The Panopticon Review

SAM RIVERS (1923-2011): MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST, SAXOPHONIST, BANDLEADER, AND COMPOSER

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 03:17:00 +0000

David Redfern/Getty Images

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/arts/music/sam-rivers-jazz-musician-dies-at-88.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28

All,

Another great and iconic African American musician and composer is gone--the internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, tenor saxophonist, and composer Sam Rivers. Thankfully, I was privileged to see and hear Sam perform many times in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Detroit from 1970 on. In 1972 he and the extraordinary bass player/composer Richard Davis (1935) did an amazing year long artist-in-residency at my college alma mater in Michigan during my senior year there. During an astounding and highly varied six decade long career (!) Sam played and recorded with everyone from Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie to Billie Holiday, T-Bone Walker, Tony Williams, David Holland, Cecil Taylor, David Holland, and Anthony Braxton among many others. He also organized and led a large number of his own ensemble groups in duo, trio, quartet, quintet, septet, octet, and orchestral big band settings. His legendary loft space for music and dance performance that he founded with his wife Beatrice in downtown Manhattan was called Studio Rivbea and was THE place to hear really original and dynamic avant-garde Jazz by a wide array of musicians and composers in New York in the mid and late 1970s and he also led a terrific anf highly influential Jazz orchestra of over 20 musicians throughout the '80s, '90s. and well into the 2000s. He was yet another real GIANT of the music in the post-1950s era. What an artist! What follows is an extended homage to and celebration of this man and his indelible music via words, visual images and of course SOUND. ENJOY! and RIP Sam...

Kofi

Sam Rivers, Jazz Artist of Loft Scene, Dies at 88
By NATE CHINEN
December 27, 2011
New York Times

Sam Rivers, an inexhaustibly creative saxophonist, flutist, bandleader and composer who cut his own decisive path through the jazz world, spearheading the 1970s loft scene in New York and later establishing a rugged outpost in Florida, died on Monday in Orlando, Fla. He was 88.

The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Monique Rivers Williams said.

With an approach to improvisation that was garrulous and uninhibited but firmly grounded in intellect and technique, Mr. Rivers was among the leading figures in the postwar jazz avant-garde. His sound on the tenor saxophone, his primary instrument, was distinctive: taut and throaty, slightly burred, dark-hued. He also had a recognizable voice on the soprano saxophone, flute and piano, and as a composer and arranger.

Music ran deep in his family. His grandfather Marshall W. Taylor published one of the first hymnals for black congregations after emancipation, “A Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies,” in 1882. His mother, the former Lillian Taylor, was a pianist and choir director, and his father, Samuel Rivers, was a gospel singer. They were on tour with the Silvertone Quintet in El Reno, Okla., when Samuel Carthorne Rivers was born, on Sept. 25, 1923.

Growing up in Chicago and on the road, Mr. Rivers studied violin, piano and trombone. After his father had a debilitating accident in 1937, he moved with his mother to Little Rock, Ark., where he zeroed in on the tenor saxophone. Joining the Navy in the mid-’40s, he served for three years.

Mr. Rivers enrolled in the Boston Conservatory of Music in 1947 and later transferred to Boston University, where he majored in composition and briefly took up the viola and fell into the busy Boston jazz scene.

He made an important acquaintance in 1959: Tony Williams, a 13-year-old drummer who already sounded like an innovator. Together they delved into free improvisation, occasionally performing in museums alongside modernist and abstract paintings.

By 1964 Mr. Williams was working with the trumpeter Miles Davis and persuaded him to hire Mr. Rivers, who was with the bluesman T-Bone Walker at the time, for a summer tour. Mr. Rivers’s blustery playing with the Miles Davis Quintet, captured on the album “Miles in Tokyo,” suggested a provocative but imperfect fit. Wayne Shorter replaced him in the fall.

On a series of Blue Note recordings in the middle to late ’60s, beginning with Mr. Williams’s first album as a leader, “Life Time,” Mr. Rivers expressed his ideas more freely. He made four albums of his own for the label, the first of which — “Fuchsia Swing Song,” with Mr. Williams, the pianist Jaki Byard and the bassist Ron Carter, another Miles Davis sideman — is a landmark of experimental post-bop, with a free-flowing yet structurally sound style. “Beatrice,” a ballad from that album Mr. Rivers named after his wife, would become a jazz standard.

Beatrice Rivers died in 2005. In addition to his daughter Monique, Mr. Rivers is survived by two other daughters, Cindy Johnson and Traci Tozzi; a son, Dr. Samuel Rivers III; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Mr. Rivers pushed further toward abstraction in the late ’60s, moving to New York and working as a sideman with the uncompromising pianists Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor. In 1970 he and his wife opened Studio Rivbea, a noncommercial performance space, in their loft on Bond Street in the East Village. It served as an avant-garde hub through the end of the decade, anchoring what would be known as the loft scene.

The albums Mr. Rivers made for Impulse Records in the ’70s would further burnish his reputation in the avant-garde. After Studio Rivbea closed in 1979, Mr. Rivers continued to lead several groups, including a big band called the Rivbea Orchestra, a woodwind ensemble called Winds of Change and a virtuosic trio with the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Barry Altschul. With the trio, Mr. Rivers often demonstrated his gift as a multi-instrumentalist, extemporizing fluidly on saxophone, piano and flute.

Mr. Rivers tacked toward more mainstream sensibilities from 1987 to 1991, when he worked extensively with an early influence, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. While touring through Orlando with Gillespie in 1991, Mr. Rivers met some of the skilled musicians employed by the area’s theme parks, who persuaded him to move there and revive the Rivbea Orchestra. He lived most recently in nearby Apopka, Fla.

The music made by his band in the 1990s and beyond was as spirited and harmonically dense as anything in Mr. Rivers’s musical history. And the trio at its core — Mr. Rivers, the bassist Doug Mathews and the drummer Anthony Cole — also performed on its own, honing a dynamic versatility distinct from that of any other group in jazz.

Mr. Rivers’s late-career renaissance was confirmed by the critical response to “Inspiration” and “Culmination,” two albums he recorded for RCA in 1998 with a New York big band assembled by the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman. In 2000, Mr. Rivers led the Orlando iteration of the Rivbea Orchestra in a concert presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center. The next year he served as the fiery eminence on “Black Stars,” an acclaimed album by the 26-year-old pianist Jason Moran.

This year saw the release of “Sam Rivers and the Rivbea Orchestra — Trilogy” (Mosaic), a three-CD set featuring recordings from 2008 and 2009. His last performance was in October in DeLand, Fla.

In 2006. the Vision Festival, a nonprofit New York event aesthetically indebted to the loft scene, honored Mr. Rivers with a Sam Rivers Day program featuring both his bands. The names of two of the bustling pieces performed were, appropriately, “Flair” and “Spunk.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/sam-rivers-jazz-sax-great-hosted-village-concerts-dead-88-article-1.997947

Sam Rivers, jazz sax great who hosted Village concerts, dead at 88

New Yorker played with Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and T. Bone Walker

BY BEN CHAPMAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
December 28 2011

Sam Rivers played saxophone with some of the all-time jazz and blues greats, including Billie Holliday, Miles Davis and B.B. King.

Sam Rivers, a legendary jazz saxophonist who threw raucous jam sessions in his west Village loft, died of pneumonia in Orlando on Monday. He was 88.

Rivers was born in El Reno, Oklahoma in 1923. He was heir to a musical legacy that began with his grandfather Marshall W. Taylor, who in 1882 published an early classic of African-American folk music, “A Collection of Revival Hymns & Plantation Melodies.”

Rivers’ mother and father played together in a local quartet and encouraged their son to study music from an early age.

By age 13, Rivers settled on the tenor saxophone as his instrument of choice. He stuck with the sax for more than 70 years, cutting 35 albums and playing countless gigs with many of the greatest artists in jazz.

After a stint in the Navy as a young man, Rivers enrolled in the Boston Conservatory, where he would begin his career as a professional musician.

By the mid-1950’s Rivers was backing up Billie Holiday on the sax and acting as musical director for a number of great R&B acts including B.B. King and T-Bone Walker.

In 1964 he moved to New York and joined Miles Davis’s quintet, with whom he recorded the seminal live record “Miles in Tokyo.” In that year Rivers also began recording his own groups for Blue Note, eventually releasing four records as a band leader for the famed jazz label.

In 1970, Rivers and his wife Beatrice opened a jazz and dance performance space called Studio Rivbea in their Bond Street loft.

The freewheeling venue was a fixture of the Village’s art and jazz scene until 1979 when Rivers and his wife relocated to New Jersey.

Rivers moved to Orlando in 1991 and continued to record and tour until his death.

Rivers is survived by five children, five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. His wife Beatrice Rivers died in 2005.

His family is holding a private funeral service and plans are being made for a public memorial concert to be held in his honor.

With News Wire Services

bchapman@nydailynews.com

Sam Rivers Biography Timeline Born: September 25, 1923 | Died: December 26, 2011 Instrument: Sax, tenor

Samuel Carthorne Rivers (born September 25, 1923, El Reno, Oklahoma) is a jazz musician and composer. He performs on soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, flute, and piano. Rivers was previously thought to have been born in 1930.

Rivers's father was a gospel musician who had sung with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Silverstone Quartet, exposing Rivers to music from an early age.

Rivers moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1947, where he studied at the Boston Conservatory with Alan Hovhaness. He performed with Quincy Jones, Herb Pomeroy, Tadd Dameron and others.

In 1959 Rivers began performing with 13-year-old drummer Tony Williams, who later went on to have an impressive career. Rivers did a brief stint with Miles Davis's quintet in 1964, partly at Williams's recommendation. This quintet was recorded on a single album, Miles in Tokyo. Unfortunately, Rivers' playing style was too free to be compatible with Davis's music at this point, and he was soon replaced by Wayne Shorter. Rivers was signed by Blue Note Records, for whom he recorded four albums as leader and made several sideman appearances. Among noted sidemen on his own Blue Note Records were Jaki Byard who appears on Fuschia Swing Song, Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard. He appeared on Blue Note recordings of Tony Williams, Andrew Hill and Larry Young.

Rivers's music is rooted in bebop, but he is an adventurous player, adept at free jazz. The first of his Blue Note albums, Fuchsia Swing Song, is widely regarded as a masterpiece of an approach sometimes called “inside-outside”. The performer frequently obliterates the explicit harmonic framework (”going outside”) but retains a hidden link so as to be able to return to it in a seamless fashion. Rivers brought the conceptual tools of bebop harmony to a new level in this process, united at all times with the ability to “tell a story” which Lester Young had

...Expand to read entire bio >

Articles about Sam Rivers
CD/LP/Track Review
Fuchsia Swing Song by Greg Simmons
Violet Violets by Annika Westman
Purple Violets by Rex Butters
Contours by Germein Linares
Contours by John Kelman
Fuschia Swing Song by David Vance
Firestorm by David Adler
Culmination by David Adler
Culmination by Mark Corroto
The Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers... by C. Andrew Hovan
Interviews
Sam Rivers: A Giant Among Us
Jazz From The Vinyl Junkyard
Sam Rivers: Contrasts
Live Reviews
Sam Rivers Celebrates His 80th at the...
Recent Sam Rivers NewsSubmit
Jazz icon Sam Rivers dead at 88 (December 27, 2011)
Jazz Musician of the Day: Sam Rivers (September 25, 2011)
Sam Rivers and the Rivbea Orchestra - Trilogy (Mosaic Select 38, 2011) (August 21, 2011)
Sam Rivers - The Quest (Red Records, 1976, 2011) (April 04, 2011)
Jazz Musician of the Day: Sam Rivers (September 25, 2010)
The Jazz Session #120: Sam Rivers (December 09, 2009)
Sam Rivers Interview (October 30, 2009)

From Naomi Klein's Newsletter: Capitalism vs. Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:08:00 +0000

http://www.naomiklein.org/main

In December's Newsletter:

Naomi's New Feature in The Nation: "Capitalism vs. the Climate"
New York Times Q&A: "Naomi Kleins Inconvenient Climate Conclusions"
Naomi's TED Talk, "Addicted To Risk," Makes Best of TED 2011 List
Watch Naomi, Michael Moore, and Others Discuss What's Next for OWS
Give To Combat Hunger and To Support Community Renewable Energy

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full

All,

The brilliant, inspiring, and prolific author, radical activist, political journalist, economic theorist, and social and cultural critic Naomi Klein continues to play a major international role in educating us all in the daunting global politics and horrific economic dynamics of 21st century corporate capitalism. By exhaustively documenting its profoundly destructive use and domination of the world's technical, scientific, and natural resources Naomi's extraordinary work and insight has served as a powerful intellectual and organizational instrument in combatting these forces and most importantly strongly advocating and fighting for real ideological, political, cultural and economic ALTERNATIVES to the criminal madness currently ruling our world...

