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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 Crisis and The Way Out Of It: What We Can Learn From Occupy Wall Street Posted on October 8, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street movement more effectively addresses the cause of the financial crisis than economists and discussions in the mainstream press. Further, this movement embodies democratic solutions for a way beyond the crisis. This essay focuses on Occupy Wall Street's facilitating of political action from disparate, heterogeneous partisans; increasing of transparency and participation in decision-making; and relying upon both human-scaled and participatory technologies. Through these processes, the Occupy Wall Street micro-community embodies a vision for a pluralistic, direct democratic society and demonstrates it through practice. Three years into an economic recession that rivals the Great Depression, economists are scrambling for explanations of its origins and the steps to take. Congressperson Darrel Issa (R-CA), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, blames unaffordable housing and political kickbacks from the banking industry. He stresses the need to "return to fiscal discipline and prudent, responsible   housing policies"(Issa, 2011, p. 419). Gary B. Gorton of the Yale School of Management traces an added cause to the "parallel" banking system and a banking panic that began in August 2007 (2010, p. 2). Former economist at Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve and current Cato Institute adjunct, Arnold Kling, blames capital regulations and "cognitive failures" of executives in financial institutions. It may not be surprising to the reader that this employee of a libertarian think-tank advocates for deregulation and expects the public to "not be deceived into believing that regulatory foresight can be as keen as regulatory hindsight" (Kling, 2011, p. 517). Ten-year veteran CEO and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and current Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute blames "a failu

Strengthening Occupy for the Future 6 ways to stop the movement from becoming institutional BY HARRIET BARLOWSHARE      Print Harriet Barlow, co-founder and Senior Fellow of the On the Commons, sends a warning that the creeping institutionalization of the Occupy movement- suggested by many well-meaning supporters as a way to strengthen its impact- will undermine what has made these protests so powerful and effective. Photo by Tom Giebel under a Creative Commons license. If we institutionalize Occupy, so that its spirit will succumb to the politics of the possible rather than continuing to create new possibilities, we will have missed an opportunity that history seldom offers. It's worth a long night's conversation over your beverage of choice to explore the history of how becoming institutionalized affected the course of the civil rights and women's movements, among others. Was the radical spirit of each distracted or stifled? Each of those movements came out of the gate with a powerful set of demands. Yet, once organizational dynamics took hold and divisions were confirmed by structure (think SCLC vis-à-vis SNCC, or NOW vis-à-vis NARAL) the chance of maintaining one strong voice committed to radical change diminished. Radicals became captive to a mindset dominated by the imperatives of competitive fundraising and institutions, rather than movement building. There were payrolls to be met, auditors to be satisfied, board members and donors to be placated. To be clear, there is a stage when that evolution is inevitable in order to make the shift from fostering outrage to changing policy. At their best, strong, transparent and accountable formal organizations are essential building blocks for social change. But is this the appropriate role for Occupy? My eloquent colleague, On the Commons Program Director, Alexa Bradley wrote: "The beauty of Occupy is that it is popular, wild, free. I don't mean that in a romantic sense, although

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

#AMERICANAUTUMN What 'diversity of tactics' really means for Occupy Wall Street by Nathan Schneider | October 19, 2011, 12:02 pm Occupy Wall Street marchers watch from the pedestrian walkway as hundreds of their comrades take to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Even as Occupy Wall Street shapes the public conversation about high finance, political corruption, and the distribution of wealth, it has also raised anew questions about how resistance movements in general should operate. I want to consider one of the matters that I've thought about a lot over the past month while watching the occupation and its means of making its presence felt on the streets of New York and in the media. "Diversity of tactics," in the context of political protests, is often treated as essentially a byword for condoning acts of violence. The phrase comes by this honestly; it emerged about a decade ago at the height of the global justice movement, especially between the 1999 demonstrations that shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle and those two years later in Quebec. While all nonviolent movements worth their salt will inevitably rely on a variety of tactics-for instance, Gene Sharp's list of 198 of them-using the word "diversity" was a kind of attempted détente between those committed to staying nonviolent and those who weren't. Consider this characterization by George Lakey: "Diversity of tactics" implies that some protesters may choose to do actions that will be interpreted by the majority of people as "violent," like property destruction, attacks on police vehicles, fighting back if provoked by the police, and so on, while other protesters are operating with clear nonviolent guidelines. Those who extoll the importance of total nonviolent discipline-as Lakey eloquently goes on to do-might be disappointed to learn that Occupy Wall Street has made "diversity of tactics" its official modus operandi. However, the way that the occu

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

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

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":http://www.flickr.com/photos/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 "O

