& OCCUPY – VOICES
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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage.
Meet 4 Middle-Class Americans Who’ve Been Politicized by #OccupyWallStreet
Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones
For Occupy Wall Street to keep gaining steam, it must begin to attract people who aren’t part of the typical protest crowd. Based on my experience at Zuccotti Park this weekend, this has begun to happen—in spades. Throughout the day I ran into people who’d never been to a protest until now. None of them belonged to activist groups or trade unions. They’d simply heard about the occupation and decided to come. Some were blue-collar folks out of work, others college students who feared they’d never land a job. Here are four of their stories:
Kevin Monahan, laid-off sanitation worker
Monahan is hard to miss at McDonald’s, where a long line of occupiers waits for the restroom. He wears long hair wrapped in a skull-pattern headband, a jean jacket with a Confederate Flag patch, and a button on his lapel that says, “The rich bailed out, the poor sold out.”
About a year ago, Monahan lost his job as a garbage truck driver in upstate New York. At 24, he’s embarrassed that he’s had to move back in with his parents. He tried attending college for a while but dropped out when he lost his financial aid. He now competes with teenagers for minimum-wage cashier jobs. He knew that Wall Street was partly to blame for his problems, but when he saw a YouTube clip of New York cops macing peaceful demonstrators at Zuccotti, “it just threw fuel on the fire.” He begged friends for gas money and drove down to Manhattan.
(9 October 2011)
An entry in a marvelous blog by journalist Josh Harkinson about his stay in Occupy Wall Street. Kevin Drum writes:
“I just scrolled through Josh Harkinson’s reporting from the Occupy Wall Street site, and it really gives you a great sense of what things look like there. His own reporting is there, updated continuously, plus loads of links to photos and videos and various related rants around the internet. It’s all here, along with links to other MoJo reporting from downtown Manhattan. If you’d like to get a better feel for what’s going on and how it’s unfolding, take a look. And come back periodically to see the latest updates.”
-BA
Why the Elites Are in Trouble
Chris Hedges, TruthDig
Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
… The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. If the police shut down the encampment in New York tonight, the power elite will still lose, for this vision and structure have been imprinted into the thousands of people who have passed through park, renamed Liberty Plaza by the protesters. The greatest gift the occupation has given us is a blueprint for how to fight back. And this blueprint is being transferred to cities and parks across the country.
“We get to the park,” Ketchup says of the first day. “There’s madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that’s what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don’t know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn’t very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn’t very optimistic. And then my response was that, well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody’s going to get anything done, it’s going be us here. People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world.”
“After the circles broke I felt disheartened because it was sort of chaotic,” she said. “I didn’t have anybody there, so it was a little depressing. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“Over the past few months, people had been meeting in New York City general assembly,” she said. “One of them is named Brooke. She’s a professor of social ecology. She did my facilitation training. There’s her and a lot of other people, students, school teachers, different people who were involved with that … so they organized a general assembly.”
… “So it’s 9:30 p.m. and people are worried that they’re going to try and rush us out of the camp,” she said, referring back to the first day. “At 9:30 they break into work groups. I joined the group on contingency plans. The job of the bedding group was to find cardboard for people to sleep on. The contingency group had to decide what to do if they kick us out. The big decision we made was to announce to the group that if we were dispersed we were going to meet back at 10 a.m. the next day in the park. Another group was arts and culture. What was really cool was that we assumed we were going to be there more than one night. There was a food group. They were going dumpster diving. The direct action committee plans for direct, visible action like marches. There was a security team. It’s security against the cops. The cops are the only people we think that might hurt us. The security team keeps people awake in shifts. They always have people awake.”
The work groups make logistical decisions, and the general assembly makes large policy decisions.
… Working groups blossomed in the following days. The media working group was joined by a welcome working group for new arrivals, a sanitation working group (some members of which go around the park on skateboards as they carry brooms), a legal working group with lawyers, an events working group, an education working group, medics, a facilitation working group (which trains new facilitators for the general assembly meetings), a public relations working group, and an outreach working group for like-minded communities as well as the general public. There is an Internet working group and an open source technology working group. The nearby McDonald’s is the principal bathroom for the park after Burger King banned protesters from its facilities.
Caucuses also grew up in the encampment, including a “Speak Easy caucus.” “That’s a caucus I started,” Ketchup said. “It is for a broad spectrum of individuals from female-bodied people who identify as women to male-bodied people who are not traditionally masculine. That’s called the ‘Speak Easy’ caucus. I was just talking to a woman named Sharon who’s interested in starting a caucus for people of color.
(10 October 2011)
Long article describes how the #Occupy process works: how decisons are made, are discussions are moderated. Fascinating! -BA
#occupywallstreet general assembly facilitation
Occupy Wall Street via YouTube
Training video on how to run a general assembly in your own community as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.Hand signs, roles etc. This training session was held at Washington Square Park in New York City on October 8, 2011.
(8 October 2011)
If the video doesn’t display, try refreshing your browser (click on the icon with the arrows going in a circle).
The hand signal information is available as a document on the NYC General Assembly site.
-BA
