Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The U.S. financial, economic, political, social, educational, health, religious, military, and other institutions seem to be collapsing. “They’re rotting out from the inside,” Ken noted. Occupy offers bold, intense, new national and international conversations that can help create alternatives that strive not to repeat the same mistakes, which have caused the growing gap between the super-wealthy 1% and the 99% rest of us.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has struck a chord with its protests against growing inequality in the United States. Suddenly, it is conceivable that policies may be enacted in the next Congress that would raise taxes on the rich and make the American dream more affordable. But if all the Occupy movement does is to restore middle-class demand for large homes and late-model automobiles, it will have been a failure.
– Rules of Engagement for Non-Profits and Unions Working with the #Occupy Movement
– Stan Goff: A Million Gardens (for the 99% of the 99%)
– Naomi Wolf: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
It’s another edition of Monday Mayhem, where talk radio hosts Rob Roper and Carl Etnier are guests on each others’ shows. Roper hosts Common Sense Radio on WDEV, Waterbury, Vermont, and the show’s focus is “improving the economic well being (sic) of Vermonters through reliance on free markets, limited government, and fiscal responsibility.” Etnier hosts the Monday edition of Equal Time Radio, focusing on energy, food, and the local economy at the end of the age of oil. The theme this Monday Mayhem is Occupy Wall Street.
The last two months of posts here on The Archdruid Report have focused on the murky interactions between the crisis of the industrial world and the deep structures of our minds — and the ways in which those deep structures have been manipulated by marketers and advertisers at the bidding of competing political and economic interests. Abstract as though these issues may seem at times, they link up directly to the most practical issues we face at the end of the age of cheap energy — and the link between them has very often been the missing piece in proposals for dealing with the challenges of the future.
The Occupy movement, unlike the peak oil/climate/Transition movement (?) is a bottom-up not a top-down approach. That appeals to the younger people and many of the older ones as well. What they are doing is not coming in the form of ‘delivered wisdom’ from the ‘experts in the field’ with their laundry list of what we ‘must’ do.
Decentralization of the Occupy movement is as important as the decentralization of any other piece of our infrastructure. If the #OWS crowd popped up in small groups around NYC, they would be easier to raid individually, but not much worth it. If one goes down, there are sites still available to regroup and relocate. … Good communications could combine dispersed occupiers for various marches and individual protest demonstrations. Seriously, we need to be in little, flexible, creative bunches everywhere, not in one giant lump.
– New Yorker: The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street
– John Robb: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement
– Juan Cole: How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War
– Bloomberg, Kelly Finally Piss Off The Media
– Biggest Week Yet for Occupy Wall Street Coverage
– The Importance of Creative Protest
– Mike Davis: Ten Immodest Commandments
– The Revolution Is Love – video by Charles Eisenstein (author of “Sacred Economics”)
– Jan Lundberg: How bad or hopeful is our situation as a culture and species?
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified.
– Economists Say Europe Facing ‘Lost Decade’
– Eurozone Crisis Q&A
– Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But Is Not
– Resources for Understanding the Crisis in Greece
Three elements have made the global movements of 2011 so powerful and different. 1) the extraordinary capacity to include all types of people 2) the impulse to move beyond traditional forms of the protest and contention, so as to create solutions for the problems identified 3) the horizontal and directly participatory form they take.
In the second phase of these movements, the focus shifts from acts of protest to instituting the type of change that the movements actually want to see happen in society as a whole. The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, first through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation of—or collaboration with—groups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources.
