Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– The end of OWS or the beginning of something else? (good article from Fortune)
– Adbusters, the OWS innovator, says movement should wind down and start up in spring
– Todd Gitlin: Liberty Park can be anywhere
– Occupy Wall Street: Time to become more overtly political? (CSM)
– As Occupy Camps Close, What’s Next For Movement? (NPR)
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Sometime last year I read an article by a psychologist about the historical impact of a recession job market on college graduates and how the government needed to do something about jobs now because otherwise we would create a whole generation of young people who would break off from the mainstream and stop believing in the system. My first thought was “Why on earth do we want yet another batch of young people who believe in the system when things are so bad already. This, after all, is the exploitive, growth oriented system that was fleecing us all for every last dollar and natural resource.”
This is an emergency response to the destruction of the library at Occupy Wall Street, a clear attempt to destroy the education of passionate people who are tired of living in a deeply flawed system. Razing libraries and burning books has historically failed every time; this will be the most colossal failure to repress education in history, because the education will not be centralized.
[One of the 5 key books selected is “End of Growth” by Richard Heinberg]
We need to turn the “disadvantage” of seasonal down time to our advantage so as to be ready and able to push the Occupy movement much further, deeper and wider as winter becomes spring.
We need to come together, small group by small group, to begin the process of thinking things out. I’m suggesting that we start creating house parties, where people gather in people’s homes, to begin these processes.
The commons is an old value that’s resurfacing as a fresh approach to twenty-first-century crises such as escalating economic inequality, looming ecological disruption and worsening social alienation.
– Lessons from Iceland: The People Can Have the Power
– Ex-banker turned Hindu monk urges Wall Street to meditate
– Former Philadelphia Police Captain Joins Occupy Protesters, Gets Arrested
– Occupy the Skies! Protesters Could Use Spy Drones
– A Career Occupation
– 5,000 books reportedly thrown out in Occupy Wall Street raid
– Chris Hedges: This Is What Revolution Looks Like
It happens that just hours before, Adbusters magazine—which originally called for the occupation—promulgated “Tactical Briefing #18: Occupy the High Ground.” It suggested that perhaps the time has passed for the movement to be so focused on encampments, and that it might move on to bigger and better things instead. This is a notion that has come up repeatedly in my recent conversations with early organizers; after almost three months, they feel, the movement is starting to outgrow the occupation.
In an epoch when going to extremes has become one of the most popular habits in American culture, the very idea that a middle ground might be a more sensible place to stand is about as popular as garlic aioli at a vampire convention. Still, the obsession with binary thinking that’s done so much to back America and the industrial world into its present corner is unlikely to get us back out of it. With the help of a Greek philosopher, an Austrian mystic, and two famous California cities, the Archdruid explores some of the alternative territory.
The GA, and the break-out groups that meet in the Atrium at 60 Wall Street are blessed with the Quaker tools now refined by waves of protest movements: the Suffragettes, Satyagraha, Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, No-nukes Affinity Groups, and Battle in Seattle. What doesn’t work? Violence. Power Trips. Hierarchies. What works? Good facilitation, timekeeping, note-taking, hand-signs, open agenda, global café, conflict transformation, consensus. What came out of the conventions at the turn of the 18th to 19th Century was protection of slavery, disenfranchisement of women, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the preservation of an elite ruling class, especially the banksters. What will emerge from this process may also be flawed when seen in hindsight centuries hence, but it will be progressively less so.
Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces — our spaces — and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people — all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.
Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in — and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.
The pipeline decision was a true upset. Everyone — and I mean everyone who “knew” how these things work — seemed certain that the president would approve it.
– Why I quit the mainstream media
– Oakland Mayoral Adviser Tells Keith Olbermann Why He Quit
– Faces Of Zuccotti Park: The Columbia Economics Professor
– Occupy Wall Street and the U.S. Labor Movement