Please carefully read this very important article and pass it on...

Kofi

Capitalism vs. the Climate
by Naomi Klein
November 9, 2011
The Nation

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but there may as well have been.

* * *

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the “skeptic” position.)

The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential campaign, with his home state literally burning up with wildfires, Texas Governor Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that climate scientists were manipulating data “so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Meanwhile, the only candidate to consistently defend climate science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on arrival. And part of what has rescued Mitt Romney’s campaign has been his flight from earlier statements supporting the scientific consensus on climate change.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

* * *

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere

After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all of our collective muscle—to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

2. Remembering How to Plan

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well—particularly for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. A few “green jobs” trainings aren’t enough. These workers need to know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the other side. That means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate profitability—giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland’s worker-run green co-ops serving as a model.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for “a fifty-year farm bill.” That’s the length of time he and his collaborators Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will take to conduct the research and put the infrastructure in place to replace many soil-depleting annual grain crops, grown in monocultures, with perennial crops, grown in polycultures. Since perennials don’t need to be replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job of storing scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon. Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being wiped out by extreme weather. Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment.

Outside the Heartland conference and like-minded gatherings, the return of planning is nothing to fear. We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world. These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative.

3. Reining in Corporations

A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek’s road to serfdom—and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.

4. Relocalizing Production

If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change sounds somewhat radical it’s because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government is to get out of the way of the corporate sector—and nowhere more so than in the realm of international trade. The devastating impacts of free trade on manufacturing, local business and farming are well known. But perhaps the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all. The cargo ships, jumbo jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced—made to be replaced, almost never fixed—are consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be safely absorbed.

This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest gains that have been made in reducing emissions many times over. For instance, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production to places like China. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy-intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light rail.)

Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an end to the reckless form of “free trade” that governs every bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more good news —for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

5. Ending the Cult of Shopping

The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate profits. They were also a response to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid economic growth. The threat was real: within our current economic model, a drop in production is by definition a crisis—a recession or, if deep enough, a depression, with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply.

This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is “decoupling”—the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And “green growth” advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to “make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.”

But here is where things get complicated. There is a growing body of economic research on the conflict between economic growth and sound climate policy, led by ecological economist Herman Daly at the University of Maryland, as well as Peter Victor at York University, Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey and environmental law and policy expert Gus Speth. All raise serious questions about the feasibility of industrialized countries meeting the deep emissions cuts demanded by science (at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050) while continuing to grow their economies at even today’s sluggish rates. As Victor and Jackson argue, greater efficiencies simply cannot keep up with the pace of growth, in part because greater efficiency is almost always accompanied by more consumption, reducing or even canceling out the gains (often called the “Jevons Paradox”). And so long as the savings resulting from greater energy and material efficiencies are simply plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth, “Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from the dilemma of growth need to take a closer look at the historical evidence—and at the basic arithmetic of growth.”

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson puts it, “trash the system or crash the planet.”

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty. Meanwhile, in the industrialized world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.

So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it’s not because they are paranoid. It’s because they are paying attention.

6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy

About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we’ll grow our way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie, eventually there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie, as the current inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting multiple ecological limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is.
That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister “world government”).

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter. For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy (BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding being the highest-profile example). But according to a study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the big five’s $100 billion in combined 2008 profits went to “renewable and alternative energy ventures.” Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate legislation that has reared its head, and to fund the denier movement gathered at the Marriott Hotel.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the “polluter pays” principle to be applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on polluters, governments will have to negotiate much higher royalty rates so that less fossil fuel extraction would raise more public revenue to pay for the shift to our postcarbon future (as well as the steep costs of climate change already upon us). Since corporations can be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into their profits, nationalization—the greatest free-market taboo of all—cannot be off the table.

When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a plot to “redistribute wealth” and wage class war, these are the types of policies they most fear. They also understand that, once the reality of climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be transferred not just within wealthy countries but also from the rich countries whose emissions created the crisis to poorer ones that are on the front lines of its effects. Indeed, what makes conservatives (and plenty of liberals) so eager to bury the UN climate negotiations is that they have revived a postcolonial courage in parts of the developing world that many thought was gone for good. Armed with irrefutable scientific facts about who is responsible for global warming and who is suffering its effects first and worst, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are attempting to shed the mantle of “debtor” thrust upon them by decades of International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and are declaring themselves creditors—owed not just money and technology to cope with climate change but “atmospheric space” in which to develop.

* * *

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political “I told you so” since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting “Mother Earth” long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, “Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen” were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.

But imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland president Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and described his personal calling to me as “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.” It looks like the end of the world. It’s not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.

* * *

At the Heartland conference—where everyone from the Ayn Rand Institute to the Heritage Foundation has a table hawking books and pamphlets—these anxieties are close to the surface. Bast is forthcoming about the fact that Heartland’s campaign against climate science grew out of fear about the policies that the science would require. “When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government…. Before we take this step, let’s take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let’s not simply accept this as an article of faith; let’s actually do our own research.” This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.

What Bast is describing—albeit inadvertently—is a phenomenon receiving a great deal of attention these days from a growing subset of social scientists trying to explain the dramatic shifts in belief about climate change. Researchers with Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project have found that political/cultural worldview explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”

Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

For example, among the segment of the US population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views. Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes this tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition.” This refers to the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways designed to protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate deniers today.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn’t with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. We have these types on the Stalinist left, and they exist as well on the neo-Nazi right. By this point in history, free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a similarly marginal status, left to fondle their copies of Free to Choose and Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this fate only because their ideas about minimal government, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, and ExxonMobil.

This points to the limits of theories like “cultural cognition.” The deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview—they are protecting powerful interests that stand to gain from muddying the waters of the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife (possibly much more, but the think tank has stopped publishing its donors’ names, claiming the information was distracting from the “merits of our positions”).

And scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies, and who knows how much of the rest comes from coal. A Greenpeace investigation into another one of the conference speakers, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that since 2002, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests. And fossil fuel companies are not the only economic interests strongly motivated to undermine climate science. If solving this crisis requires the kinds of profound changes to the economic order that I have outlined, then every major corporation benefiting from loose regulation, free trade and low taxes has reason to fear.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much-discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”

But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell, whose bio describes him as a “space architect,” drew plenty of laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn’t so bad: “I moved to Houston intentionally!” (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to be the state’s worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.” And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after a devastating 2003 heat wave killed 14,000 of their people: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.”

Listening to these zingers as an estimated 13 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. (“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas Congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and environment subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels whether rich countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to give money to countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.

* * *

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before. The US Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” These adaptations are what I worry about most.

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How will we deal with resource scarcity?

We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. “Free-market climate solutions,” as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

In The Shock Doctrine, I explore how the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through a brutal ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will be no exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is built to do. The process is already well under way.

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, before everything was broken into single “issues” to be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.” By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

But that isn’t happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often little more than a footnote, when it should be the coup de grâce.

Half of the problem is that progressives—their hands full with soaring unemployment and multiple wars—tend to assume that the big green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate justice movement—drawing the connections between racism, inequality and environmental vulnerability—stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, like Yale’s Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work. For years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert “energy security,” while “free-market solutions” are virtually the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe—nor is it necessary. According to McCright, co-author of the “Cool Dudes” study, the most extreme, intractable climate deniers (many of them conservative white men) are a small minority of the US population—roughly 10 percent. True, this demographic is massively overrepresented in positions of power. But the solution to that problem is not for the majority of people to change their ideas and values. It is to attempt to change the culture so that this small but disproportionately influential minority—and the reckless worldview it represents—wields significantly less power.

* * *

Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement strategy. Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year jail sentence in Utah for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented in May on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the economy. “I believe we should embrace the charges,” he told an interviewer. “No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes, we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change—of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society.” He added, “I think once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we expect.”

When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement fused with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely sounded to most like a pipe dream. But just five months later, with Occupy Wall Street chapters seizing squares and parks in hundreds of cities, it sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many Americans had been hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts, from the practical to the spiritual.

Though climate change was something of an afterthought in the movement’s early texts, an ecological consciousness was woven into OWS from the start—from the sophisticated “gray water” filtration system that uses dishwater to irrigate plants at Zuccotti Park, to the scrappy community garden planted at Occupy Portland. Occupy Boston’s laptops and cellphones are powered by bicycle generators, and Occupy DC has installed solar panels. Meanwhile, the ultimate symbol of OWS—the human microphone—is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.

And new political connections are being made. The Rainforest Action Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the coal industry, has made common cause with OWS activists taking aim at the bank over foreclosures. Anti-fracking activists have pointed out that the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth to keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the profits flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the climate movement out of the lobbyists’ offices and into the streets (and jail cells). Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone concerned about the corporate takeover of democracy need look no further than the corrupt process that led the State Department to conclude that a pipeline carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of the most sensitive land in the country would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” As 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu put it, “If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s State Department and the halls of Congress, it’s time for the people to occupy Wall Street.”

But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power. As Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration in the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over the past decade—in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, in economic localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, and in the co-op sector. Already a group at OWS is cooking up plans to launch the movement’s first green workers’ co-op (a printing press); local food activists have made the call to “Occupy the Food System!”; and November 20 is “Occupy Rooftops”—a coordinated effort to use crowd-sourcing to buy solar panels for community buildings.

Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities while reducing emissions; they do so in a way that systematically disperses power—the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1 percent. Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker Cooperatives in the South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct democracy that thousands are having in plazas and parks has been, for many, “like flexing a muscle you didn’t know you had.” And, he says, now they want more democracy—not just at a meeting but also in their community planning and in their workplaces.

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly sets the OWS moment apart. The Occupiers—holding signs that said Greed Is Gross and I Care About You—decided early on not to confine their protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying—in highly visible ways—radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction from the “real” struggles. In the rocky future we have already made inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

Watch Naomi, Michael Moore, and Others Discuss What's Next for Occupy Wall Street Movement: Sponsored by The Nation magazine at The New School in New York: November 12, 2011

Naomi Klein
The Nation
COLUMNIST

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, fellow at The Nation Institute and author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Published worldwide in September 2007, The Shock Doctrine is slated to be translated into seventeen languages to date. The six-minute companion film, created by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men, was an Official Selection of the 2007 Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals and a viral phenomenon as well, downloaded over one million times. Klein's previous book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies was also an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty-eight languages, with over a million copies in print. A collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in 2002. Klein's regular column for The Nation and The Guardian is distributed internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004 her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. The same year, she released a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories, The Take, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. The film was an official selection of the Venice Biennale and won the best documentary jury prize at the American Film Institute’s Film Festival in Los Angeles. Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.

How To Sustain and Expand the Occupy Wall Street Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:44:00 +0000

http://www.thenation.com/article/165117/ten-things-you-can-do-sustain-occupy-movement

All,

Excellent and important advice for grassroots organizers and regular citizens alike. Useful and necessary...

Kofi

Ten Things You Can Do to Sustain the Occupy Movement
The Nation
Editorial
December 13, 2011

[Conceived by Walter Moseley and co-edited by Rae Gomes]

Alice Walker has noted that one of the failures in our collective memory of the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham is that we have forgotten the names and activist leanings of the four girls—Carole, Denise, Addie Mae and Cynthia—who are often merely reported to be four black girls who died in the bombings. In fact, the burgeoning activists were preparing to give a presentation about civil rights at the church’s annual Youth Day program. Rosa Parks, before she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, had just finished a course on nonviolent action [1]. To neglect the activist background and intention of these women is to believe falsely that historic moments like the civil rights movement “just happen.” In fact, years of organizing and strategizing bring about their birth. Travis Holloway [2], a poet, political philosopher and activist at Occupy Wall Street, believes this movement has the potential to go beyond mere words and slogans (though, he writes in a recent piece [3], these help), and like the civil rights movement, to effect real change. Along with suggestions from a wide range of activists, here are “Ten Things” to keep the Occupy movement going and build a foundation for long-term change.

1. We are the 99 percent. A movement of the 99 percent must be inclusive in its makeup and its goals. “The issues of the bottom of the 99 percent have to move to the top of the agenda [4],” writes Elias Holtz. Be sure that the movement involves those of all backgrounds, sexual orientations, religious and cultural affiliations and work towards representing the movement through women and people of color. Engage community leaders and ask them what are the most pressing issues they’re facing and fight alongside them. Read organizer Paulina Gonzalez’s experience at Occupy LA [5].

2. Whose streets? Our streets! Crackdowns on encampments means the movement shifts from holding a space to major public events, actions on the street, and horizontal, online organizing forums. Join a working group [6] according to your interest and stay updated on major days of action [7].

