The fantastic success of Occupy Wall Street
The Occupy Wall Street movement – for now it is a movement – is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.
Politics
Deep thought – Oct 19
– Q&A with Post-Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg
– Europeans fear climate change more than financial turmoil, poll shows
– Deep in the heart of Texas, the scientific consensus is alive and kicking — no matter what the local politicians say
– Business Week: Marx is relevant again
#Occupy – Oct 19
– Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them
– Occupy Protests’ Seismic Effect
– Greece on the Brink of Emergency: A Matter of Days
– Kunstler: Going Apeshit
– Business Insider: Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About…
– Jan Lundberg: The Occupiers’ dream: an easy revolution?
The Occupy movement builds democratic learning/action communities
Occupy Wall Street gatherings on Oct. 15 at around 1500 sites in some 80 countries revealed a global uprising for building democratic learning and action communities. People were joyous to be together in streets and parks, on church steps, outside banks, and elsewhere—playing music, chanting, and exercising their freedoms. They sat in circles, paraded around with bands, and fed each other in dramatic outpourings of anger, aspiration, feelings, energy, humor, yearning, and wisdom.
Letter to a dead man about the occupation of hope
Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi, I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society. I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring. We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.
Turning occupation into lasting change
If the Occupy movement is to succeed over time, it must follow the lead of community rights building efforts that have begun work to dismantle the body of law that perpetually subordinates people, community, and nature to wealthy corporate minorities.
End-of-growth uprising goes global
Brutal police and military repression of the protests could buy time for politicians, but it would solve nothing. The unrest would go underground and tear at the social fabric, leading eventually to revolution or societal breakdown.
Reform, if it is to make a difference, must be fundamental. It must start by addressing issues of economic inequality, but then must eliminate the massive debt overhang that plagues not just governments but households and the entire financial sector. In essence, policy makers must cobble together a new economic model that meets human needs in the absence of economic growth.
Saving Money
We speak with Charles Eisenstein about his new book Sacred Economics which explains how to save the concept of money from being subject to our outdated understanding of human nature and simplistic mechanistic models of the physical world around us…Can we accept that the failure of money isn’t the end of the world but that it is an opportunity to reorganize?
Talk amongst yourselves
People working in the City of London have played a starring role in creating the global economic crisis. Since our representative institutions have thus far failed to address this crisis in a way that is both sensible and just, it is only fitting that we should use the City as a place in which work on solutions ourselves.
#Occupy – NEWS & ANALYSIS – Oct 17
– UK Independent: Across the World, the Indignant Rise Up
– Reason Magazine (libertarian): OWS beyond the caricatures
– Nicholas Kristoff (NYT): America’s ‘Primal Scream’s
– BBC: ‘Occupy’ is a response to economic permafrost
#Occupy – VOICES – Oct 17
– Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played for 500,000 in Spanish protest
– From the Heart of Liberty Plaza
– Ben Zolno “End of Growth” Street Seminar
– US Marine tells off NYPD
I believe it because it is absurd
When people lose wisdom, the easiest way out appears to them to find an enemy, Our new enemies seem to be the scientists. We haven’t seen yet climatologists being lynched by angry mobs, as it happened to Hypatia long ago – but we seem to be getting close to something like that.
