation for the most part, there is an element of truth in it.  However, to the extent that it holds water, the issue isn't that the people involved don't know what they want to do.  Rather, many of them know exactly what they want.  But they ar

Occupy Main Street Frustration about Wall Street greed boils over in Middle America BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Stars mark the spot of Occupation actions on Sept. 28. Now more than 1500 U. Now more than 1500 Occupy Meetups exist. (Credit: By David Shankbone, a photographer offering many vivid images from Occupy Wall Street under Creative Commons licenses at flickr.com) The entire Occupy movement unfolding around the world offers an inkling of how commons-based activism could evolve. It's a chilly day, but the "Occupy" protesters in jackets and scarves are warmed by each show of support from passersby. They chant "This is What Democracy Looks Like" and "We Are the 99 Percent" to the accompaniment of plastic water bottles thumping on trash can lids. The crowd resembles a random sample of all ages and backgrounds, from an 87-year-old lawyer in a Detroit Tigers ballcap (they lost the pennant that evening in the play-offs) to a grade schooler holding up a sign, "What About My American Dream?" This democratic ruckus can be heard a block away, but politeness prevails. No one-not those who look "square", or those who look "scruffy", or the police cruising past-are viewed as the enemy. Everyone who believes in economic fair play, environmental protection and citizen power is welcomed as an ally. To me, this is what a commons movement looks like. Hand-lettered signs on thin poster board or cardboard ripped from the side of a box express people's frustrations and as well as their hopes-"The Revolution Will Not Be Privatized", "Everyone Does Better When Everyone Does Better", "I Can't Afford to Hire a Lobbyist", and "Main Street, Not Wall Street". Actually, this rally takes place on Main Street-in Traverse City, Michigan, a town of 14,500 in northern Michigan. Throughout the late afternoon between 25 and 75 people gather at various points, heralding the call to "Occupy Traverse City" on the sidewalk in

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)   One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do. This puts the media in an awkward and unaccustomed position. They are used to relating with leaders. Since they have not been able to find any, they are forced to look a little deeper, to investigate for themselves and see if they can discover who or what may be behind all this. Since the initial concept and publicity for Occupy Wall Street came from the Canadian group and magazine Adbusters, the following passage from an interview with Adbusters editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn (Salon.com, October 4) has been widely noticed: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Sp

Occupy's Expressive Impulse by Todd GitlinTweetFacebookEmail Matthew Noah Smith has written a most cogent critique of Occupy's current direction-its prime direction, anyway. I agree with almost everything he says, not least his pithy summary: "Occupy is all play but no power." But how did Occupy get here? And what's the alternative? As I show in Occupy Nation, the movement's core has been more expressive than strategic from the beginning. This core, those who clustered around Zuccotti Park and other such hubs, and remain the reliables who make up the so-called Working Groups, are not the majority of the demonstrators who turn out on major occasions (Oct. 5, Oct. 15, Nov. 17, May 1)-far from it-but they are the movement's beating heart. They take the initiative. They make plans. They act. They are not 99 percent of the 99 percent. Much of the initiative that surfaced so volcanically last fall came from a sort of counterculture, an anarchist post-punk core-often of anarcho-syndicalist and Situationist inspiration-that proclaimed itself "horizontalist" and "anti-capitalist" and "revolutionary" and had no qualms about doing so. Its theatrical elements were not incidental; they were central. The General Assemblies, with their "human mic" rituals, were the way in which the movement's core displayed itself to itself. What it created was, as Matthew Smith says, an aesthetic. The statement they made was: We're here, horizontal, improvising. We want to secede, more or less, from the market economy. We abhor the capitalist organization of work. We want to pool our skills. We ourselves, the way we relate to each other, constitute our demand, our agenda, our program. The movement, well aware of its theatrical potential, was superficially visible to outsiders, bystanders, and the media, but those forms of its visibility weren't its central point-the movement's most binding transaction, let's say-and bystanders and mainstrea