3. Imagine all the people. Rallies aren’t the only form of protest. Be creative and don’t forget to surprise. If your opponent is counting on noisy drum circles or big signs, try a silent march or vigil (like the students at UC Davis [8]) or looking like your opponent by walking the streets in business suits [9]. For ideas and inspiration, read Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action [10]. Some ideas include boycotts, mock awards, mock elections, mock funerals, prayer and worship (as a symbolic public act), silence, teach-ins, refusal of public support, etc. Get more creative action ideas from the YesLab [11].

4. This is what democracy looks like. The value of top-down organization is no longer self-evident—not only in government, given the lack of trust in political representatives [12], but also in our everyday jobs and institutions. Consider adopting a horizontal decision-making structure. Here are the principles of workplace democracy [13] and some people who practice it. [14]

5. Occupy the future. Set major, future events now to define the agenda and the permanence of the movement, then use the winter to network in order to better mobilize in the spring. Community organizations, churches and labor have real connections with the community and add support and energy to existing movements. Go to OrganizingUpgrade [15]for ideas on how to build and maintain connections. And don’t let Facebook leave out your grandma.

6. Occupy your life. Everyone has an opportunity to act out the ideals and goals of the Occupiers in his/her everyday life. We may not be able to leave jobs that are inconsistent with our values, but reflecting on our own feelings and opinions can make us stronger and influence others. Check out Occupy Yourself [16]for the holiday season and beyond. Read this article [17]and watch this video [18] to rethink your allegiance to popular brands.

7. Boycott the 1 percent. Take on a corporation or person that in their actions embody the worst of greed Whoarethe1percent [19]. If you are in a non-union workplace, consider the benefits of worker solidarity when confronting unfair wages or work conditions. Many union organizers are willing and prepared to help you form a union with your fellow workers [20].

8. Study. Winter is a time to learn more about economic inequality and real strategies for resistance. Schedule a teach-in [21] at an Occupy event or consider attending one (schedule of NYC teach-ins here [22]). Read “There Are Realistic Alternatives [10]” for a crash course on nonviolent resistance and browse the OWS Library [23].

9. Nonviolent resistance is five parts organizing, four parts media and one part action. One of the major challenges and successes of organizing is to get media to report on an event. Designate a media person whose sole goal is to pitch to reporters, build relationships, update them on actions, and report back to members. Just keep reiterating the main themes of the movement. You may feel like a broken record, but few things are more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Go to Pitching to news outlets [24] for more suggestions.

10. Occupy education. Occupy the DOE [25] was a great way the movement showed it could shift from the streets to strategic action by protesting the lack in the structures that instruct. Identify student loan corporations [26] and colleges with the most atrocious tuition hikes. If you are a public university student, connect and collaborate with other schools within your network to protest tuition hikes that most state schools are undergoing. Go to Occupy Student Debt Campaign [27] to learn more.

A Couple More Things:

11. Exit Strategy Always have one. Be imaginative enough to see possible outcomes of the movement and always have a plan for anything that arises.

12. Occupy “Other Things.” Think we missed out on a fundamental piece of advice or suggested action? Think we were utterly wrong about one of them? Send your suggestions, corrections and slams to nationtenthings@gmail.com [28].

Conceived by Walter Moseley and co-edited by Rae Gomes.

Links:

[1] http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/what-is-icnc
[2] http://sbsuny.academia.edu/TravisHolloway/About
[3] http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3307/travis_holloway_performing_art/
[4] http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/12/next-step-for-the-occupy-movement-uniting-labor-and-the-dispossessed/
[5] http://www.narconews.com/nntv/video.php?vid=43
[6] http://www.nycga.net/
[7] http://www.nycga.net/events/
[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8775ZmNGFY8&feature=player_embedded
[9] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Airlinepilotswallstreet.jpeg
[10] http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/TARA.pdf
[11] http://www.yeslab.org/projects
[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/world/as-scorn-for-vote-grows-protests-surge-around-globe.html?pagewanted=all
[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
[14] http://workplacedemocracy.com/
[15] http://www.organizingupgrade.com/
[16] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/this-thanksgiving-occupy-_b_1110246.html
[17] http://www.alternet.org/rights/152043/10_faux_progressive_companies_..._with_some_dirty_secrets?page=entire
[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
[19] http://whoarethe1percent.com/
[20] http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/how/
[21] http://www.nycga.net/groups/education-and-empowerment/contact/
[22] http://www.nycga.net/groups/education-and-empowerment/events/
[23] http://www.librarything.com/catalog/OWSLibrary
[24] http://occupywinning.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/pitching-news-outlets1.pdf
[25] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmjMickJMA&feature=share
[26] http://www.alternet.org/story/153200/meet_5_big_lenders_profiting_from_the_ percent241_trillion_student_debt_bubble_ percent28hint percent3A_you_know_some_of_them_already percent29/
[27] http://www.occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/our-principles/
[28] mailto:nationtenthings@gmail.com

President Obama, the Democratic Party, and the Real Stakes of the 2012 Presidential Election

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:25:00 +0000

President Obama speaks to the crowd at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kan. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters / December 6, 2011)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/06/michael-tomasky-obama-finally-seizes-the-moment-in-his-kansas-speech.html

All,

While on the surface much of what Obama said in his Kansan speech tuesday was obviously "positive", necessary, and yes, long overdue (to say the least!), it simply remains to be seen if either this President or the Democratic Party generally will have the courage to seriously advocate, propose, and fight for specific progressive public policies over the next year that concretely address and aggressively attempts to resolve the raging issues of national unemployment, housing foreclosures, the corrupt economic (and political) domination of the banking industry, the ongoing healthcare crisis, the massive structural tyranny of corporate capitalism, and the fierce ideological and political opposition of the far rightwing in Congress and elsewhere who absolutely control the Republican and Tea parties in this country. So while it's crystal clear that the crypto-fascist national right and its pathologically madhatter candidates MUST be thoroughly defeated in both the presidential and congressional elections in 2012 it's equally clear that we as citizens must demand that there is also an actual/real/concrete (i.e. NOT merely "symbolic") strongly progressive political and ideological ALTERNATIVE to the general malaise, anger, alienation, fear, and inertia that is currently paralyzing the country...

Kofi

Obama Finally Seizes the Moment in His Kansas Speech

Obama’s rousing remarks in Kansas on Tuesday were long overdue, setting the stage for a national showdown with the GOP over the middle class, says Michael Tomasky.

by Michael Tomasky
December 7, 2011
Los Angeles Times

Remember the days when a Barack Obama speech was an event? Can’t blame you if you don’t. It sure has been a while. He hasn’t uttered a particularly inspiring or unexpected sentence in public in ages. But Tuesday’s “Teddy Roosevelt” speech in Osawatomie, Kans., broke the losing streak and then some. This was Obama’s best speech in a very, very long time, and it showed that he and his political people have finally figured out how to express the new, quasi-populist mood in this country in a way that sounds utterly majoritarian and unthreatening—and that backs the GOP into the corner of defending things that most Americans find indefensible. The tide is turning, and while it wasn’t the president who turned it, at least it’s clear that he understands the moment and seizing it.

You’ve read by now the money quotes, about how restoring growth, prosperity, balance, and fairness are “the defining issue[s] of our time” and about how this is a “make or break moment for the middle class.” But there was much more to the speech than sound bites. Ever since Republicans and conservatives introduced trickle-down economics to the political lexicon 30-something years ago, the Democratic Party has offered responses only intermittently. Bill Clinton did it well, with “putting people first.” But even that phrase was built chiefly around the idea of fairness. Where the Democrats have been less successful is in talking about growth. Indeed, growth, a word that sounds perfectly apple-pie-ish on its face, is a somewhat charged word in liberal policy circles, and for some very good reasons: In the past three decades, the U.S. economy has experienced massive growth in output, but wages for many have been stagnant. This wasn’t the case in the postwar years. So lots of liberals came to mistrust growth, and its especially evil cousin, productivity, which has soared during the era of wage stagnation.

With this speech, Obama argued clearly that growth and not just fairness was a Democratic goal, and that the way to achieve both at the same time is through an economics that says that “in America, we are greater together—when everyone engages in fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.” And that, he said, means building up the middle class. Again, on its face, this may sound obvious. But for many years Democrats, riven by intense arguments over core economic policies, have found it to be anything but. A unifying and simple theme like this has proven surprisingly elusive for many reasons—not least many Democrats’ fear of being accused of class warfare. Obama had a pretty good line for that too, by the way: “This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare.”

I counted 25 mentions of “middle class” in the speech. Finally—maybe, if he keeps it up—the Democrats have a broad and coherent response to trickle-down economics: middle-class economics. It’s ridiculously simple. It’s like a melody in a new pop song that you hear, and it’s so catchy and instantly memorable that you can’t believe that no one has written it until now.

But no one quite has, not even Clinton, for all his formidable skills. And one reason no one quite has is that the moment has never been as amenable as the current one to its resonance. The Occupy Wall Streeters, whether they bathe or don’t bathe or drum or don’t drum, articulated it first. A strong majority of Americans is fed up with stagnation, with inequality, with the unfairness of the economic system. The minority—the Tea Party, Wall Street, and its paid agents in the GOP—are vocal and powerful. But the majority’s views are clear. The time has finally come to change the political economy.

Next November, if people are talking about how Obama is the guy who has made it patriotic to be on the side of the middle class, then the Republican candidate will be in a heap of trouble.

The other deft move Obama made with the speech was to turn economics—this middle-class economics—into an act of patriotism. Obama would never use rhetoric as stark as that employed by Elizabeth Warren in the famous video clip where she said no one ever got rich on his own, but he did channel her in his own way toward the end of the speech when he quoted former Intel CEO Andy Grove on the debt he feels to the United States, and when he spoke of the “broader obligation” corporations should feel (beyond their shareholders) to the country that made their success possible.

There were few specific policies in the speech—a downside to some, and maybe a flaw. A few policies exist—the payroll-tax fight—and others, one hopes, will come. But what was important here was the big picture. This is the first speech of Obama’s career, at least his career as a presidential candidate or president, where I felt he achieved a comfortable marriage of his own civic-republican beliefs about national community and principles of political economy that are plainly but not off-puttingly progressive. That he invoked the ghost of a Republican president to do it is so much the better. TR wouldn’t want much to do with Paul Ryan, and most Americans don’t either.

Now, Obama has to keep this theme going. One speech, even a very good one, doesn’t amount to much. But if, 11 months from now, people are talking with their neighbors about how, for all his faults, Obama is the guy who’s on the side of the middle class and who has made it patriotic to say so, then the Republican candidate will be in a heap of trouble. But more importantly, the country will stand ready to reverse and once and for all reject the trickle-down economic philosophy that has been a con from the day it was bruited.

Barack Obama
U.S. Politics ©2011
The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-text-obama-speech-kansas-20111206,0,7741368,full.story

Read the full text of President Obama's economic speech in Kansas below:

December 6, 2011,

The following is the full transcript of President Obama's remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas, Tuesday as provided by the White House.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I want to start by thanking a few folks who've joined us today. We've got the mayor of Osawatomie, Phil Dudley is here. (Applause.) We have your superintendent Gary French in the house. (Applause.) And we have the principal of Osawatomie High, Doug Chisam. (Applause.) And I have brought your former governor, who is doing now an outstanding job as Secretary of Health and Human Services -- Kathleen Sebelius is in the house. (Applause.) We love Kathleen.

Well, it is great to be back in the state of Tex -- (laughter) -- state of Kansas. I was giving Bill Self a hard time, he was here a while back. As many of you know, I have roots here. (Applause.) I'm sure you're all familiar with the Obamas of Osawatomie. (Laughter.) Actually, I like to say that I got my name from my father, but I got my accent -- and my values -- from my mother. (Applause.) She was born in Wichita. (Applause.) Her mother grew up in Augusta. Her father was from El Dorado. So my Kansas roots run deep.

My grandparents served during World War II. He was a soldier in Patton's Army; she was a worker on a bomber assembly line. And together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and over fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried -- no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter how you started out. (Applause.)

And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known. It was here in America that the most productive workers, the most innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth. And you know what? Every American shared in that pride and in that success -- from those in the executive suites to those in middle management to those on the factory floor. (Applause.) So you could have some confidence that if you gave it your all, you'd take enough home to raise your family and send your kids to school and have your health care covered, put a little away for retirement. Today, we're still home to the world's most productive workers. We're still home to the world's most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments -- wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren't -- and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.

Now, for many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over this harsh reality. But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn't afford them, or even sometimes understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets -- and huge bonuses -- made with other people's money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn't have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we're still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people -- innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag.

And ever since, there's been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness. Throughout the country, it's sparked protests and political movements -- from the tea party to the people who've been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. It's left Washington in a near-constant state of gridlock. It's been the topic of heated and sometimes colorful discussion among the men and women running for president. (Laughter.)

