Building Community

After the eviction: What’s next for Occupy Wall Street?

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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.

Occupy Wall Street and FDR’s four freedoms

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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.

“You can’t evict an idea whose time has come:” Read the post-eviction statement from OWS

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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.

Science wants to save us from ourselves

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Many argue that what we’re suffering from is an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ in that our hunter-gatherer brains haven’t caught up with modern real-time problems such as climate change. What we are currently wired to respond to are immediate and easily perceived threats, like stampeding buffalo. According to acclaimed Stanford biologist Paul Erhlich — in his paper Human Natures, Nature Conservation and Environmental Ethics — our nervous systems have perceptual constraints making it difficult for us to comprehend the very real threat of a planet that is slowly heating up.

Local currencies, Transition Councils and Declarations of Food Independence: it must be the October Transition podcast!

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Here’s the second Transition podcast. The idea with these is that they will explore some of the stories from the month’s “Round up of what’s happening in the world of Transition” in greater depth. So, this month we hear from Brixton about the latest developments with the Brixton Pound, from the Wiltshire town whose Town Council just voted to become a Transition Council, and from the Yorkshire valley that recently declared independence from the global food system.

Size of the US underground economy

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I was curious to know what efforts had been made to estimate the size of the informal economy. After some poking around, I discovered Edgar Feige, a widely cited Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison who seems to have devoted much of his career to this question.

The entire paper is well worth a read…

Occupy your life

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Someone asked “if you could say something to the Occupy movement what would you say?” Vandana Shiva flashed her brilliant and embracing laughing smile, a smile that hooks right into your heart and you can’t help but feel the connection. She replied: “I’d tell them, Occupy your Life.” She reminded us how Gandhi had the symbolic actions — sitting in protests — but with that he also had the cotton — the tangible actions.  Dr Shiva said that along with the protests, people need to grow food, to build connections within their communities, to make changes in their lives.

Privatising public space

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By privatised public space, I mean that space which appears to be a public space (a square or a lane, for example) is in fact owned and controlled by a private landowner (or sometimes managed privately for a public owner.) Either way, different rules apply. It’s a trend which has been driven along by private sector regeneration schemes, and reinforced by a plethora of increasingly contentious public order legislation. But it is all but invisible.