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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

How Oversocialization and Feelings of Inferiority Cripple Bay Area Occupations Occupy Reality by MARC SALOMON The Bay Area has always been the outlier in American politics, often for the better and occasionally for the worse.  In the case of Occupy, the Bay Area's unique situation highlights the challenges facing the movement from both its relative "left" and "right" flanks.  The downside of this Bay Area specialness has been exposed like our earthquake fault lines after two actions, one in San Francisco on January 20th (J20) and another in Oakland on January 28 (J28). San Andreas fault on the right are the institutional actors, nonprofit corporation centered advocacy groups and organized labor with varying degrees of connection to the state, the Democrat Party and its corporate sponsors.   The Hayward fault on the left includes the dwindling ranks of sectarian leftists and the more predominant militant blacque bloque anarchoids, which exist outside of the constellation of power affiliated with the Democrat Party.  The attributes of labor and the nonprofit corporations are clear, but this anarchist would hesitate to ascribe the term 'anarchists' to the militants in Oakland. Despite of decades of activism and nominal public support for goals, professional activists have failed connect with and mobilize sufficient numbers of people to create critical mass and raise political power, although those years were not entirely fruitless in building some base capacity from which Occupy benefits now.   Power, for its part, succeeded in coopting activists into the nonprofit corporate sector beginning in earnest during the early years of Clintonia. Organized labor, long an ugly stepchild of the Democrat coalition, has been in slow free fall for the past three decades but less so in the Bay Area public sector.  Since labor abandoned unorganized workers, it has forfeited its relevance to most of the 99% and is paying the political price now.  The

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

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

#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

Welcome to the Oakland General Strike (Wednesday, November 2)   [NOTE: This invitation was addressed primarily to friends and contacts in the San Francisco Bay Area (approx. 1000 people and groups), but I also sent it to some 3000 other friends and contacts across the country and around the world, as well as posting it at this website, because I believe that many other people will be interested in hearing about what has been going on here. -KK]   Dear Bay Area Friends, As most of you probably know, the police raid and destruction of the Occupy Oakland encampments last Tuesday, followed by the notorious police violence against protesters later the same day, provoked such an immense expression of outrage from thousands of people in the Bay Area and around the world that the Oakland city government was thrown completely on the defensive. The next day police were scarcely to be seen. The fence surrounding Frank Ogawa Plaza was still in place, but the occupiers calmly took it down and began reoccupying the same spot. That evening, by a vote of 1484 to 46 (with 77 abstentions), the general assembly decided to call for a General Strike in Oakland on Wednesday, November 2. You can see their declaration, a press conference, and other information at www.occupyoakland.org. [Note that that website is continually updated. To find the posts relevant to this text, you will need to scroll back to the entries for the period leading up to November 2. Numerous videos from the day of the strike can be found here.] The fact that they reoccupied the encampment less than 48 hours after it had been demolished is astonishing enough. But that they immediately shifted to the offensive with such a marvelously audacious venture leaves me almost speechless with admiration. I hope that their appeal meets with correspondingly large-minded and supportive responses by people in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. Occupiers in many other cities have already been venturing outside their

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

Occupy Wall Streeters are right about skewed economic rewards in the United States By Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel | October 26, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street movement has captured much the nation's attention with a clear message: A U.S. economy driven by the interests of business and the wealthy has generated increasingly unequal economic outcomes where the top 1 percent did exceptionally well but the vast majority did not do well at all. According to the data, they're fundamentally right. This paper presents 12 figures that demonstrate how skewed economic rewards (in income, wages, capital income, and wealth) have become in the United States. These figures, most of which cover 1979 through 2007 (prior to the recession) generally break out trends for the top 1 percent, the next richest 9 percent, and then the bottom 90 percent of households or earners. While income growth at the very top-the richest 1 percent and above-has been truly staggering, incomes at roughly the 90th percentile and above (the richest 10 percent) have generally at least matched the rate of economy-wide productivity. It is below the 90th percentile where one really sees the potential fruits of economic growth (as measured by economy-wide productivity) failing to reach American households. An economy that fails to cut in 90 percent of American households on a fair share of economic growth is one that needs serious reform. As the figures show: The top 1 percent of households have secured a very large share of all of the gains in income-59.9 percent of the gains from 1979-2007, while the top 0.1 percent seized an even more disproportionate share-36 percent. In comparison, only 8.6 percent of income gains have gone to the bottom 90 percent. The patterns are similar for wages and capital income. As they have accrued a large share of income gains, the incomes of the top 1 percent of households have pulled far away from the incomes of typical Americans. In 2007, average annual i