But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what's at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.

Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

I am here to say they are wrong. (Applause.) I'm here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we're greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. (Applause.) These aren't Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They're American values. And we have to reclaim them. (Applause.)

You see, this isn't the first time America has faced this choice. At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world's industrial giant, we had to decide: Would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were being controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because there were people who thought massive inequality and exploitation of people was just the price you pay for progress.

Theodore Roosevelt disagreed. He was the Republican son of a wealthy family. He praised what the titans of industry had done to create jobs and grow the economy. He believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It's led to a prosperity and a standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world.

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. (Applause.) He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest. And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for consumers with better services and better prices. And today, they still must. He fought to make sure businesses couldn't profit by exploiting children or selling food or medicine that wasn't safe. And today, they still can't.

And in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here to Osawatomie and he laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. “Our country,” he said, “…means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy…of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” (Applause.)

Now, for this, Roosevelt was called a radical. He was called a socialist -- (laughter) -- even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women -- (applause) -- insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax. (Applause.)

Today, over 100 years later, our economy has gone through another transformation. Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and it's made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere they want in the world. And many of you know firsthand the painful disruptions this has caused for a lot of Americans.

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn't just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet.

Today, even higher-skilled jobs, like accountants and middle management can be outsourced to countries like China or India. And if you're somebody whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don't have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages or better benefits, especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory.

Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history. And what did it get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class -- things like education and infrastructure, science and technology, Medicare and Social Security.

Remember that in those same years, thanks to some of the same folks who are now running Congress, we had weak regulation, we had little oversight, and what did it get us? Insurance companies that jacked up people's premiums with impunity and denied care to patients who were sick, mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn't afford, a financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy.

We simply cannot return to this brand of “you're on your own” economics if we're serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country. (Applause.) We know that it doesn't result in a strong economy. It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and in its future. We know it doesn't result in a prosperity that trickles down. It results in a prosperity that's enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.

Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. I'm not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars. I'm saying people who make a million dollars every single year. For the top one hundredth of 1 percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her worker now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent.

Now, this kind of inequality -- a level that we haven't seen since the Great Depression -- hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, when people are slipping out of the middle class, it drags down the entire economy from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity, of strong consumers all across the country. That's why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars he made. It's also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. (Applause.) It leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them, that our elected representatives aren't looking out for the interests of most Americans.

But there's an even more fundamental issue at stake. This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that's at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people -- we tell our kids -- that in this country, even if you're born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That's why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. You know, a few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance had fallen to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it's estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class -- 33 percent.

It's heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That's inexcusable. It is wrong. (Applause.) It flies in the face of everything that we stand for. (Applause.)

Now, fortunately, that's not a future that we have to accept, because there's another view about how we build a strong middle class in this country -- a view that's truer to our history, a vision that's been embraced in the past by people of both parties for more than 200 years.

It's not a view that we should somehow turn back technology or put up walls around America. It's not a view that says we should punish profit or success or pretend that government knows how to fix all of society's problems. It is a view that says in America we are greater together -- when everyone engages in fair play and everybody gets a fair shot and everybody does their fair share. (Applause.)

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today's economy? Well, it starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is we'll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who's best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages, who's best at busting unions, who's best at letting companies pollute as much as they want. That's a race to the bottom that we can't win, and we shouldn't want to win that race. (Applause.) Those countries don't have a strong middle class. They don't have our standard of living.

The race we want to win, the race we can win is a race to the top -- the race for good jobs that pay well and offer middle-class security. Businesses will create those jobs in countries with the highest-skilled, highest-educated workers, the most advanced transportation and communication, the strongest commitment to research and technology.

The world is shifting to an innovation economy and nobody does innovation better than America. Nobody does it better. (Applause.) No one has better colleges. Nobody has better universities. Nobody has a greater diversity of talent and ingenuity. No one's workers or entrepreneurs are more driven or more daring. The things that have always been our strengths match up perfectly with the demands of the moment.

But we need to meet the moment. We've got to up our game. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission -- a national mission. (Applause.) Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don't have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn't be laying off good teachers right now -- we should be hiring them. (Applause.) We shouldn't be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more. (Applause.) We shouldn't be making it harder to afford college -- we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn't rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went. (Applause.)

In today's innovation economy, we also need a world-class commitment to science and research, the next generation of high-tech manufacturing. Our factories and our workers shouldn't be idle. We should be giving people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines and semiconductors and high-powered batteries. And by the way, if we don't have an economy that's built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best and brightest won't all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance. (Applause.) Because if we want an economy that's built to last, we need more of those young people in science and engineering. (Applause.) This country should not be known for bad debt and phony profits. We should be known for creating and selling products all around the world that are stamped with three proud words: Made in America. (Applause.)

Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in the places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, communicate with the rest of the world. And that's why the over 1 million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed, they shouldn't be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and our bridges, laying down faster railroads and broadband, modernizing our schools -- (applause) -- all the things other countries are already doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.

Yes, business, and not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we've always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed. (Applause.) And historically, that hasn't been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt worked with Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II -- including my grandfather, Stanley Dunham -- the chance to go to college on the G.I. Bill. It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son of Kansas -- (applause) -- who started the Interstate Highway System, and doubled down on science and research to stay ahead of the Soviets.

Of course, those productive investments cost money. They're not free. And so we've also paid for these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share. Look, if we had unlimited resources, no one would ever have to pay any taxes and we would never have to cut any spending. But we don't have unlimited resources. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices.

Today that choice is very clear. To reduce our deficit, I've already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law and I've proposed trillions more, including reforms that would lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. (Applause.)

But in order to structurally close the deficit, get our fiscal house in order, we have to decide what our priorities are. Now, most immediately, short term, we need to extend a payroll tax cut that's set to expire at the end of this month. (Applause.) If we don't do that, 160 million Americans, including most of the people here, will see their taxes go up by an average of $1,000 starting in January and it would badly weaken our recovery. That's the short term.

In the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education and research and high-tech manufacturing -- all those things that helped make us an economic superpower? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can't afford to do both. That is not politics. That's just math. (Laughter and applause.)

Now, so far, most of my Republican friends in Washington have refused under any circumstance to ask the wealthiest Americans to go to the same tax rate they were paying when Bill Clinton was president. So let's just do a trip down memory lane here.
Keep in mind, when President Clinton first proposed these tax increases, folks in Congress predicted they would kill jobs and lead to another recession. Instead, our economy created nearly 23 million jobs and we eliminated the deficit. (Applause.) Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century. This isn't like in the early ‘50s, when the top tax rate was over 90 percent. This isn't even like the early ‘80s, when the top tax rate was about 70 percent. Under President Clinton, the top rate was only about 39 percent. Today, thanks to loopholes and shelters, a quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of you, millions of middle-class families. Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent. One percent.

That is the height of unfairness. It is wrong. (Applause.) It's wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker, maybe earns $50,000 a year, should pay a higher tax rate than somebody raking in $50 million. (Applause.) It's wrong for Warren Buffett's secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. (Applause.) And by the way, Warren Buffett agrees with me. (Laughter.) So do most Americans -- Democrats, independents and Republicans. And I know that many of our wealthiest citizens would agree to contribute a little more if it meant reducing the deficit and strengthening the economy that made their success possible.

This isn't about class warfare. This is about the nation's welfare. It's about making choices that benefit not just the people who've done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get into the middle class, and the economy as a whole.

Finally, a strong middle class can only exist in an economy where everyone plays by the same rules, from Wall Street to Main Street. (Applause.) As infuriating as it was for all of us, we rescued our major banks from collapse, not only because a full-blown financial meltdown would have sent us into a second Depression, but because we need a strong, healthy financial sector in this country.

But part of the deal was that we wouldn't go back to business as usual. And that's why last year we put in place new rules of the road that refocus the financial sector on what should be their core purpose: getting capital to the entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and financing millions of families who want to buy a home or send their kids to college.

Now, we're not all the way there yet, and the banks are fighting us every inch of the way. But already, some of these reforms are being implemented.

If you're a big bank or risky financial institution, you now have to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you'll pay the bills if you fail, so that taxpayers are never again on the hook for Wall Street's mistakes. (Applause.) There are also limits on the size of banks and new abilities for regulators to dismantle a firm that is going under. The new law bans banks from making risky bets with their customers' deposits, and it takes away big bonuses and paydays from failed CEOs, while giving shareholders a say on executive salaries.

This is the law that we passed. We are in the process of implementing it now. All of this is being put in place as we speak. Now, unless you're a financial institution whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers and making risky bets that could damage the entire economy, you should have nothing to fear from these new rules.

Some of you may know, my grandmother worked as a banker for most of her life -- worked her way up, started as a secretary, ended up being a vice president of a bank. And I know from her, and I know from all the people that I've come in contact with, that the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals, they want to do right by their customers. They want to have rules in place that don't put them at a disadvantage for doing the right thing. And yet, Republicans in Congress are fighting as hard as they can to make sure that these rules aren't enforced.

I'll give you a specific example. For the first time in history, the reforms that we passed put in place a consumer watchdog who is charged with protecting everyday Americans from being taken advantage of by mortgage lenders or payday lenders or debt collectors. And the man we nominated for the post, Richard Cordray, is a former attorney general of Ohio who has the support of most attorney generals, both Democrat and Republican, throughout the country. Nobody claims he's not qualified.

But the Republicans in the Senate refuse to confirm him for the job; they refuse to let him do his job. Why? Does anybody here think that the problem that led to our financial crisis was too much oversight of mortgage lenders or debt collectors?

AUDIENCE: No!

THE PRESIDENT: Of course not. Every day we go without a consumer watchdog is another day when a student, or a senior citizen, or a member of our Armed Forces -- because they are very vulnerable to some of this stuff -- could be tricked into a loan that they can't afford -- something that happens all the time. And the fact is that financial institutions have plenty of lobbyists looking out for their interests. Consumers deserve to have someone whose job it is to look out for them. (Applause.) And I intend to make sure they do. (Applause.) And I want you to hear me, Kansas: I will veto any effort to delay or defund or dismantle the new rules that we put in place. (Applause.)

We shouldn't be weakening oversight and accountability. We should be strengthening oversight and accountability. I'll give you another example. Too often, we've seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there's no price for being a repeat offender. No more. I'll be calling for legislation that makes those penalties count so that firms don't see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business. (Applause.)

The fact is this crisis has left a huge deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit of trust. At minimum, they should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis. They should be working to keep responsible homeowners in their home. We're going to keep pushing them to provide more time for unemployed homeowners to look for work without having to worry about immediately losing their house.

The big banks should increase access to refinancing opportunities to borrowers who haven't yet benefited from historically low interest rates. And the big banks should recognize that precisely because these steps are in the interest of middle-class families and the broader economy, it will also be in the banks' own long-term financial interest. What will be good for consumers over the long term will be good for the banks. (Applause.)

Investing in things like education that give everybody a chance to succeed. A tax code that makes sure everybody pays their fair share. And laws that make sure everybody follows the rules. That's what will transform our economy. That's what will grow our middle class again. In the end, rebuilding this economy based on fair play, a fair shot, and a fair share will require all of us to see that we have a stake in each other's success. And it will require all of us to take some responsibility.

It will require parents to get more involved in their children's education. It will require students to study harder. (Applause.) It will require some workers to start studying all over again. It will require greater responsibility from homeowners not to take out mortgages they can't afford. They need to remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

It will require those of us in public service to make government more efficient and more effective, more consumer-friendly, more responsive to people's needs. That's why we're cutting programs that we don't need to pay for those we do. (Applause.) That's why we've made hundreds of regulatory reforms that will save businesses billions of dollars. That's why we're not just throwing money at education, we're challenging schools to come up with the most innovative reforms and the best results.

And it will require American business leaders to understand that their obligations don't just end with their shareholders. Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, put it best. He said, “There is another obligation I feel personally, given that everything I've achieved in my career, and a lot of what Intel has achieved…were made possible by a climate of democracy, an economic climate and investment climate provided by the United States.”

This broader obligation can take many forms. At a time when the cost of hiring workers in China is rising rapidly, it should mean more CEOs deciding that it's time to bring jobs back to the United States -- (applause) -- not just because it's good for business, but because it's good for the country that made their business and their personal success possible. (Applause.)

I think about the Big Three auto companies who, during recent negotiations, agreed to create more jobs and cars here in America, and then decided to give bonuses not just to their executives, but to all their employees, so that everyone was invested in the company's success. (Applause.)

I think about a company based in Warroad, Minnesota. It's called Marvin Windows and Doors. During the recession, Marvin's competitors closed dozens of plants, let hundreds of workers go. But Marvin's did not lay off a single one of their 4,000 or so employees -- not one. In fact, they've only laid off workers once in over a hundred years. Mr. Marvin's grandfather even kept his eight employees during the Great Depression.