Turning Occupation into Lasting Change Can the Occupy movement transform the legal structures that give corporations their power over the rest of us? Document Actions Email Print Feed  Share by Thomas Linzey, Jeff Reifman posted Oct 14, 2011 Photo by Andy Sternberg The history of populist uprisings like Occupy Wall Street isn't a reassuring one. The last one to have any staying power was the populist farmers revolt of the 1800's, and it was aggressively dismantled by everyone from the two major political parties to the banks and railroad corporations of its day. Most revolts are snuffed out well before their efforts impact the political scene-not because their ideas and issues aren't relevant, but because the major institutional players within the system-that-is rapidly attempt to snag the power and energy for their own. In the eyes of the Democratic Party or the national environmental groups, this revolt is merely seen as an opportunity to assimilate newly emerging troops back into those groups' own ineffective organizing. After all, if those institutional groups have actually been effective all of these years, why the need for a revolt at all? Our current system, in which a corporate minority wields a stranglehold over 99 percent of us, won't change just because one bill is introduced into Congress, or promises are made by financial institutions. It's when these revolts become mainstreamed by their "friends" within existing institutions that they lose their steam, and become just one more footnote in an endless stream of footnotes of revolts that have burned out early. The pundits and "experts" are already trying to put this revolt in its place. A recent New York Times editorial declared that it "isn't the job of these protesters to write legislation." That, the editorial argued, was what the national politicians need to do. The Times couldn't be more wrong. If the Occupy movement is to succeed over time, it must follow the

David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst* By gregdowney Posted: October 15, 2011 Wall Street is in the grips of an 'occupation,' and activist and anthropologist, David Graeber, now at Goldsmiths, University of London, is in the centre of the action.  Graeber has been doing a few television and radio interviews of late (check here for his interview on ABC Radio National, Australia), talking about the organization of the Wall Street occupation as well as his new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House). The juxtaposition of Florida Governor Rick Scott's recent comments about anthropology and the fact that Graeber is offering what may be among the most penetrating and accessible analyses of an important dimension of the current global debt crisis is striking. Of course, maybe clear-eyed analysis of our current economic situation, and the ability to point out that other societies do perfectly well with other sorts of economic and political systems, is precisely the sort of academic work that Gov. Rick Scott thinks universities should give up.  After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt.  Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs.  Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain! Graeber is doing exactly what many of us want university-based social and cultural anthropologists to do more of: not just doing outstanding, useful applied work (which is bloody brilliant, of course), but also showing how our distinctive intellectual perspectives - comparative, evolutionary, cross-cultural, critical, even deconstructive (and 'post-modern') - provide academic analyses with important, 'real world' implications. After all, part of the current problem in the global economy is not just that we have bad applications of economic theory-we have b

RETOMANDO LA CALLE, HACIENDO POLÍTICA: OCCUPY WALL STREET (II) 'Occupy Everything': identidades en fuga La recuperación de espacios públicos, los multitudinarios actos de desobediencia civil y resistencia no violenta, los procesos masivos de participación y decisión directa y horizontal, la reconstrucción de lazos, de sociabilidades... son algunos de los rasgos comunes de este nuestro actual movimiento: primavera árabe, 15M y ahora Occupy Wall Street en EE UU. Pero cada área tiene sus especificidades. Para enriquecer el común de este creciente movimiento, intentamos abordarlas abriendo el debate.

 was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a.k.a. "the human microphone"), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech. I love you. And I didn't just say that so that hundreds of you would shout "I love you" back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder. Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: "We found each other." That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can't be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful. If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over. And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it's a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say "No. We will not pay for your crisis." That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began. "Why are they protesting?" ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: "What took you so long?" "We've been wondering when you were going to show up." And most of all: "Welcome." Many people have drawn parallels bet

Transcript: Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop BY SARAHANA » Fake leftist melancholia; obscene Zionist pact. Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop First part of the talk is a theoritical discussion on melancholy, mourning and prohibition, addressing Judith Butler and Freud. It's followed by a discussion on Wall Streets protests, including (1) a dissection of Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post that claims democracy is incompatible with globalization, but also that the Occupy protests (which react to the consequences of globalized economy) are incompatible with democracy (2) the idea of a fake leftist melancholia as it applies to these protests (3) the need to preserve the vacuum the protests create, by refusing to engage in a dialogue with those in power, just yet. Later parts of the unscripted talk discuss the obscene pact of Zionism that allows pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism to co-exist in the same group (like American Christian fundamentalists). Towards the very end, there's a brief mention of the anticipated pact between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood. October 26, 2011 at St. Mark's Bookshop. -- TRANSCRIPT -- I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that - the other Sunday, about 9 days ago - that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, "They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. W

