Group items tagged

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

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

Ocupar Wall Street: o que todos querem saber sobre o movimento DOSSIER | 16 OUTUBRO, 2011 - 01:55 É um colectivo de activistas, sindicalistas, artistas, estudantes. Para muitos norte-americanos, essa acção directa e não violenta é a única oportunidade que resta para terem alguma voz política. Por Nathan Schneider, The Nation. Ouvi dizer que o grupo Adbusters organizou o movimento Occupy Wall Street? Ou os Anonymous? Ou US Day of Rage? Afinal, quem os juntou todos? Todos esses grupos participaram. Adbusters fez a convocação inicial em meados de Julho, e produziu um cartaz muito sexy, com uma bailarina fazendo uma pirueta no lombo da estátua do Grande Touro, com a polícia anti-tumultos no fundo. O grupo US Day of Rage, criação da estrategista de Tecnologias da Informação Alexa O'Brien, que existe quase exclusivamente na Internet, também se envolveu e fez quase todo o trabalho inicial de encontros e pelo Tweeter. O grupo Anonymous - com as suas múltiplas, incontáveis e multiformes máscaras - agregou-se no final de Agosto. Mas em campo, em Nova York, quase todo o planeamento foi feito pelo pessoal envolvido na Assembleia Geral de NYC. É um colectivo de activistas, artistas, estudantes, que se reunira antes na campanha "New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts" [Novaiorquinos contra os cortes no orçamento]. Essa coligação de estudantes e sindicalistas acabou de levantar a ocupação de três semanas perto do City Hall, que recebeu o nome de Bloombergville, na qual protestaram contra os planos do presidente da câmara, de demissões e cortes no orçamento da cidade. Aprenderam muito naquela experiência e estavam ansiosos para repetir a dose, desta vez em movimento mais ambicioso, aspirando a ter mais impacto. Mas, de fato, não há ninguém, nem grupo nem pessoa, a comandar toda a ocupação de Wall Street. Ninguém manda? Ninguém é responsável? Como se tomam as decisões? A própria Assembleia Geral tomou as decisões para a ocupação na

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

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

#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

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 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

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

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

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

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

The Inky tries to explain Occupy Wall Street View Translation by Rich Gardner | 11.11.2011 Raghuram Rajan, in the Inky of 11 Nov 2011 is absolutely correct, the Occupy Wall Street movement is using a rhetorical shorthand to describe what it's complaint with America's current status is and why they're out protesting. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that began in the late 1950s, the opponents of Occupy Wall Street are in need of careful definition as the problem is nowhere near as obvious as it was for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. The traditional media, of course, very clearly won't do that for us and those wanting clarity will obviously have to look elsewhere than into any daily newspaper or TV news show.* The blogger and Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, has put out a piece describing the worldwide movement that Occupy Wall Street is a part of. Neoliberalism is the economic movement that wants capital and business to be liberated from government regulations and it both got Ronald Reagan elected President and greatly benefited from his administration. As Cole points out, the worldwide movement in reaction to neoliberalism encompasses not just the "Arab Spring" countries of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but Chile, Spain and Israel as well as the United States. It's irresponsible capital that seeks freedom from government supervision that's the problem, not merely those who earn lots of money. As Rajan makes clear, there are many people who earn lots of money that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't have a problem with. Rajan points to a long-term problem that indeed will require a coordinated effort from the whole of American society, but that particular problem doesn't explain why the Occupy Wall Street movement exists. *As an example, the Inky ran a piece written by Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) that was allegedly pro-litle guy and pro-small businesses, but the actual position they