Now, at Marvin's when times get tough, the workers agree to give up some perks and some pay, and so do the owners. As one owner said, “You can't grow if you're cutting your lifeblood -- and that's the skills and experience your workforce delivers.” (Applause.) For the CEO of Marvin's, it's about the community. He said, “These are people we went to school with. We go to church with them. We see them in the same restaurants. Indeed, a lot of us have married local girls and boys. We could be anywhere, but we are in Warroad.”

That's how America was built. That's why we're the greatest nation on Earth. That's what our greatest companies understand. Our success has never just been about survival of the fittest. It's about building a nation where we're all better off. We pull together. We pitch in. We do our part. We believe that hard work will pay off, that responsibility will be rewarded, and that our children will inherit a nation where those values live on. (Applause.)

And it is that belief that rallied thousands of Americans to Osawatomie -- (applause) -- maybe even some of your ancestors -- on a rain-soaked day more than a century ago. By train, by wagon, on buggy, bicycle, on foot, they came to hear the vision of a man who loved this country and was determined to perfect it.

“We are all Americans,” Teddy Roosevelt told them that day. “Our common interests are as broad as the continent.” In the final years of his life, Roosevelt took that same message all across this country, from tiny Osawatomie to the heart of New York City, believing that no matter where he went, no matter who he was talking to, everybody would benefit from a country in which everyone gets a fair chance. (Applause.)

And well into our third century as a nation, we have grown and we've changed in many ways since Roosevelt's time. The world is faster and the playing field is larger and the challenges are more complex. But what hasn't changed -- what can never change -- are the values that got us this far. We still have a stake in each other's success. We still believe that this should be a place where you can make it if you try. And we still believe, in the words of the man who called for a New Nationalism all those years ago, “The fundamental rule of our national life,” he said, “the rule which underlies all others -- is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.” And I believe America is on the way up. (Applause.)

Thank you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America.

Robert Reich On What We All Need To Know and Understand About The U.S. Political Economy Right Now

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:12:00 +0000

All,

The truly progressive and brilliant former Secretary of Labor and presently Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley (and 2011 Mario Savio Memorial Lecturer) Robert Reich on What Everybody Really Needs To Know About The U.S. Economy RIGHT NOW...

Kofi

Arundhati Roy On the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Renewed Fight for a New Political Imagination and Language

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:57:00 +0000

Arundhati Roy, speaking at a Harvard conference in April, 2010. (Photo: jeanbaptisteparis)

http://www.truth-out.org/arundhati-roy-people-who-created-crisis-will-not-be-ones-come-solution/1322765555

All,

Arundhati Roy is one of the most important, creatively dynamic, and consistently courageous public intellectuals, writers, and radical activists of our time in the world and a major personal political and intellectual hero of mine. Roy never fails to address in a very lucid, eloquent, and independent manner the major concerns, issues, and crises facing our planet today and she is a tireless and relentless force in the global struggle to defeat the contemporary ravages of capitalism, racism, sexism, and imperialism. She is also one of the finest WRITERS--period--of the late 20th/early 21st centuries...

Kofi

Arundhati Roy: "The People Who Created the Crisis Will Not Be the Ones That Come Up With a Solution"
Wednesday 30 November 2011
by Arun Gupta
The Guardian UK | Op-Ed

The prize-winning author of The God of Small Things talks about why she is drawn to the Occupy movement and the need to reclaim language and meaning.

Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my colleague Michelle holds an audio recorder to my cellphone. At the other end of the line is Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, who is some 2,000 miles away, driving to Boston.

"This is uniquely American," I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it's become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.

This is the secret behind the Occupy Wall Street movement that Roy visited before the police crackdowns started. Sure, ending pervasive corporate control of the political system is on the lips of almost every occupier we meet. But this is nothing new. What's different is most Americans now live in poverty, on the edge, or fear a descent into the abyss. It's why a majority (at least of those who have an opinion) still support Occupy Wall Street even after weeks of disinformation and repression.

In this exclusive interview for the Guardian, Roy offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America's political discourse and seized the world's attention.

AG: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?

AR: How could I not want to visit? Given what I've been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People's University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.

AG: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?

AR: I don't think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.

AG: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?

AR: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

AG: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?

AR: I don't know whether I'm qualified to answer that, because I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that's coming up. I've seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the "better guy", in this case Barack Obama, who's actually expanding wars all over the world. Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

AG: Your essays, such as "The Greater Common Good" and "Walking with the Comrades", concern corporations, the military and state violently occupying other people's lands in India. How do those occupations and resistances relate to the Occupy Wall Street movement?

AR: I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.

AG: You've written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?

AR: We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word "capitalism", but once you've actually seen, let's say, what's happening in India and the United States – that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says "democracy" is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. Money need not be our only reward. Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.

The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

AG: What would the different imagination look like?

AR: The home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land. That cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But in the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies, and a huge battle is being waged. These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may "progress" at their cost.

India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

That is why we must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.

AG: In the United States, as I'm sure you're aware, political discourse is obsessed with the middle class, but the Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse. Could you comment on that?

AR: It's so much a reversal of what you see in India. In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms. Whereas, here, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

AG: As a writer, what do you make of the term "occupation", which has now somehow been reclaimed as a positive term when it's always been one of the most heinous terms in political language?

AR: As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word "occupation" on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, "Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq," "Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan," "Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine." The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.

AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we've talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama's record, they say, "Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it's not his fault." Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?

AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. We have a right wing that is so vicious and so openly wicked, which is the Baratiya Janata party (BJP), and then we have the Congress party, which does almost worse things, but does it by night. And people feel that the only choices they have are to vote for this or for that. And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn't have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. Even if we do vote, we should just spend less time and intellectual energy on our choices and keep our eye on the ball.

AG: So it's also a failure of the imagination?

AR: It's walking into a pretty elaborate trap. But it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I'll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there's no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time. So I'm not going to waste even three minutes of my time, if I have to speak, asking people to vote for this one or for that one.

AG: One question that a lot of people have asked me: when is your next novel coming out?

AR: I have no answer to that question … I really don't know. Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

AG: So this inspires you, as a novelist, the movement?

AR: Well, it comforts me, let's just say. I feel in so many ways rewarded for having done what I did, along with hundreds of other people, even the times when it seemed futile.

• Michelle Fawcett contributed to this article. She and Arun Gupta are covering the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon, Alternet and other outlets. Their work is available at occupyusatoday.com

ARUN GUPTA
Arun Gupta is the editor of The Indypendent.

OccupyCal Protest Rally at University of California Berkeley Campus, Nov. 15, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:16:00 +0000

General Assembly in front of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley

PHOTOS BY CHULEENAN

All,

On Monday evening, November 15, 2011, Chuleenan and I participated in a massive rally and protest sponsored by OccupyCal at Sproul Plaza on the University of California, Berkeley campus in which over 4,000 students and community citizens and activists declared our collective intellectual, spiritual, political and ideological solidarity with the national Occupy Wall Street movement and demanded that the state of California honestly address the crucial issues of the need for real democracy in public education, the exploitive and corrupting influences of the banks and Wall Street on the U.S. economy generally, and the critical political, cultural, and economic relationships between higher education, health care reform, financial regulation, systemic structural investment, and science and technology in a global context. Former Secretary of Labor and currently Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley Robert Reich was the keynote speaker who had been chosen by student groups to give the annual Mario Savio memorial lecture in honor of the great and profound legacy left by the late UC, Berkeley philosophy school graduate and leader of the famed Free Speech Movement in 1964 Mario Savio (1942-1996). Reich gave his inspiring speech on the exact same steps on the Plaza directly in front of Sproul Hall that Savio gave his famous speech in December of 1964 at the height of the extraordinary campus wide Free Speech Movement (see Video of that incredible speech below). BTW: The rally and Reich's speech were terrific. Mario would have been very proud of us...

Kofi

MARIO SAVIO AT SPROUL HALL
DECEMBER 2, 1964

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

--Mario Savio, University of California, Berkeley Sproul Hall--December 2, 1964

"Savio's moral clarity, his eloquence, and his democratic style of leadership inspired thousands of fellow Berkeley students to protest university regulations which severely limited political speech and activity on campus. The non-violent campaign culminated in the largest mass arrest in American history, drew widespread faculty support, and resulted in a revision of university rules to permit political speech and organising. This significant advance for student freedom rapidly spread to countless other colleges and universities across the country."

[Via stonecast, see here: http://www.savio.org/who_was_mario.html

The Rise of Occupy Cal--Thousands Rally and Protest at University of California, Berkeley in Solidarity with the National Occupy Wall Street Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:56:00 +0000

Francisco Alvarado yells during an anti-Wall Street rally near Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley during an Occupy Cal rally, Nov. 15, 2011, in Berkeley, Calif. (AP)

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich speaks to Anti-Wall Street activists near Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley during an Occupy Cal rally, Nov. 15, 2011, in Berkeley, Calif. (Credit: AP)

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57325649/occupy-protesters-rebuild-uc-berkeley-camp/

November 16, 2011

"Occupy" protesters rebuild UC Berkeley camp

BERKELEY, Calif. - Anti-Wall Street activists began rebuilding their tent encampment on the steps of the University of California, Berkeley student plaza and cheered wildly when former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich implored them to take a moral stand against the very rich owning so much of America's wealth.

A daylong strike and peaceful demonstrations against big banks and education cuts culminated in some 4,000 people rallying at the Reich speech on the steps of the same student plaza that first launched the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.

"The days of apathy are over, folks," Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said to a roaring crowd at Sproul Hall on Tuesday. "We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy were built. There are some people out there who say we cannot afford education any longer, we cannot provide social services for the poor ... but how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before?"

The protests were disrupted earlier in the day by a campus shooting in inside the Haas School of Business. Officials did not know if the suspect was part of the Occupy Cal movement, said Ute Frey, a spokeswoman for the university.

"I just hope it wasn't from the protest or the movement, because that's not what the movement is about," said Sadia Saif, a 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore.

The shooting didn't prevent thousands of students and demonstrators from gathering at the university to vote on a list of demands and await Reich's Mario Savio Lecture, named for the political activist and leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. Savio's impassioned speeches on the same steps of Sproul Hall against the Vietnam War and racial inequality prompted thousands of students to join the movement.

"Every social movement in the last half century or more — it started with moral outrage," Reich said, likening Wall Street to the bullies who battered him when he was an especially short kid. "You understand how important it is to fight the bullies, to protect the powerless."

Protesters also cheered as at least 10 tents were constructed on the steps, less than a week after baton-wielding police clashed with people who tried to defy a campus ban on camping.

Elizabeth de Martelly, a 29-year-old UC Berkeley graduate student, said she was inspired by Reich's comments about social movements born from moral outrage and planned to spend the night in the new encampment.

"That said, I want to see the movement to expand beyond encampments," she said amid the music, light shows and dancing. "But this is a powerful thing for the time being."

The Occupy Cal students were joined by hundreds of Occupy Oakland demonstrators who marched the five miles from Oakland to Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue, chanting, "Here comes Oakland!" Police cleared their tent city outside Oakland City Hall on Monday amid complaints about safety and sanitation, and arrested more than 50 people.

Occupy Cal's general assembly voted in favor of inviting the university's chancellor and board of regents to a debate in early December and sending the educational officials a list of demands, including a tuition rollback to 2009 levels.

They also voted in favor of rebuilding their encampment despite earlier violence.

On Nov. 9, police jabbed students with batons and arrested 40 people as the university sought to uphold a campus ban on camping.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau launched an investigation into allegations that campus police used excessive force. He said videos of the protests were disturbing, and he plans to grant amnesty to all students who were arrested and cited for attempting to block police from removing the tents.

Birgeneau issued a statement to the students and Occupy demonstrators, saying the university leadership shares in their anger and frustration over relentless tuition hikes and the growing burden on their families.

"We all share the distress and anger at the State of California's disinvestment in public higher education," Birgeneau said.

He called on the "political leadership" from Sacramento to come to campus to engage with him and student representatives in a public forum to debate the future of public education. "The issues require bold action and time is short," he said.

Over the past three years, the cash-strapped state has sharply reduced funding to California's public colleges and universities, which has led to steep tuition hikes, course cutbacks, staff layoffs and reduced student enrollment.

Oscar Varela, 21, a fifth-year economics major who helped organize Tuesday's demonstrations, was among the students who tried to block campus police from tearing down the campus encampment last week.

"We want to stay here to prove to the regents and state that we are part of this movement and that we want our tuition to go back to what it used to be, which essentially should be free," Varela said.

Earlier in the day, university officials said a female staff member reported seeing a man with a gun, who was shot by a university police officer within minutes. The condition of the 33-year-old suspect was not immediately known. His name was not released.

Dong Hwan Kim, 27, a senior, said he was terrified when he learned of the shooting.