Students Launch 'Occupy the Facts' By JOSE A. DELREAL, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER Published: Monday, November 07, 2011 6 16 COMMENT EMAIL PRINT About 20 students Sunday night launched "Occupy the Facts," a nascent student organization hoping to combat charges that protestors in the Occupy movement are uninformed about public policy issues. The organization seeks to conduct important policy research and make their findings accessible to Occupy protesters and the public. The group will spend the next three weeks developing information packages. "I want to see if we [can] create something that could research public policy surrounding the occupiers' demands," said Peter D. Davis '12, one of the project facilitators. "We want to be able to create fact sheets." One of the projects' goals is to eventually transform their policy findings into various formats, including educational YouTube videos and info-graphics. Davis said that the inspiration for "Occupy the Facts" is the potential for Occupy to affect social change. "I see the Occupy movement as a platform that might just have a chance at making the kind of change that a lot of people in our generation have been dreaming of," Davis said. Talia B. Lavin '12, another active student participant, protested the criticism levied against the movement. "I've noticed this persistent criticism that the demands of the movement aren't specific enough," Talia B. Lavin '12 said. "The goal is to reach out to people who have heard a lot about Occupy but aren't sure what Occupy is trying to achieve." Davis believes the charges that Occupy participants are uninformed are distracting from the movement's potential. "This group is calling those peoples' bluffs," Davis said. Davis met with a small group last week to determine how they could help the Occupy movement. They came to the conclusion that they could leverage Harvard's research resources to make policy information more acces

Occupy the Vote A new student initiative, "Occupy the Facts," should also emphasize political engagement By THE CRIMSON STAFF Published: Thursday, November 10, 2011 0 8 COMMENT EMAIL PRINT In Nov. 2010, days before the Republicans' midterm triumph, at the crest of the Tea Party wave, The Guardian's Gary Lounge wrote that the movement "…does not exist. It has no members, leaders, office bearers, headquarters, policies, participatory structures, budget or representatives." One year later, the Tea Party' fortunes have ebbed somewhat, and it has been largely supplanted by Occupy Wall Street as the epicenter of American populism. And yet, Lounge's words are perhaps even more pertinent now than they were then, as they also aptly encapsulate the gravest deficiencies of this latest protest movement. Like its rightwing predecessor, Occupy Wall Street has been criticized-by The Crimson, no less-for its permeating incoherence and debilitating disorganization. Enter "Occupy the Facts," a new, Harvard-grown student group dedicated to providing an intellectual foundation and policy platform for the headless movement. "Occupy the Facts" appears to be a direct response to these allegations of incoherence; its goal, according to co-founder Peter D. Davis '12, "is calling those peoples' bluffs." His colleague, Talia B. Lavin '12, likewise said that "I've noticed this persistent criticism that the demands of the movement aren't specific enough. The goal is to reach out to people who have heard a lot about Occupy but aren't sure what Occupy is trying to achieve." Our democracy is ill-served by blind, amorphous rage, and so we are heartened to see some effort to channel this populist energy into constructive issue advocacy. We are living today with the consequences of the Tea Party's failure to provide intelligible solutions to our most pressing national problems, and the effort to better inform and orient this new upsurge of popu