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

Occupy Wall Street: quatro etapas e um desafioBY ADMIN - 25/10/2011POSTED IN: POSTS Movimento deixará legado positivo e duradouro. Mas pode tornar-se ainda mais potente, e alcançar objetivos imediatos Por Immanuel Wallerestein | Tradução: Paulo Cezar de Mello O movimento Occupy Wall Street - por enquanto, é um movimento - é o acontecimento político mais importante nos Estados Unidos desde as rebeliões de 1968, das quais é descendente ou continuação direta. Por que começou nos Estados Unidos em dado momento - e não três dias, três meses, três anos antes ou depois -, jamais saberemos ao certo. As condições estavam dadas: crescimento agudo do desastre econômico, não só para os realmente acometidos pela pobreza mas também para um segmento cada vez mais vasto dos trabalhadores pobres; incríveis exageros (exploração, ganância) do 1% mais rico da população americana ("Wall Street"); o exemplo de iradas rebeliões ao redor do mundo (a "Primavera Árabe", os indignados espanhóis, os estudantes chilenos, os sindicatos de Wisconsin e mais uma longa lista). Não importa tanto qual fagulha acendeu a fogueira. Ela foi acesa. Na primeira etapa - os dias iniciais -, o movimento resumia-se a um punhado de pessoas audaciosas, e na maioria jovens, procurando se manifestar. A imprensa ignorou-as completamente. Até que alguns chefes de polícia imbecis acharam que um pouco de brutalidade acabaria com as manifestações. Acabaram capturados por filmagens e as filmagens infestaram o YouTube. O que nos leva à segunda etapa - a publicidade. A imprensa não pôde mais ignorar totalmente as manifestações. Então, tentou ser condescendente. O que esses tolos e ignorantes jovens (e uma e outra mulher mais velha) sabiam de economia? Será que tinham algum programa positivo? Eram "disciplinados"? Fomos informados de que logo as manifestações iriam minguar. O que não era esperado pela imprensa e pelos poderes correntes (parece que

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 vs. The Tea Party Posted on October 19th, 2011 by The Public Professor Why is it that the Tea Party, an American movement founded nearly three years ago, seems completely incapable of reaching beyond U.S. borders, while Occupy Wall Street is an American movement that transformed into a genuine international phenomenon within just a matter of weeks? If we can manage to avoid partisan accusations and snide quips, an honest assessment reveals core similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy.  Both have emerged as genuine social protest movements.  Both are concerned with the current economic malaise.  Both vent their anger at powerful institutions.  And both became tremendously successful, garnering millions of supporters in a relatively brief period of time.  Yet one has remained an exclusively American movement, while the other is quickly spreading around the entire world. One obvious explanation is the symbols and framing devices adopted by the Tea Party movement, beginning with its very name.  The Tea Party has proudly draped itself in American symbolism, which of course limits its appeal elsewhere.  But that cannot explain it completely. Symbols are flexible.  People can adapt.  A genuine anti-government movement will hop borders.  Just look at the Arab Spring. What's more, the Tea Party's initial focus had the potential to be an international draw.  Indeed, some of the issues driving the Tea Party are quite similar to the ones fueling the Occupy movement, particularly rage against the economic mess.  People elsewhere in the world could have adopted the Tea Party movement and refashioned it with their own national or even international symbolism.  Greece in particular is a nation where citizens have very real reasons to be outraged at their government's irresponsible economic policies. But unlike the Arab Spring, the Tea Party anti-government movement has not crossed any national borders, and it almost certainly never will.

Occupy Ethnography: Reflections on Studying the Movement by Zoltán Glück and Manissa McCleave MaharawalTweetFacebookEmail Winter has seen Occupy Wall Street shift gears. Meetings have moved indoors, and the movement is now more a network of decentralized groups working on symbiotic projects and campaigns. Winter has also brought a moment of self-reflection. Conversations about strategy abound, as do conversations about how best to use one's time and energy. This moment of self-reflection is also an opportunity to turn the analytic gaze upon ourselves and ask what it means to do research on a constantly changing social movement and what lessons Occupy may have to teach the ethnographer. Here in New York, since January, Occupy has been planning for the General Strike on May 1st. These meetings, which started as unwieldy debates about the very idea of a general strike, are now becoming focused planning meetings where important decisions about march routes, alliance-building, tactics, and points of negotiation with organized labor are being decided. In such a context, participation often means being involved in an outreach cluster, taking on some share of the labor in your working group, and thereby becoming implicated in the success or failure of the tasks of the day. The "participation" of participant observation, then, is a process whereby one becomes part of the group (ethnos) that one is writing (graphos) about. Far from being unique to these planning meetings, we argue that because of the structure and process of Occupy, ethnography becomes a practice through which the researcher is inscribed in the movement. The Occupy movement is one deeply concerned with its process, seeking to realize ideals of inclusion and democratic participation through the practice of consensus decision making. With this practice, the process of making a decision is just as important as the decision itself. Consensus explicitly aims to prevent the oppression that occurs th

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