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

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

A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street by GEORGE LAKOFF on OCTOBER 19, 2011 in COMMUNICATION, NEWS, POLITICAL MIND I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It's a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you - the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. I have so far hesitated to offer suggestions. But the movement appears to maturing and entering a critical time when small framing errors could have large negative consequences. So I thought it might be helpful to accept the invitation and start a discussion of how the movement might think about framing itself. About framing: It's normal. Everybody engages in it all the time. Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day. All words in all languages are defined in terms of frame-circuits in the brain. But, ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act. In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says, do what I say because it's wrong! Or because it doesn't matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda. Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is "deserving," defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this

Elinor Ostrom Outlines Best Strategies for Managing the Commons Nobel Prize winner headlines the Minneapolis Festival of the Commons, co-sponsored by On the Commons BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Elinor Ostrom details the importance of commons management at the Minneapolis Festival of the Commons, co-sponsored by On the Commons and Augsburg College (Credit: Augsburg College) Ostrom cited Jane Jacobs- who believed that local people usually know more about what's best for their communities than expertly-trained planners-as an influence on her work. A breakthrough for the commons came in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The first woman awarded this honor, the Indiana University political scientist not only made history but also helped debunk widespread notions that the commons inevitably leads to tragedy. In 50 years of research from Nepal to Kenya to Switzerland to Los Angeles, she has shown that commonly held resources will not be destroyed by overuse if there is a system in place to manage how they are shared. How such systems work around the world was the topic of Ostrom's keynote address at Minneapolis' Festival of the Commons at Augsburg College Oct. 7-co-sponsored by On the Commons, Augsburg College's Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning and The Center for Democracy and Citizenship. Ostrom explained there is no magic formula for commons management. "Government, private or community," she said, "work in some settings and fail in others." The most effective approach to protect commons is what she calls "polycentric systems," which operate "at multiple levels with autonomy at each level." The chief virtue and practical value of this structure is it helps establish rules that "tend to encourage the growth of trust and reciprocity" among people who use and care for a particular commons. This was the focus of her Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, which she opened by stressing a need for "developi

Stage One: Occupy Public Space. What Next?Posted on November 3, 20112Stage One: Occupy Public Space. Occupy Together, an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street, has seen tens of thousands of people in cities all over the world reclaiming public spaces. Stage Two: Occupy Unused Property. Occupy Oakland, perhaps the most radical - and perhaps most effective - of the occupations has moved on to the logical "next stage," and movements everywhere should take note. This is not without precedent in this movement and those that inspired it. Last week in Madrid, a hotel was occupied and opened up to people evicted in foreclosures: The abandoned Hotel Madrid, which was taken over by an unknown number of squatters on October 16 after a mass rally in the capital organized by the 15-M movement, opened its doors on Monday to the first person to take up the group's stated strategy of "freeing up spaces for common use."   Continue reading →Posted on November 3, 20112Stage One: Occupy Public Space. Occupy Together, an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street, has seen tens of thousands of people in cities all over the world reclaiming public spaces. Stage Two: Occupy Unused Property. Occupy Oakland, perhaps the most radical - and perhaps most effective - of the occupations has moved on to the logical "next stage," and movements everywhere should take note. This is not without precedent in this movement and those that inspired it. Last week in Madrid, a hotel was occupied and opened up to people evicted in foreclosures: The abandoned Hotel Madrid, which was taken over by an unknown number of squatters on October 16 after a mass rally in the capital organized by the 15-M movement, opened its doors on Monday to the first person to take up the group's stated strategy of "freeing up spaces for common use."   Continue reading →

The Occupy Movement is Too Big to Be Shut Down "The start of a new era in America", according to Jeffrey Sachs BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Occupy Iowa City before the snow came. (Credit: JSchueller2 under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com) Something is happening here that wind, cold, snow, tear gas and police batons cannot deter. Recent headlines chronicle police busting up Occupy encampments in New York, Los Angeles and Oakland. But the movement has spread so far and wide that it can't be shut down that easily. Two nights ago on a chilly night in Grand Rapids, with the wind howling off of nearby Lake Michigan, I sat down to talk with the young activists of Occupy Grand Rapids, camping out on the plaza of a downtown church. They were comfy with a big tent and piles of donated food with the brick walls of the church offering a great wind shelter. They weren't going anywhere-except to classes the next morning. But they would be back. The week before in Iowa City, I visited the encampment of 27 tents in College Green Park as the wind blew snow sideways to my face. Most of the occupiers were gone, off to college classes or their jobs, debunking right-wing claims that the movement is little more than modern-day bums. Occupy Iowa City is still going. Karen Kubby, who owns a store on Washington Avenue, Iowa City's Main Street, noted that College Green Park was once the site of Chautauqua festivities- a grand American tradition of the early 20th Century where people flocked to see lecturers and performers appearing in tents. Not so different from the Occupy actions, another idealistic public education movement taking place in tents. "Occupy Wall Street and its allied movements around the country are", in the words of Jeffrey D. Sachs (the economic strategist who introduced capitalism to Russia as shock therapy) "most likely the start of a new era in America." Something is happening here that wind, cold, snow, tear gas and police