From Protest to Disruption Frances Fox Piven Frances Fox Piven has spent decades writing about and participating in social movements in the United States. She was gracious enough to sit down for an interview with Chris Maisano, a writer and activist in the New York local of Democratic Socialists of America, where this interview first appeared. They discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests, the complex interplay between social movements and electoral politics, and the future of the occupation movement. Chris Maisano [CM]: What have you thought of the Occupy Wall Street protests so far? Frances Fox Piven [FFP]: I think they've been pretty terrific. And I really am hopeful that it's the beginning of a new period of social protest in this country. I think a lot about the protest is absolutely on target, it's so smart. It was so smart to pick Wall Street because Wall Street looms so large not only in the reality of inequality and recession policy, but it looms so large in the minds of people now because everybody knows that they're stealing the country blind. So they picked the right place, they had somehow - I don't know how self-consciously, maybe self-consciously - absorbed a kind of lesson from Tahrir Square of staying there, because usually we have demonstrations and marches and parades and things, and they're over in a nanosecond. And all that the authorities have to do is wait, because they're gonna be over. So what they tried to do is take this classical form of the mass rally - they didn't do it alone, obviously it happened in Egypt too - and connected it with the disruptive potential of mass action because they said 'we're staying.' And 'we're staying' is more troublesome. Not only that, 'we're staying' makes it possible for them to organize and mobilize throughout the course of the action, which is what they do. So that part of it was pretty, pretty smart. Frances Fox Piven interveiwed by Democracy Now! (October 4, 2011). They are sm

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

Occupy Wall Street: Beyond the Rhetoric Matthew Flisfeder One of the distinguishing features of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is its apparent lack of central leadership. Not only does the movement seem leaderless; it does not appear to be organized around any clearly defined 'demands.' This has been perceived as something quite positive for participants and supporters of the movement, while being the primary point of criticism from opponents, particularly the mainstream media. Clearly, OWS stands against the unfair balance of wealth distribution in the United States (and around the world, for that matter), the unfair neoliberal politics that have swept the globe over the last four decades, corporate greed (especially in the financial sector), and various forms of systemic violence resulting from structural inequalities built into the capitalist system of exploitation. But what media pundits are looking for is something that they can represent: something, that is, with a timeline, that defines when the protestors will be 'satisfied.' This makes OWS qualitatively different from the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings that took the world stage last winter, popularly touted as the 'Arab Spring.' These groups had clearly defined 'demands': first and foremost was the overthrow of their political leaders. OWS is distinguished from the Arab Spring to the extent that its definitive aims and goals have yet to be defined. Activists meet October 7th in Toronto, in a pre-October 15 General Assembly. The movement has gone beyond the various '-isms,' labels that media pundits and the corporate elite find easy to dismiss: 'communism,' 'socialism,' 'anarchism,' 'Leftism,' etc. Commentators outside the United States have started to take notice. CBC business personality, Kevin O'Leary made a mockery of himself last week during a live interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, by referring to him as a "Left-wi

Occupy Protest Shuts Down Harvard Yard By JOSE A. DELREAL Published: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 4 158 COMMENT EMAIL PRINT DANIEL M. LYNCH GSAS student Marissa M. Egertsrom teaches the basics of "General Assemblies" while facilitating a conversation Wednesday night on the Law School campus. UPDATED 4:34 a.m. 11/10/11 A tent city was hastily constructed in front of University Hall Wednesday night during a tense dialogue between "Occupy Harvard" protesters and Dean of Student Life Suzy M. Nelson. The occupation followed a protest on campus involving more than roughly 350 participants sympathetic to the Occupy movement, during which Harvard Yard was shut down by Harvard University Police officers and Securitas guards. The protest was intended to convey disapproval of the University's perceived complicity in growing income inequality across the country. Participants included students, staff, faculty, and community members. Around 7 p.m., protesters were met with increased security that would prevent Boston residents who were not Harvard affiliates from entering the Yard. Multimedia GALLERY OCCUPY HARVARD BEGINS PHOTO "I think it's absurd. Do we really need eight guards per gate?" said Nicandro G. L. Iannacci '13, who has participated in other Occupy events. "The idea that the only people allowed here to have this conversation are members of the Harvard community, specifically, is wrong. Why not welcome more people in?" In response to the limited access to the Yard, demonstrators relocated to the Harvard Law School campus. As they marched past freshman dorms, they chanted, "Out of your rooms and into the Yard," rallying the students in the dorms to join. After a general assembly, protesters left the Law School campus and tried to re-enter the Yard to set up a tent city, but Securitas guards prevented demonstrators from entering by locking the gates. In a tense exchange, students tried to push their way into the Yard-some holding up