"The shooting, in addition to what's happening here with the protests, makes the campus feel really tense," Kim said. "This is a historical moment, but it is also really scary at the same time."

Protesters descended on the university after ReFund California, a coalition of student groups and university employee unions, called for a campus strike and teach-ins.

"If the only people who can come here in the future are those who have money, it's going to hurt everyone's educational experience," said Daniel Rodriguez, 28, a graduate student who was conducting an introductory Spanish language class outside.

Mike Davis On the Importance of Grassroots Organizing and Mature Radical Activism in the Occupy Wall Street Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:34:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street, October 10. (Photo: DoctorTongs [4])

http://www.truth-out.org/ten-immodest-commandments-lessons-fumbling-and-bungling-lifetime-activism/1321797658

All,

Mike Davis, the legendary longtime radical leftist organizer and prolific author from Los Angeles ("City of Quartz", "Planet of Slums", "In Praise of Barbarians". "Ecology of Fear", "Prisoners of the American Dream", "Magical Urbanism" etc.) offers some very interesting and useful organizational suggestions about the theoretical and practical direction of the Occupy Movement...

Kofi

Ten Immodest Commandments: Lessons From a Fumbling-and-Bungling Lifetime of Activism Thursday 17 November 2011 by Mike Davis,
The Rag Blog | Op-Ed

A friend in Canada recently asked me if the Sixties’ protests had any important lessons to pass on to the Occupy movement.

I told her that one of the few clear memories that I retain from 45 years ago was a fervent vow never to age into an old fart with lessons to pass on.

But she persisted and the question ultimately aroused my own curiosity. What, indeed, have I learned from my fumbling-and-bungling lifetime of activism?

Well, unequivocally I am a pro at coaxing 1,000 copies of a flyer from a delicate mimeograph stencil before it disintegrates. (I’ve promised my kids to take them to the Smithsonian someday to see one of these infernal devices that powered the civil rights and anti-war movements.)

Other than that, I mainly recall injunctions from older or more experienced comrades that I’ve put to memory as a personal Ten Commandments (like you might find in a diet book or inspirational tract). For what it's worth:

First, the categorical imperative is to organize or rather to facilitate other peoples’ self-organization. Catalyst is good, but organization is better.

Second, leadership must be temporary and subject to recall. The job of a good organizer, as it was often said in the civil rights movement, is to organize herself out of a job, not to become indispensable.

Third, protesters must subvert the media’s constant tendency toward metonymy -- the designation of the whole by a part, the group by an individual. (Consider how bizarre it is, for instance, that we have "Martin Luther King Day" rather than "Civil Rights Movement Day.") Spokespeople should regularly be rotated and when necessary, shot.

Fourth, the same warning applies to the relationship between a movement and individuals who participate as an organized bloc. I very much believe in the necessity of an organic revolutionary left, but groups can only claim authenticity if they give priority to building the struggle and keep no secret agenda from other participants.

Fifth, as we learned the hard way in the 1960s, consensual democracy is not identical to participatory democracy. For affinity groups and communes, consensus decision-making may work admirably, but for any large or long-term protest, some form of representative democracy is essential to allow the broadest and most equal participation. The devil, as always, is in the details: ensuring that any delegate can be recalled, formalizing rights of political minorities, guaranteeing affirmative representation, and so on.

I know it’s heretical to say so but good anarchists, who believe in grassroots self-government and concerted action, will find much of value in Roberts’ Rules of Order (simply a useful technology for organized discussion and decision-making).

Sixth, an "organizing strategy" is not only a plan for enlarging participation in protest but also a concept for aligning protest with the constituencies that bear the brunt of exploitation and oppression.

For example, one of the most brilliant strategic moves of the Black liberation movement in the late 1960s was to take the struggle inside the auto plants in Detroit to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. -- (Editor's note: great example!)

Today, "Occupying the Hood" is a similar challenge and opportunity. And the troops occupying the plutocrats’ front yard need to respond unequivocally to the human-rights crisis in working-class immigrant communities.

The immigrant rights protests five years ago were amongst the largest mass demonstrations in U.S. history. Perhaps next May Day we will see a convergence of all movements against inequality on a single day of action.

Seventh, building movements that are genuinely inclusive of unemployed and poor people requires infrastructures to provide for basic survival needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. To enable lives of struggle we must create sharing collectives and redistribute our own resources toward young frontline fighters.

Similarly we must renew the apparatus of movement-committed legal professionals (like the National Lawyers Guild) that played such a vital role in sustaining protest in face of mass repression in the 1960s.

Eighth, the future of the Occupy movement will be determined less by the numbers in Liberty Park (although its survival is a sine qua non of the future) than by the boots on the ground in Dayton, Cheyenne, Omaha, and El Paso. The geographical spread of the protests in many cases equals a diversifying involvement of people of color and trade unionists.

The advent of social media, of course, has created unprecedented opportunities for horizontal dialogue among non-elite activists all over the country and the world. But the Occupy Main Streets still need more support from the better resourced and mediagenic groups in the major urban and academic centers. A self-financed national speakers and performers bureau would be invaluable.

Conversely, it is essential to bring the stories from the heartlands and borders to national audiences. The narrative of protest needs to become a mural of what ordinary people are fighting for across the country, e.g., stopping strip-mining in West Virginia; reopening hospitals in Laredo; supporting dockworkers in Longview, Washington; fighting a fascist sheriffs’ department in Tucson; protesting death squads in Tijuana; or global warming in Saskatoon; and so on.

Ninth, the increasing participation of unions in Occupy protests -- including the dramatic mobilization that forced the NYPD to temporarily back down from its attempt to evict OWC -- is mutually transformative and raises the hope that the uprising can become a genuine class struggle.

Yet at the same time, we should remember that union leaderships, in their majority, remain hopelessly committed to a disastrous marriage with the Democratic Party, as well as to unprincipled inter-union wars that have squandered much of the promise of a new beginning for labor.

Anti-capitalist protesters thus need to more effectively hook up with rank-and-file opposition groups and progressive caucuses within the unions.

Tenth, one of the simplest but most abiding lessons from dissident generations past is the need to speak in the vernacular. The moral urgency of change acquires its greatest grandeur when expressed in a shared language.

Indeed the greatest radical voices -- Tom Paine, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Gene Debs, Upton Sinclair, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Mario Savio -- have always known how to appeal to Americans in the powerful, familiar words of their major traditions of conscience.

One extraordinary example was Sinclair’s nearly successful campaign for Governor of California in 1934. His manifesto, "End Poverty in California Now," was essentially the program of the Socialist Party translated in New Testament parables. It won millions of supporters.

Today, as the Occupy movements debate whether or not they need more concrete political definition, we need to understand what demands have the broadest appeal while remaining radical in an anti-systemic sense.

Some young activists might put their Bakunin, Lenin, or Slavoj Zizek temporarily aside and dust off a copy of FDR’s 1944 campaign platform: an Economic Bill of Rights.

It was a clarion call to social citizenship and a declaration of inalienable rights to employment, housing, healthcare, and a happy life -- about as far away from the timid concessionary Please-Just-Kill-Half-the-Jews politics of the Obama administration as might be envisioned.

The fourth-term platform (whatever opportunistic motivations existed in the White House) used the language of Jefferson to advance the core demands of the CIO and the social-democratic wing of the New Deal.

It was not the maximum program of the Left (i.e., democratic social ownership of the banks and large corporations), but certainly the most advanced progressive position ever espoused by a major political party or U.S. president.

Today, of course, an Economic Bill of Rights is both an utterly utopian idea and a simple definition of what most Americans existentially need.

But the new movements, like the old, must at all cost occupy the terrain of fundamental needs, not of short-term political "realism."

In doing so, why not accept the gift of FDR’s endorsement.

Links:

[1]http://www.truth-out.org/print/9355
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/9355
[3] http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/mike-davis-ten-immodest-commandments.html
[4]http://www.flickr.com/photos/drtongs/6234281777/
[5] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[6] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[7]http://www.truth-out.org/mike-davis/1311686759
[8] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[9] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=sixties-berkeley-london-riots-word-our-sponsors/1314046009
[10] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=framing-sixties-exposes-scapegoating-era/1303023600

Is the Occupy Wall Street Movement Under National Surveillance by the State?

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:46:00 +0000

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13159

All,

Answer: You bet there is...

Kofi

Is There a Conspiracy to Suppress Occupy Wall Street?
by MARK KARLIN,
EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
TRUTHOUT

Was there a somewhat coordinated effort among cities with Occupy encampments and the federal government to shut them down?

If true, the implications of such a status quo government consensus to crush a populist movement would be an affront to democracy. Prima facie evidence of militarized police action out of all proportion to the situations in the protest sites suggests something more than local "riot police" action around the country (with few peaceful exceptions, such as Los Angeles and Albany, New York).

Michael Moore stoked the conspiracy speculation in an appearance on "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" when he referred to a Minneapolis News Examiner article that citied Department of Justice "advisory" involvement in the nearly simultaneous crackdowns. In that article, Rick Ellis writes:

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

The FBI has so far failed to respond to requests for an official response, and of the 14 local police agencies contacted in the past 24 hours, all have declined to respond to questions on this issue.

But in a recent interview with the BBC, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned she was on a conference call just before the recent wave of crackdowns began.

An Associated Press article confirmed the speculation of widespread "consultation" among cities on how to crack down on the Occupy movement, noting "as local governments expressed concern over safety and sanitation at the encampments over the last month, officials from nearly 40 cities turned to each other on conference calls."

Suffice it to say, no police agency, federal government agency, or mayor's office supports the notion of a "conspiracy" to crush the Occupy sites, but evidence suggests that there was, in general, a mutual consensus that the Occupy movement needed to be uprooted - and that information was shared among city officials across the nation, with the likely input of the FBI and other federal officials.

Interestingly, in a little noted comment by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Air Force One after the New York Police Department smashed through Zuccotti Park, Obama's position appears to be almost identical to the public relations "balance" statements of Michael Bloomberg:

We would hope and want, as these decisions are made, that it balances between a long tradition of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in this country, and obviously of demonstrating and protesting, and also the very important need to maintain law and order and health and safety standards, which was obviously a concern in this case.

Notice the Bloombergian emphasis on concern for "health and safety standards," even when the city was doing everything possible to ensure the deterioration of health and safety standards.

This was the national refrain among mayors who consulted with each other, even though there are large areas - in every city in question - that have sizable populations who are neglected as far as health and safety standards are concerned, particularly when it comes to basic medical care and violence.

Where there is no smoking gun, conspiracy theories abound - and they remain "theories" in the absence of evidence. There is no smoking gun at this point that indicates a national federal/municipal coordination to smother the Occupy movement. On the other hand, when everybody's message points are the same in the status quo - and the Occupy movement represents a force that institutionalized governments are threatened by - a common sound bite and similar excessive police tactics may reveal much more than Washington and the mayors are willing to publicly admit.

November 17, 2011: Mass Day of Action Marks Two Month Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street!

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:22:00 +0000

http://occupywallst.org/

All,

Like I said before: They think (rather they futilely hope) that they have "deterred" or "crippled" the movement. They have done no such thing! For further details on just how truly strong, organized, and determined the Occupy movement's massive public response to this state violence and disruption is please check out the very important details below. "One monkey don't stop no show" is I believe the traditional vernacular used in such a situation as this. It should thus be further noted that not even a million monkeys could possibly halt or shut us down... PASS THE WORD...

WE ARE THE 99%!!

Kofi

OccupyWallStreet The revolution continues worldwide!
News LiveStream #HowToOccupy Forum Chat User Map NYCGA About Donate Thursday November 17th Day of Action

Shut Down Wall Street! Occupy the Subways! Take the Square!

#OWS calls for nonviolent solidarity on November 17th
Posted 3 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 7:14 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

occupynyc on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

full details here

81 Comments

Mass Day of Action on 2-Month Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street
Posted 7 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 3:27 p.m. EST by

OccupyWallSt

Tomorrow, Thursday November 17th, marks two months since the start of Occupy Wall Street as well as International Students Day. To commemorate this two month anniversary, Occupy Wall Street will take to the streets in celebration and in solidarity with people around the world participating in a massive global day of action in hundreds of cities.

In the wake of Bloomberg’s predawn raid of Occupy Wall Street on Tuesday morning, thousands of people throughout the five boroughs and the greater region will join together to take nonviolent action tomorrow. We will gather to resist austerity, rebuild the economy, and reclaim our democracy. We will no longer tolerate a system that only serves the very rich and powerful. Right now Wall Street owns Washington. We are the 99% and we are here to reclaim our democracy.

Schedule for New York #N17 Actions below. Read More...