Occupy the Commons How the values of collaboration and sharing fuel the impact of Occupy protests BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Image from Kevin Hansen's video "Real Democracy and Youth Decisionmaking at Occupy Wall Street" Rather than an isolated band of protesters, the Occupy encampments depend on the continuing support of the broader community to keep going. The #Occupy movements that spread across the nation this fall are taking citizen activism in a new direction-toward the commons. The protests create actual commons, shared public spaces that have become both a symbol and an example of the more cooperative, hopeful future that 99 percent of Americans want to see. That's why these action have been able to shift the political debate by galvanizing public support for a more equitable economy. And rather than an isolated band of protesters, the Occupy encampments depend on the continuing support of the broader community to keep going. And as filmmaker Kevin Hansen shows in this new video, occupiers are also experimenting with new forms of collaborative, commons-based, genuinely democratic decisionmaking based on mutual consensus and inclusiveness. And rather than an isolated band of protesters, the POSTED NOVEMBER 8, 2011 COMMONS STRATEGIESCOMMONS-BASED SOLUTIONSCOMMUNITY LIFECONSENSUS DECISIONMAKINGECONOMY AND MARKETSKEVIN HANSENOCCUPY MOVEMENTSOCCUPY WALL STREETPOLITICS AND GOVERNMENT Disqus Like Dislike Login Add New Comment Post as … Showing 0 comments M Subscribe by email S RSS LEGACY COMMENTS Another process, very similar Submitted by burke00 on Sun, 2011-11-13 19:24. Another process, very similar to that described in the video, is sociocracy, or dynamic governance. Maybe the OWS folks are on to this process, or they've found some closely related consensus-based approach. Of course, being an open and new community, with a political agenda, Occupy groups are at risk of fraudulent and malicious trespassers infiltrating the process

Occupy the Commons How the values of collaboration and sharing fuel the success of Occupy protests BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Image from Kevin Hansen's video "Real Democracy and Youth Decisionmaking at Occupy Wall Street" Rather than an isolated band of protesters, the Occupy encampments depend on the continuing support of the broader community to keep going. The #Occupy movements that spread across the nation this fall are taking citizen activism in a new direction-toward the commons. The protests create actual commons, shared public spaces that have become both a symbol and an example of the more cooperative, hopeful future that 99 percent of Americans want to see. That's why these action have been able to shift the political debate by galvanizing public support for a more equitable economy. And rather than an isolated band of protesters, the Occupy encampments depend on the continuing support of the broader community to keep going. And as filmmaker Kevin Hansen shows in this new video, occupiers are also experimenting with new forms of collaborative, commons-based, genuinely democratic decisionmaking based on mutual consensus and inclusiveness. And rather than an isolated band of protesters, the POSTED NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Charting Hybridised Realities:  Tactical Cartographies for a densified present In the midst of an enquiry into the legacies of Tactical Media - the fusion of art, politics, and media which had been recognised in the middle 1990s as a particularly productive mix for cultural, social and political activism [1], the year 2011 unfolded. The enquiry had started as an extension of the work on the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for tactical media practices worldwide [2], which grew out of the physical archives of the infamous Next 5 Minutes festival series on tactical media (1993 - 2003) housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. After making much of tactical media's history accessible again on-line, our question, as editors of the resource, had been what the current significance of the term and the thinking and practices around it might be? Prior to 2011 this was something emphatically under question. The Next 5 Minutes festival series had been ended with the 2003 edition, following a year that had started on September 11, 2002, convening local activists gatherings named as Tactical Media Labs across six continents. [3] Two questions were at the heart of the fourth and last edition of the Next 5 Minutes: How has the field of media activism diversified since it was first named 'tactical media' in the middle 1990s? And what could be significance and efficacy of tactical media's symbolic interventions in the midst of the semiotic corruption of the media landscape after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? This 'crash of symbols' for obvious reasons took centre stage during this fourth and last edition of the festival. Naomi Klein had famously claimed in her speedy response to the horrific events of 9/11 that the activist lever of symbolic intervention had been contaminated and rendered useless in the face of the overpowering symbolic power of the terrorist attacks and their real-time mediation on a global scale. [4] The

Commentary on the First Statement of the Occupy Wall Street Movement Wed, 10/05/2011 - 07:40 - lindorff by:  Dave Lindorff   This statement was released after a unanimous vote of Occupy Wall Street's general assembly:   As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known. Wall Street and the corporatocracy are behind America's rampant militarism They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage. They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization. They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices. They have continuously sought to strip employees of th

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