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

 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

Diversity of Tactics and Democracy By George Lakey Clamor magazine March-April02 Last fall while working with activists in Europe I had the chance to hang out more with young people from Otpor, the resistance movement that brought down dictator Slobadan Milosevic in Serbia in October00. These Otpor activists were ages 19-23, typical ages in the movement that catalyzed the downfall of Milosevic (pronounced "Milosevitch"). They taught people twice their age some powerful lessons about how to overthrow a dictatorship, including how to keep going despite years of arrests and beatings. Some of the young people who started Otpor in 1999 had already been doing direct action in 1996 in the student pro-democracy movement. There they learned a hard fact: as the demonstrations grew the government paid infiltrators to pretend to be activists and do property destruction and street fighting. The government's tactic was brilliant because it scared away the potentially hundreds of thousands who were getting ready to join the movement, and gave back to government the moral high ground. Refusing to be discouraged, those who made a fresh start in 1999 made a critical decision: in order to win, Otpor would establish a policy of nonviolence. The stakes were too high, they reasoned, to have the luxury of everyone doing their thing. Milosovic was desperate, and surrounded with thugs who had no scruples. Only a policy of nonviolence could avoid the mistakes of 1996. I was impressed by the fast learning curve. Most movements do have a learning curve that enables them to benefit from their experience, but Otpor confronted a very hard lesson and quickly changed their policy of tolerance for diversity of tactics. Maybe their youth gave them an advantage in flexibility. Was Milosevic's tactic unusual? So many powerholders have used the tactic of what the French call "agents provocateur" that it is virtually predictable. Not only the "bad guy" authoritarians like Milosevic do it; liber

Thomas Sowell Delivers Inconvenient Truths By Heather Wilhelm Economic Facts and Fallacies By Thomas Sowell Perseus Publishing, December 2007 -------------------------------------------- Want to be a real hit at a cocktail party? Try bringing up politics, preferably with someone who disagrees with you--and if they're an emotional sort, even better. Proceed to delve into controversial issues of the day (the politics of race and gender, for instance) and, as you do, back up each point with lucid economic facts. After thorough research and a calm, learned presentation, odds are that you'll make a real impact. An impact, that is, in the form of gigantic tufts of steam shooting out of your audience's ears. Thomas Sowell's new book, "Economic Facts and Fallacies," is much like that cocktail party guest: cool, logical, informative, insightful, and, for some sides of the political aisle, a major irritant to be blocked out of the mind. Indeed, Sowell is the first to admit that facts, though the subject of his book, aren't always enough when it comes to winning the debate. He quotes Henry Rosovsky, a Harvard economist: "Never underestimate the difficulty," the professor once said, "of changing false beliefs by facts." Sowell's book dismantles many of the pervasive fallacies running rampant in politics today, broken into categories of urban life, gender, academia, income, race, and the problems of the third world. Some of these fallacies stem from false assumptions; others from faulty economics; still others from dodgy definitions. "Undefined words have a special power in politics," Sowell writes, "particularly when they evoke some principle that engages people's emotions." He mentions "fair" as a prime example. In the charged political milleu of 2008, "change" is surely another. Sowell packs the book with salient facts--that less than 5% of all American land is developed, for instance, or that the percentage of American families with incomes over $75,000 has tripled ove