80 Comments

From Those Inside Of Central Booking
Posted 5 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 5:24 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

While we've been imprisoned here we've held Assemblies and Mic Checked corrections officers to attend to urgent medical conditions, some of which were the result of police brutality during the raids. There is no food except for bread, no cleanliness, no hygene, no waters, no showers. There are non-occupiers who are suffering here as well.

We do not know what we have been charged with.

We want freedom!

This message was consensed upon by a group of occupiers imprisoned by Billionare Michael Bloomberg and his private army, and relayed to members of the Legal Working Group of #ows.

180 Comments

#N17 Global Day Of Action!
Posted 6 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 4:40 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Sixty days into the struggle #OccupyWallStreet was violently evicted by the NYPD, who leveled our homes at Liberty Square to the ground. Our movement, however, is stronger than it has ever been. In these sixty days we have brought about a massive awakening, perhaps the largest one in the country since the Civil Rights Movement fifty years ago, and certainly the first global one in modern history. People around the world, from Spain to Australia, from Chile to the U.S. have opened their eyes together to the decadence and injustice of the common system that exploits us. This is what we mean when we say with the deepest significance: you cannot stop an idea whose time has come. Read More...

132 Comments

Mass Day of Action on 2-Month Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street
Posted 7 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 3:27 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Tomorrow, Thursday November 17th, marks two months since the start of Occupy Wall Street as well as International Students Day. To commemorate this two month anniversary, Occupy Wall Street will take to the streets in celebration and in solidarity with people around the world participating in a massive global day of action in hundreds of cities.

In the wake of Bloomberg’s predawn raid of Occupy Wall Street on Tuesday morning, thousands of people throughout the five boroughs and the greater region will join together to take nonviolent action tomorrow. We will gather to resist austerity, rebuild the economy, and reclaim our democracy. We will no longer tolerate a system that only serves the very rich and powerful. Right now Wall Street owns Washington. We are the 99% and we are here to reclaim our democracy.

Schedule for New York #N17 Actions below. Read More...

80 Comments

#OWS holds Action Council and Spokes Council Tonight!
Posted 7 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 3:19 p.m. EST by carbonogram

There are two councils happening tonight: Read More...

6 Comments

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg's New York
Posted 7 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 3 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

32 Comments

100 March on NYPD 1st Precinct to Demand Dignity;
Women in Custody Being Harassed, Police Protocols In Question
Posted 21 hours ago on Nov. 16, 2011, 12:54 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Message from Protestors to NYPD: If you SEE something, a fellow officer violating protocol, SAY something

Over 100 people, mostly women, marched from Liberty Square to NYPD’s 1st Precinct HQ at 11pm Tuesday night to demand that all women in custody be treated with respect and dignity by the police. The march was organized after our sisters in custody made various complaints of male officers patrolling the women’s cells, unannounced. We were told that male members of the NYPD were specifically making unannounced patrols by the women’s cells, and by the shared women’s toilet (in plain view of all women and officers)--which is a common tactic used to humiliate those in custody.

In the spirit of the Occupy movement, the crowd of 100 gathered in a show of solidarity to demand that the NYPD issue a formal statement that this will be addressed and that there be no more instances of this humiliating tactic being used. There were no arrests at tonight’s solidarity march.

Some chants from the crowd: “All day, all night, occupy women’s rights!” and “Courtesy, professionalism and respect” and “If you see something, say something!”

All those in solidarity are encouraged to call the complaint line and demand Police Commissioner Ray Kelly put an end to this violent behavior. NYPD Internal Affairs: 212.487.7350 or directly NYPD 1st Precinct: 212.334.0611

Linnea Palmer, Occupy Wall Street Press Team, is available for any follow up questions on this particular action. Press@occupywallst.org

176 Comments

This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Huge General Assembly in Progress at Liberty Square
Posted 1 day ago on Nov. 15, 2011, 8:40 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement Persevere

The feeling here at Liberty Square tonight is the feeling of a movement that is rising, building, and making headway.

Following the 1am eviction of Liberty Square early this morning and a long day of legal wrangling, the park was reoccupied late this afternoon. This evening, just after 7pm, the first General Assembly at the reoccupied park began. Using our 'people's mic', we declared together:

"They showed us their power. And we're showing them ours."

We are here because we believe a better world is possible. We are willing to endure mistreatment, if by doing so we can help re-enfranchise the 99% and reclaim our democracy from the stranglehold of Wall Street and the top one percent.

We will push back against billionaire Michael Bloomberg and any politician who wantonly tramples on proud American freedoms: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the freedom of Americans to peaceably assemble and petition for change.

We will overcome the obstacles placed before us. We will not be deterred. We will persevere. Our message is resonating across America, and our cause is shared by millions around the world. We are the 99%, and we want to live in a world that is for all of us — not just for those who have amassed great wealth and power.

You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

384 Comments

NYPD Occupying Liberty Square; Demands Unclear
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 6:51 p.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

URGENT: EVERYONE TO LIBERTY SQUARE! NOW! WE ARE RE-OCCUPYING!
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 5:59 p.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

Judge REJECTS Temporary Restraining Order to Allow Liberty Square Reoccupation
Posted 1 day ago on Nov. 15, 2011, 4:56 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

from the ruling:

The movants have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators, and other installations to the exclusion of the owner's reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely. Neither have the applicants shown a right to a temporary restraining order that would restrict the City's enforcement of law so as to promote public health and safety.

Therefore, petitioners application for a temporary restraining order is denied.

click here for full text of ruling

288 Comments

Help Occupy Wall Street, Liberty Square, From New York and Afar
Posted 1 day ago on Nov. 15, 2011, 4:02 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country, was evicted by a large police force in full riot gear. NOW is the time to help. If you feel as deeply about the Occupy movement as we do, show your support by taking real steps today! We are counting on people all over the country to come out and support us to keep this movement going!

Come to GENERAL ASSEMBLY tonight at 7pm in Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park):

They can kick us out, but they can’t stop us from reassembling. Let’s show them that truth by showing up at Liberty Square with the biggest General Assembly yet! Come to GA tonight at 7pm!

Help the Occupiers Get their stuff back:

Supposedly, all the stuff that was taken by the police from the square will be available for people to pick up at noon EST today. WE NEED PEOPLE TO GO TO MIDTOWN MANHATTAN AND HELP THE OCCUPIERS GET THEIR STUFF BACK TODAY! If you can help gather the stuff, especially if you have a van or can rent a U-Haul for the effort, please call or text 617-406-8299

Support the Occupiers by giving them a place to stay:

Live in New York City? Want to support the Liberty Square arrestees? We are looking for safe spaces where folk who have been arrested can go after they are released to rest, tend their wounds, take a shower, have a meal, etc. If you can offer your house, call Hannah at 802.359.3628. Tell us how many people you can have over, for how long, where you live, and a return number. Thanks!

Medical Needs Supplies:

The medics lost all of their supplies last night along with everyone else. We urgently need all basic medical supplies. Things such as gauze, bandages, bandaids, vitamin C, heat packs, cold packs, gloves, asprin, AND ANY OTHER THINGS THAT YOU CAN THINK MAY BE NECESSARY FOR MEDICAL NEEDS!

Medics ALSO need new tent, headlamps, cots, battery-powered lanterns

Please bring supplies to S.I.S (OWS Shipping and Storage) at 52 Broadway, NYC.

Mailing Address:

118A Fulton St.
PO Box 205
New York, NY 10038

Call assistant Attorney General with the Civil Rights Division:

http://interoccupy.org/CivilRightscomplaint.pdf is a complaint submitted on behalf of the Occupy Movement to the Department of Justice in response to the increasing antagonism of police against peaceful protesters. It was formally submitted to the Department of Justice on 11/10/2011. It is addressed to a Mister Thomas Perez, the assistant Attorney General with the Civil Rights Division. Mr. Perez’s office number is (202) 514-4609. Let us call, tie up his lines, and demand that every citizen has a right to peaceably assemble without the threat of police violence.

Link To Potential Actions

Contact movementbuildingny@gmail.com for potential additions to this list.

63 Comments

OWS Awaits Ruling to Reoccupy
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 3:49 p.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

A Call to Occupy
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 8:23 a.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

9AM Post-Raid Rally and General Assembly
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 6:57 a.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

You can't evict an idea whose time has come.
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 1:36 a.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

NYPD IS RAIDING OCCUPY WALL STREET
Posted Nov. 15, 2011, 1:20 a.m. EST (1 day ago) by OccupyWallSt

Poster for N17 Mass Direct Action: Print and Post Freely!
Posted Nov. 14, 2011, 10:53 a.m. EST (2 days ago) by OccupyWallSt

Thousands Rally to Resist Occupy Portland Evictions
Posted Nov. 13, 2011, 2:04 p.m. EST (3 days ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Denver Under Attack: Occupiers Take Streets Facing Tear Gas and Rubber Bullets
Posted Nov. 12, 2011, 7:41 p.m. EST (4 days ago) by OccupyWallSt

Direct Action Training
Posted 5 days ago on Nov. 11, 2011, 4:17 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Action Preparation & Training for November 17th, November 30th and Beyond. Direct Action Trainings: build affinity team, train to do actions and civil disobediences, meet new allies and friends and have some fun with us.

Monday Nov. 14 and Tuesday Nov. 15 1:30-3:30 and 4:30-6:30. Meet at the Red Cube

Wednesday Nov. 16 5:30-7:30 UFT 52 Broadway 6th Floor

www.occupydaysofaction.com

107 Comments

11.11.11 Veterans Day Concert and Rally for the 99%. Foley Square 1pm.
Posted Nov. 10, 2011, 2:16 p.m. EST (6 days ago) by OccupyWallSt

A victory for the 99% in Ohio
Posted Nov. 9, 2011, 2:56 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street and Teamsters to Occupy Sotheby’s Tonight
Posted Nov. 9, 2011, 2:41 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Federal Reserve Global Phonecast
Posted Nov. 9, 2011, 2:19 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Join the "Occupy Your Block" Sidewalk Chalk Campaign
Posted Nov. 8, 2011, 10:22 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Urgent Help: Occupy Edmonton In Need Of Winter Equipment
Posted Nov. 8, 2011, 6:28 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Everyone has the Right to Occupy Space, Safely
Posted Nov. 8, 2011, 4:07 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Planting Change: Guerrilla Gardening and the Occupy Movement
Posted Nov. 8, 2011, 1:35 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Tonight: A Dialogue with Occupy El Bario & OWS
Posted Nov. 7, 2011, 9:02 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy The Highway: The 99% March to Washington
Posted Nov. 7, 2011, 5:30 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Spokes Council Meeting Tonight
Posted Nov. 7, 2011, 5:14 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Dallas Calls for General Strike: Nov. 30th
Posted Nov. 7, 2011, 2:07 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

OWS Teams Up with the Street Vendor Project
Posted Nov. 7, 2011, 9:23 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

"End to End for 99%" — 11-mile Neighborhood March of the 99%
Posted Nov. 7, 2011, 9:17 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Too Small to Fail: Occupy Mosier
Posted Nov. 6, 2011, 5:27 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Guest Post from an Arrestee of the 99%
Posted 1 week ago on Nov. 6, 2011, 1:29 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Nature itself is the beautiful expression of order and balance arising out of chaos. Time and time again, nature has demonstrated its ability to naturally grow this order and peace out of the random noise that makes its very basis. The myth of true order comes from human attempts to impose it where it does not naturally occur. While there may be order, its cause is incorrectly perceived.

By definition, imposed order is unstable. It must be forcibly maintained in order to continue to exist. People are as a whole intelligent enough to devise such structures but not intelligent enough to override our most fundamental sense of natural order. As a whole, our species' attempt to engineer its own order has been slowly successful. We created kingdoms, handing ourselves to a monarch. This is an extreme deviation from natural order, because there are in that case only a handful of people globally who matter. It leaves the commoner entirely outside the global order. Out of our natural human desire to move towards natural order, we devised a new structure of governments commonly known as republics. These were closer to something which we could naturally live at ease with. The commoner, despite not having a direct say in the larger global order was in some way involved, or at least believed this to be so. More recently, through the rapid development of communications technologies which allow any one commoner's voice to find itself suddenly amplified and repeated around the world in moments we have grown into an entirely new method of global order. As trivial as much of the social networking conversation is, through social networking borders have fallen, lines have blurred, and a kind of collective consciousness representing its participants equally has arisen from it. However, we find ourselves in a unique situation. The people have moved on from the easily corruptible pseudo-free societies of the past, yet the forces enforcing those societies have attempted to simply ignore this transition. Through force, violence, and illegitimate law which passed without the consent of the commoner, they have attempted to extinguish the phoenix, the collective society which has arisen from the ashes of the republics.