PETER BREGMAN Peter Bregman is a strategic advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. His latest book is 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. To receive an email when he posts, click here. One Thing I've Learned from the Wall Street Protests 1:43 PM Tuesday November 1, 2011  | Comments (57) T During a bleak, cold winter in New York City, a park is occupied by thousands who stand there day and night for weeks. Nobody knows precisely what these occupiers represent, but people are mesmerized by them. Not just the city, but the country and beyond. Articles appear in papers around the world as people react with mixed emotions spanning surprise, admiration, ridicule, frustration, pride, and even fear. I am talking about The Gates: 7,500 bright orange fabric and steel sculptures erected by artists Christo and Jeanne Claude in 2005 that serpentined 23 miles of Central Park's walking paths. I loved The Gates. The exhibit was visually stunning, creating the sensation of a river flowing through the snow-covered landscape. But what I loved most about them - perhaps their greatest impact - was the conversations they sparked. I would guess that no other art exhibit ever got as much popular attention as The Gates. People who would never otherwise think much about it were pondering and discussing the question "What is art?" Sparking Conversations. That, too, is perhaps the greatest impact of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Protestors have been criticized for their lack of clarity. What, precisely, are they protesting? From what I could tell when I was at Zuccotti Park, it was everything from corporate greed to unemployment to tax loopholes to foreclosures to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to specific companies to bank ATM fees to unfair distribution of wealth, and a lot more. But, in this case, lack of clarity might be something to celebrate instead of criticize. Because, the truth is, we all have more questions than ans

This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement Staff of Yes! Magazine 0 Resenhas Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011 - 96 páginas Occupy Wall Street protests have spread around the world, with a common slogan of "We are the 99%." But there is a great deal of confusion and misperception about this movement. This book clarifies the who, what, when, where, why, and how of this movement. It provides profound insight into the movement's power, messages, significance, methods, and impact. The editors of YES! Magazine bring together voices from inside and outside the protests to show how the meaning and impact of this movement are much bigger and more far-reaching than is being reported.The central thesis of this book is "This Changes Everything." The authors show how this movement changes (1) how citizens view themselves, (2) what citizens see is really going on in the world, (3) what is possible in creating a world that works for the many (the "99%") and not just the few (the "1%"), and (4) how citizens can bring about changes they seek in their communities, nations, and the world

May 1, 2012 Pt.1 A Call To Strike To friends who don't live in the US, or others who have not yet been touched by the call for a General Strike on this day, we write this short note, as a kind of update. Some of our earliest discussions in the space began with considerations of what could or could not be considered work; who is included and who is excluded when we talk about labor. And what constitutes labor today in this everywhere and nowhere paradigm of production. Moreover, we have reflected together on what could potentially constitute a political activity today? It is no surprise then that the most intensive global attempts at responses in recent memory come precisely when the living labor of humans is in its most deformed and devalued form, and political space everywhere appears the most foreclosed, by a logic that would prefer to reduce politics to a managerial task of order and administration. A call for a national general strike in the United States has happened perhaps only once, for May 1st, 1886 [to be expanded by historians?]. In our January retreat/seminar, The Crisis of Everything Everywhere, we had a session, "On the General Strike". We asked: How it could be deployed? What are our historical and political conceptions of the strike, how do they relate to our present contexts, and what forms of communication and solidarity are necessary to see the strike we want to see? Who calls for the strike, who strikes, what do we do during the strike, and is there an AFTER the strike? What activities do we expect to precede this call, and what do we expect to follow? Can we have a general strike which is not instrumentalized, but is a political act, a step towards definitive refusal or revolt? The efficacy of this meeting was to be found neither in its valor for organizing, nor the theories we developed together. Its efficacy came in its indiscernibility between intellectual work, cultural work, and political work. To

