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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

POST A COM­MENT RE­SIZE TEXT + | - | R PLAIN TEXT PRINT SHARE EMAIL It all started with an e-mail. On July 13 Ad­busters mag­a­zine sent out a call to its 90,000-strong list pro­claim­ing a Twit­ter hash­tag (#Oc­cu­py­Wall­Street) and a date, Sep­tem­ber 17. It quickly spread among the mostly young, tech-savvy rad­i­cal set, along with an es­pe­cially al­lur­ing poster the mag­a­zine put to­gether of a bal­le­rina atop the Charg­ing Bull statue, the fi­nan­cial dis­trict's totem to testos­terone. The idea be­came a meme, and the angel of his­tory (or at least of the In­ter­net) was some­how ready. Halfway into a rev­o­lu­tion­ary year-after the Arab Spring and Eu­rope's tu­mul­tuous sum­mer-cy­ber­ac­tivists in the United States were primed for a piece of the ac­tion. The Ad­busters ed­i­tors weren't the only ones or­ga­niz­ing; sim­i­lar oc­cu­pa­tions were al­ready in the works, in­clud­ing a very well-laid plan to oc­cupy Free­dom Plaza in Wash­ing­ton, start­ing Oc­to­ber 6. Web­sites cropped up to gather news and an­nounce­ments. U.S. Day of Rage, the Twit­ter- and web-dri­ven pro­ject of a de­ter­mined IT strate­gist, en­dorsed the ac­tion, pro­moted it and started prepar­ing with on­line non­vi­o­lence train­ings and tac­ti­cal plans. Then, in late Au­gust, the hack­tivists of Anony­mous signed on, post­ing men­ac­ing videos and flood­ing so­cial media net­works. But a meme alone does not an oc­cu­pa­tion make. An oc­cu­pa­tion needs peo­ple on the ground. By early Au­gust, a band of ac­tivists in New York began meet­ing in pub­lic parks to plan. Many were fresh off the streets of Bloombergville, a three-week en­camp­ment near City Hall in protest of lay­offs and cuts to so­cial ser­vices. Oth­ers joined them, es­pe­cially artists, stu­dents and an­ar­chists-aca­d­e­mic and oth­er­wise. (US Day of Rage's founder wa

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

"If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible."- Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street video By Kishani Widyaratna / 24 October 2011 Judith Butler, author of Frames of War and Precarious Life, visited Occupy Wall Street to lend her support to the protesters there. In a rallying speech, amplified through the human microphone, she gave her thoughts on the reception of the movement and its demands. I came here to lend my support to you today, to offer my solidarity, for this unprecedented display of democracy and popular will. People have asked, 'So what are the demands? What are the demands all these people are making?' Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused-or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed then yes, we demand the impossible. But it is true that there are no demands that you can submit to arbitration here because we are not just demanding economic justice and social equality, we are assembling in public, we are coming together as bodies in alliance, in the street and in the square. We're standing here together making democracy, enacting the phrase 'We the people!'   A video of Butler delivering her speech at Occupy Wall Street is available below. More in #Occupy Share

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

Yesterday in Oakland This seven-minute video gives a pretty good brief impression of what happened in Oakland yesterday, following the police destruction of the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Among other things, I call your attention to a poignant interaction around 4:45 where a few marchers start pushing a dumpster, as if to start a barricade. A guy hugs one of them and pleads with them, "Oh, no, guys, come on, let's be civil." One of the others says, "Are they [the police] being fuckin' civil?!" Hugging that second guy, he says, "I know, brother, they're savages, they're fuckin' savages. But don't be like them! Don't be like them!" If you think that rhetoric is excessive, note the very end of the video, where lots of people are running away and one of them is hit by a tear gas canister and falls to the ground. Several of the others run back to help him, and as they are all crowding around, the police throw a flash-bang grenade right down into the group which explodes in the injured man's face. Here is a clearer view of the same incident. The young man, Scott Olsen, an Iraq war veteran, has a fractured skull and is in critical condition. But I guess this sort of thing has to be done in order to maintain "public peace" and keep the Plaza nice and "hygienic" . . . I was at the 4:00 rally outside the Oakland Public Library. It began with a report on the situation of the arrestees. We learned that there are 105 of them, and that two of them have broken hands and another one is in the hospital. Then there was an open mic for an hour or so, then a march. (The rally and the march ranged between 1000 and 2000 people, with many coming and going at various times.) We intended to pass by the jail where our friends were being held, but were blocked by police. In the process of pushing and shoving, the police grabbed two of us, threw them down and handcuffed them. Hundreds of us crowded around them, shouting: "Shame! S

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

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'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

Note: This is obviously an ongoing event and this page will be going through constant editing and revision. On September 17th, men and women of all races, backgrounds, political and religious beliefs, began to organize in nonviolent protest. These men and women represent the 99% with the goal of ending the greed and corruption of the wealthiest 1% of America. Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement which began as a call to action from Adbusters, a Canadian-based anti-consumerist organization. The original projections for the protest were to be between 20,000-90,000 participants. However, when only a little over a thousand protestors showed up the first day, it was labeled a bust. In the days to follow, more and more people have joined the protestors as they spend day and night in Liberty Square. As stated by Occupy Wall Street: "The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen." LINKS Please visit their website for up to date information at www.occupywallst.org and don't forget to add and support them on facebook and twitter. Still don't understand why they are there? Read the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. Follow the discussions and developments of the NYC General Assembly at nycga.cc. And watch streaming video of the protests LIVE at this globalrevolution.tv. Read the Occupied Wall Street Journal for the latest OWS news.

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

Can Communities Reclaim the Right to Say "No"? Many communities trying to keep fracking, drilling, or big box stores out are finding they don't have the legal right to say no. Their response? Take on the very structure of law. Document Actions Email Print Feed  Share by Mari Margil posted Aug 24, 2011 Strong community activism led the Pittsburgh City Council to pass an ordinance banning drilling for natural gas within city limits. Photo by Parker Waichman Alonso It's no wonder that many communities want nothing to do with the natural gas drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." The practice, which involves pumping chemical-laced water underground at high pressure, results in millions of gallons of frack wastewater that's been found to contain dangerous levels of radioactivity, carcinogenic chemicals, and highly corrosive salts. Last year, 16 cattle died after being exposed to the wastewater; a famous scene in the documentary Gasland shows a resident lighting his tap water on fire. But communities trying to protect their drinking water from fracking haven't found it at all easy to do. No Right to Self-Government? In June, the city council of Morgantown, West Virginia-which draws its drinking water from the Monongahela River, just downstream of a new natural gas well-passed a ban on horizontal drilling and fracking within one mile of city limits. Two days later, a company seeking to drill sued Morgantown, claiming that because drilling is regulated by the state, it wasn't within the city's authority to keep fracking out.  When communities try to exercise authority to protect themselves, they are met with threats of corporate lawsuits and state efforts to override their decisions. In August, a circuit court agreed, invalidating the city's ordinance. In her decision, Judge Susan Tucker ruled that municipalities are but "creatures of the state" without jurisdiction to legislate on drilling or fracking wi

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

How Youth Decides: Real Democracy and Youth Decision-Making at #OWS Occupy Wall Street