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Can a big coordinated effort save Occupy? – GlobalPost – Salon.com

9 Dec

The move has also galvanized Occupy movements in other cities. Texas occupiers have called for protesters to gather in Houston and march on that city’s port. Even landlocked Denver is trying to get in on the action, with plans to protest at a local Wal-Mart distribution center.

In Oakland, protesters like Johnson are hoping for a repeat of Nov. 2, when tens of thousands converged en masse on the Port of Oakland, successfully stopping the flow of goods overnight.

It could be more complicated this time. The powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents most of the port workers whom protesters say they are supporting, has publicly rejected the blockade effort.

via Can a big coordinated effort save Occupy? – GlobalPost – Salon.com.

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Can Occupy and the Tea Party team up? – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

7 Dec

RICHMOND, Va. — Members of the Occupy Richmond and local Tea Party movements found acres of common ground during an unlikely meeting held Tuesday at a police station-turned-art gallery in the city’s historic Jackson Ward neighborhood.

But first and foremost, the 12 men and women from seemingly polar spots on the political spectrum agreed on this: The meeting never happened.

“I think it’s all very, very important that we state very clearly that this was not a meeting between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement,” declared Donald Rallis, an Occupy Richmond member, as the meeting wound to a close. His sotto-voce assertion meets with a flurry of “up twinkle” hands — or vigorous head nods — depending on the individual’s political leanings.

via Can Occupy and the Tea Party team up? – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

Where I stand on the Occupy movement – Roger Ebert’s Journal

7 Dec

A clear majority of Americans should be in sympathy with the Occupy Movement. That they are not is a tribute to an effective right wing propaganda machine given voice by Fox News, radio talkers like Rush Limbaugh, and financed by the Koch brothers among many others. The machine’s audience is to oppose its own self-interest and support the interests of the rich….

There was a time in the not very distant American past when it was easier to support a family and buy a home. Now many college graduates find themselves moving back in with their parents. They’re living off prosperity that was built up when the economy wasn’t stacked against them.

President Obama went to Kansas on Tuesday to make the kind of speech I’ve been waiting and hoping for. It was billed as sort of a keynote for his campaign. He said, “This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share and when everyone plays by the same rules.” Isn’t that true? Does everyone get a fair shot? When the Republicans try to exempt the financial industry from regulation, is that playing by the same rules?

via Where I stand on the Occupy movement – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

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Live from Occupy East New York – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

6 Dec

OccupyYourHome:

Today, Occupy Wall Street activists are teaming up with existing progressive and community groups to launch Occupy Our Homes – a campaign on the foreclosure crisis – in cities around the country. One action will take place in East New York.

The campaign is expected to feature aggressive tactics such as eviction defenses, takeovers of vacant bank-owned properties, and disruptions at foreclosure auctions. The full story on the organizing of the new campaign is here. The background on current state of the foreclosure crisis is here.

via Live from Occupy East New York – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

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A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS Is So Useful – Technology – The Atlantic

3 Dec

The Occupy movement explained as components of an application interface (API, a programming specification).

The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that’s surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.

via A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS Is So Useful – Technology – The Atlantic.

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‘We Are the 99 Percent’ Joins the Cultural and Political Lexicon – NYTimes.com

1 Dec

Whatever the long-term effects of the Occupy movement, protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent” referring to the tiny proportion of Americans with a vastly disproportionate share of wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon.

via ‘We Are the 99 Percent’ Joins the Cultural and Political Lexicon – NYTimes.com.

For Occupying Protesters, Deadlines and Decisions – NYTimes.com

26 Nov

Come Sunday, should the protesters accept the city’s proposal for a part-time occupation across the street, bringing a new phase of the movement without overnight camping? Should they stay at the site, inviting an attention-getting confrontation with the police? Or should they join a march of the homeless to a nearby rail yard? (Dennis Payne, a homeless man who was spreading the word about the march, said he wanted to move other homeless people “out of the way” of a potential clash.)

Partly joking, Mr. Pierce said he would like to see protesters move to Rittenhouse Square, one of the city’s wealthiest pockets. There, he said, “a lot more of the right kind of people would get annoyed.”

Similar conversations were taking place in Los Angeles, where Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa said Friday that protesters, who had been allowed to remain on the lawn outside City Hall for almost two months, had to disperse by 12:01 a.m. Monday. A Twitter page for the Occupy L.A. movement put out a call on Friday evening for “back up” from other Occupy-aligned groups in California.

via For Occupying Protesters, Deadlines and Decisions – NYTimes.com.

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Russell Simmons On Occupy Wall Street: ‘It Is My Moral Duty To Do This’

25 Nov

No celebrity supports the “Occupy” movement more fervently than Russell Simmons, founder of DefJam and GlobalGrind.com and author of Super Rich: A Guide To Having It All. Not only has he visited Occupy Wall Street nearly every day since the protests began, but he has started on a cross-country tour of different protest sites to gather grassroots support for his proposed Constitutional amendment that would ban private donations to candidates running for federal public office.

via Russell Simmons On Occupy Wall Street: ‘It Is My Moral Duty To Do This’.

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Van Jones can’t occupy us – Law enforcement – Salon.com

24 Nov

Jones’ call for the movement to “mature” and move on to party politics would only make us a sterile part of the very problem we oppose. As I learned working on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign and running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, the electoral system is a mirage where only corporate-approved candidates are allowed to be considered seriously. At Occupy Washington, D.C., we recognize that putting our time, energy and resources into elections will not produce the change we want. What we need to do right now is build a dynamic movement supported by independent media that stands in stark contrast to both corporate-bought-and-paid-for parties.

Democratic operatives want to steal the energy of the Occupy movement because they do not have any of their own. These front groups operate within the confines of the two-corrupted-party system and their agenda is limited by what big business interests say is politically realistic.

via Van Jones can’t occupy us – Law enforcement – Salon.com.

What’s in a Name? “Pepper Spray”

24 Nov

The police use of so-called pepper spray is much in the news and on the web these days, especially as a result of its use at University of California at Davis. According to The New York Times“Megyn Kelly on Fox News dismissed pepper spray as ‘a food product, essentially.” That same story also reports:

To the American Civil Liberties Union, its use as a crowd-control device, particularly when those crowds are nonthreatening, is an excessive and unconstitutional use of force and violates the right to peaceably assemble.

A food product? Excessive and unconstitutional? One and the same product. I understand the name’s derivation, that the active ingredient—technically, oleoresin capsicum—is the chemical that causes the ‘bite’ in peppers. The use of THAT name, of course, automatically associates the spray with food. Not only is food innocuous, it’s necessary for life. So the name tells us that this agent is, at most, an exaggeration or amplification of something that’s good for us: “Eat your spinach, it’s good for you.” We don’t think that such an agent could put someone in the hospital or induce possibly permanent nerve damage. How would these stories play out if the spray was known as ‘liquid pain’ or ‘torture spray’? How would the officers using the agent think of themselves and their actions if they thought of the agent as torture spray rather than as a food derivative?

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