We Power From Zuccotti Park to Main Street, people's yearnings spark new possibilities for a shift from me to we BY JULIE RISTAU & ALEXA BRADLEYSHARE Print Occupy Wall Street and related actions across the country overturned the conventional wisdom that most Americans passively accept a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. There's genuine surprise among journalists and other experts that thousands of people from all walks of life are camping out in the autumn chill to protest Wall Street greed. And there's shock that their actions are supported by a majority of Americans. A recent Time magazine poll found that 54 percent view the Occupy Wall Street protests favorably (23 percent do not). Compare that to the 27 percent in the same poll who view the Tea Party favorably. Until now, it's been easy to think that no cares what's happening because there were no protests in the streets. But the dynamics of social change are more complicated that that, as shown in this essay by On the Commons Co-director Julie Ristau and Program Director Alexa Bradley. Although written before the Wall Street occupation, it pinpoints the power of our yearnings to set the stage for future action. We live under the market paradigm today, they write, in which "people's social, political, and even personal consciousness is conditioned by their belief in the market as the only efficient system to organize society." That means it takes time for many people to respond to events like the economic crisis, and that when they do it comes out first as feelings, not as policy proposals. But three years after the crash, there's an upsurge in outrage about the richest one percent high-jacking the U.S. economy-and rising interest in the commons as a way to find our way of this mess. - Jay Walljasper Adapted from the On the Commons book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. Young and old together, we will not be moved. (Credit: By "David Shan

Published on Friday, October 28, 2011 by Solutions Needed: The Solutions Generation by Robert Costanza The Arab Spring and now the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are indications of growing unhappiness with the state of the world, especially among the younger generation. As Paul Krugman has pointed out,1 Americans are finally getting angry at the right people-the financial and corporate elites who currently govern the United States and have caused the ongoing crisis. Anger and protests can be effective at bringing the current system into question. But they do little, by themselves, to lead the way to a better future. For that we need a compelling shared vision and a focus on solutions. In 1776, a group of rebels had such a vision: a government of, by, and for the people. Notwithstanding their rather narrow definition of "the people," this shared vision had profound implications and helped solve some fundamental problems of human well-being-by spreading participation in governance to the population and rewarding intelligence, hard work, and innovation. A protestor with Occupy Wall Street in New York City in September 2011. (photo: Francisco Daum) In 1945, the fundamental problems concerned rebuilding the nations devastated by the Great Depression and World War II. The vision that emerged from the baby boom generation involved a focus on built capital, economic production and consumption, full employment, and an expanded middle class. The "great acceleration" that began at that time, largely driven by the consumption of oil and other fossil fuels, had profound implications and helped solve some of the significant challenges of the time. But single-minded pursuit of this vision also created a new set of problems. In 2011, our fundamental problems include the vast gap in incomes within and between nations, the ecological limits we are exceeding or approaching (climate change, biodiversity loss, etc.), the peaking of global oil production, the deteriorat

Live From Wall Street A dispatch from Zuccotti Park BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Willie Osterwell, a punk singer from Brooklyn, reported from the frontlines in Barcelona about the free-form protest camps erupting all over Spain this summer for the Shareable.net. Now with a similar action happening close to home, Osterwell offers a vivid portrait on Shareable what's happening with the Wall Street occupation. He was arrested Saturday on the Brooklyn Bridge, so look for his next report. (Credit: David Shankbone under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com) (Credit: David Shankbone under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com; hukdunshur under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com) A new day on Wall Street. With every day that we hold the square, we chip away at our fear, at our confusion, at our alienation. We improvise new ways of living, new relations, new forms of solidarity. Another general assembly is beginning here in Zuccotti Park, a small park at the corner of Broadway and Liberty in Manhattan's financial district, two blocks from the World Trade Center site, three blocks from Wall Street. Zucotti, renamed "Liberty Plaza" by its occupiers [which was actually its original name], has been held as a home base by protesters since September 17. This, in itself, is a kind of achievment. In the General Assemblies leading up to the first day of protest that culminated in the occupation, organizers hoped that the occupation would last days, weeks, perhaps even months, but no one could guarantee it would make it six hours. Yet hundreds are here, on day ten, holding another open discussion of tactics, infrastructure and politics. Even a week ago this wasn't a foregone conclusion. Inspired by the methods of Arab Spring, and the protest movements in Israel, Greece and Spain, protesters from New York City and the rest of the country (I spoke with one man who had come all the way from Alaska) have built an encampment of sorts-so far t

Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: "We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare" By Sarah Shin / 10 October 2011 Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the original text of his speech - not a transcript, as originally described in error. Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap-the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work-we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions-questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work. So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main street, not Wall street," but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for