Government by definition creates order, whether natural or imposed. A government exists within the borders of some defined region, and exists to represent the people of that region. Therefore, by definition the only possible government is that which exists by the consent of those who represent the people. A government which is operating without that consent is no longer a valid government. It is a criminal enterprise which exists to serve only itself. It in this case has moved from an entity which serves and fears the people to an entity which is served by and is feared by the people. For the people to accept such a criminal takeover of their land is a violation of their core drives, it is a violation of the natural progression from imposed global order towards natural order on a global scale. In the case where a criminal takeover has occurred, it is not only the natural right, but the obligation of that region's people to raise themselves in great numbers against that criminal enterprise which seeks to exploit them. Fundamental human dignity demands it unambiguously. It is unfortunate, but an unavoidable conclusion that yesterday's republics have on a grand scale violated their purpose and made the transition from representatives of the people towards criminal slave enterprise which holds the people in bondage, extracting value and joy from them, forever unhappy with their current holdings. The organs and systems which we the people devised not long ago to serve and represent us have been hijacked by a select few individuals, making the commoner irrelevant despite numerous legal guarantees and protections against this. The methods used in these criminal takeovers vary and are too numerous to list in the context of this document, but they are well documented by many members of the newly arisen collective consciousness.

There are many and varied voices which have erupted from captivity which suggest methods by which we the people can reclaim our rightful place as our own rulers and each other's subject at once. In order to reclaim our human dignity and make progress towards natural order, a collective state where the people live in harmony with one another in naturally organized chaos, it is useful to examine the birth of the republics which today have become something grotesque and unrecognizable. Attempt after attempt was made to force monarchs to dictate the will of their subjects, but these attempts were made in ignorance of the fact that the very nature and structure of the kingdoms was not compatible with what the people desired. Facing a global order which could not advance any farther and had reached the end of its useful lifespan, individuals began to realize the increasingly undeniable fact that an entirely new order had to be devised to replace the old kingdoms. We have reached a similar point today. Society's process of collective consciousness and consensus has advanced beyond the point that the republics can follow. In response to this, a select few have hijacked the republics in order to bring them backwards while the people march forwards. As difficult as it is to accept, the time has indeed come to tearfully say goodbye to the republics. They are artifacts of a beautiful age, yet in their age have become irrelevant to the progress of society, and in fact have become a snarling, grotesque weight which fights progress at every turn.

The form of the global order's replacement is not mine to decide. It is not yours, it is not your neighbor's. The global order's form is for the globe to decide collectively. For this reason, my identity will not be disclosed. I will present no idea for the future's form other than the fact that society has advanced beyond the point where the republics can exist in their current form. Go forth, and reclaim your dignity. If you fear the republics, imagine this. You are no longer represented in the republics. Therefore, their laws, their edicts, their decrees have no legitimate authority over you. They are just as illegitimate as if I attempted to dictate the terms of your life from behind my keyboard. They have become little more than bullies with guns, and if there is anything the Arab Spring has taught us, it is that guns are utterly useless against an idea.

Solidarity,
(this space intentionally left blank)
(Ed.: We'd also like to remind people who read this, especially if you're working with your local occupation, that you can submit content at content@occupywallst.org)

401 Comments

Sunday: Global Uprisings--Egypt, Tunisia, Iran & Activists @ OWS
Posted Nov. 6, 2011, 12:35 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

The 99% visit Governor Walker
Posted Nov. 4, 2011, 10:16 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Transforming Harm & Building Safety: Confronting Sexual Violence At Occupy Wall Street & Beyond
Posted Nov. 4, 2011, 7:22 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street: Improving Quality of Life for the 99%
Posted Nov. 4, 2011, 2:53 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Don't Be Big Banks' Puppet; No Immunity Deal for Crooks
Posted Nov. 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street to Mayor Bloomberg: Get Your Facts Straight; Stop the Fear Mongering
Posted Nov. 4, 2011, 12:42 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Eviction Defense!
Posted Nov. 3, 2011, 7:25 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Stephen Colbert's Plot to Co-opt Occupy Wall Street Foiled by Ketchup and Justin
Posted Nov. 3, 2011, 12:55 p.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Liberty Square Adopts a Spokes Council
Posted Nov. 3, 2011, 10:21 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

The People vs. Goldman Sachs - Trial and March!
Posted Nov. 3, 2011, 12:08 a.m. EST (1 week ago) by OccupyWallSt

Rule of Law vs. the Forces of Order
Posted Nov. 2, 2011, 7:52 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

General Strike Shuts Down Oakland. Watch Live!
Posted Nov. 2, 2011, 1:22 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Call To Action - Join The Month Of Global Uprising
Posted Nov. 1, 2011, 7:28 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

A New World
Posted Nov. 1, 2011, 5:30 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Military Veterans Join the 99% on Wall Street
Posted Nov. 1, 2011, 2:27 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Oakland Calls For City-Wide General Strike, Nov 2
Posted Oct. 30, 2011, 9 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Urgent: Winter Donation Needs
Posted Oct. 29, 2011, 10:54 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making)
Posted 2 weeks ago on Oct. 29, 2011, 9:55 p.m. EST by David-Graeber

TO THE VILLAGE: With a large college and high school student contingent, occupiers from all over the city have repeatedly marched to Washington Square where at least two general assemblies have convened. PHOTO: Stephen O’Byrne

On August 2, 2011 at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street, about a dozen people sat in a circle in Bowling Green. The self-appointed “process committee” for a social movement we merely hoped would someday exist, contemplated a momentous decision. Our dream was to create a New York General Assembly: the model for democratic assemblies we hoped to see spring up across America. But how would those assemblies actually operate?

The anarchists in the circle made what seemed, at the time, an insanely ambitious proposal. Why not let them operate exactly like this committee: by consensus.

It was, in the least, a wild gamble, because as far as any of us knew, no one had ever managed to pull off something like this before. Consensus process had been successfully used in spokes-councils — groups of activists organized into separate affinity groups, each represented by a single “spoke” — but never in mass assemblies like the one anticipated in New York City. Even the General Assemblies in Greece and Spain had not attempted it. But consensus was the approach that most accorded with our principles. So we took the leap.

Three months later, hundreds of assemblies, big and small, now operate by consensus across America. Decisions are made democratically, without voting, by general assent. According to conventional wisdom this shouldn’t be possible, but it is happening — in much the same way that other inexplicable phenomena like love, revolution, or life itself (from the perspective of, say, particle physics) happen.

The direct democratic process adopted by Occupy Wall Street has deep roots in American radical history. It was widely employed in the civil rights movement and by the Students for a Democratic Society. But its current form has developed from within movements like feminism and even spiritual traditions (both Quaker and Native American) as much as from within anarchism itself. The reason direct, consensus-based democracy has been so firmly embraced by and identified with anarchism is because it embodies what is perhaps anarchism’s most fundamental principle: that in the same way human beings treated like children will tend to act like children, the way to encourage human beings to act like mature and responsible adults is to treat them as if they already are.

Consensus is not a unanimous voting system; a “block” is not a No vote, but a veto. Think of it as the intervention of a High Court that declares a proposal to be in violation of fundamental ethical principles — except in this case the judge’s robes belong to anyone with the courage to throw them on. That participants know they can instantly stop a deliberation dead in its tracks if they feel it a matter of principle, not only means they rarely do it. It also means that a compromise on minor points becomes easier; the process toward creative synthesis is really the essence of the thing. In the end, it matters less how a final decision is reached—by a call for blocks or a majority show hands—provided everyone was able to play a part in helping to shape and reshape it.

We may never be able to prove, through logic, that direct democracy, freedom and a society based on principles of human solidarity are possible. We can only demonstrate it through action. In parks and squares across America, people have begun to witness it as they have started to participate. Americans grow up being taught that freedom and democracy are our ultimate values, and that our love of freedom and democracy is what defines us as a people—even as, in subtle but constant ways, we’re taught that genuine freedom and democracy can never truly exist.

The moment we realize the fallacy of this teaching, we begin to ask: how many other “impossible” things might we pull off? And it is there, it is here, that we begin enacting the impossible.

This article was written by David Graeber for the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

351 Comments

#ows and #occupythehood March In Solidarity With Those Foreclosed On By Criminal Banks
Posted Oct. 28, 2011, 5:39 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall St. And Allies Rally & March United for Civil Rights
Posted Oct. 27, 2011, 8:46 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

#ows Takes The Streets In Solidarity With #occupyoakland
Posted Oct. 27, 2011, 2:53 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy The DOE
Posted Oct. 27, 2011, 12:53 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Tonight: Vigils Across America for Scott Olsen, Marine Veteran Critically Injured by Police Projectile at #OccupyOakland
Posted Oct. 27, 2011, 12:13 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Deliver Your Message To The 1%
Posted Oct. 27, 2011, 12:08 p.m. EST (2 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

We are all Scott Olsen: Occupy Oakland #OWS
Posted Oct. 26, 2011, 8:53 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

#ows Response To Government Violence At #occupyoakland | Solidarity March At 9PM From Liberty Square
Posted Oct. 26, 2011, 3:47 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Solidarity with Oakland | Exposing Police Lies
Posted Oct. 26, 2011, 3:14 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street Takes On Health Insurance Industry
Posted Oct. 26, 2011, 1:28 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

The 1% have Addresses. The 99% have Messages.
Posted 3 weeks ago on Oct. 25, 2011, 6:43 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Solidarity Statement From Cairo
Posted Oct. 25, 2011, 2:39 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Protect Occupy Baltimore
Posted Oct. 25, 2011, 2:10 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupied Wall Street Journal's New Site
Posted Oct. 25, 2011, 4:13 a.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Drumming and the Occupation
Posted Oct. 24, 2011, 6:57 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

"Where Do We Go From Here?"
Posted Oct. 23, 2011, 9:32 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Chicago Being Dispersed / Arrested By Police Presently
Posted Oct. 23, 2011, 2:31 a.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

STOP & FRISK HAS GOT TO GO! Solidarity with #occupyharlem.
Posted Oct. 22, 2011, 6:35 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Columbus Circle
Posted Oct. 21, 2011, 5:18 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Demands Working Group
Posted Oct. 21, 2011, 3:01 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

As We Gather Together
Posted Oct. 21, 2011, 12:55 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street Survey
Posted 3 weeks ago on Oct. 21, 2011, 9:48 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Please take some time to fill out our survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VSN6VW9

65 Comments

Stop The Spectra Pipeline | Meet-Up at Liberty Square at 5 P.M. For Die-In at P.S. 41
Posted Oct. 20, 2011, 2:15 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Parents for Occupy Wall Street Family Sleepover
Posted Oct. 20, 2011, 12:13 p.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

America Supports #OWS
Posted 3 weeks ago on Oct. 20, 2011, 11:06 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Supplies and Support Pour into Occupy Wall Street from Every Corner of the US

Occupiers Launch Tumblr Website Today: Gallery of Personal Notes of Support from Farmers, Veterans, Grandparents and "Knitters for Occupy Wall St"

http://occupywallstreetcarepackages.tumblr.com/

Liberty Square, NY — Today we want to spotlight the tens of thousands of people from across the United States and around the world who are supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement by contributing blankets, clothing, food, money, and other needed supplies. The support has truly been overwhelming.

Over one month ago, hundreds, and then thousands, gathered in Liberty Square to protest unprecedented consolidation of wealth and power, plummeting household income, skyrocketing school debt, and a broken political system. In the weeks since, hundreds of thousands have rallied and occupied in cities and towns around the world. And people from every corner of the United States have sent donations of tarps, home baked pies, hand-knit mittens, and pizzas — with personal notes of solidarity and support.

OWS has compiled notes from supporters on a Tumblr site called Occupy Wall St. Care Packages:

http://occupywallstreetcarepackages.tumblr.com/

This new site features only a tiny fraction of the thousands of packages and letters of support we have received. It includes messages like this one from Elora and Monte, supporters who live on a farm in West Virginia:

"We stand ready to help #OWS in any way we can, from out here 'Just Off the One-Lane Road...' And we are so grateful for all of you involved in this defense of America. We firmly believe this is "it." If we can't grab this democracy this time, we'll sink and it will be a long time before we will have this opportunity again. Thank you for taking time from your busy life to be there and to email us. Whatever we can do, we are pleased to be a part of this incredible Movement."

We know from history that social movements grow when they have a broad base of support. We are thankful that this movement has attained such a dramatic level of support in a short amount of time. We are hopeful that this people's movement will continue to grow.

88 Comments

10 a.m. All Hands on Deck for Square Reorganizing!
Posted Oct. 20, 2011, 12:31 a.m. EST (3 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

OWS Snapshot
Posted Oct. 19, 2011, 3:30 p.m. EST (4 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

70% of #OWS Supporters are Politically Independent
Posted Oct. 19, 2011, 2:11 p.m. EST (4 weeks ago) by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street Marks One Month
Posted Oct. 17, 2011, 8:20 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

From Tahrir Square to Times Square: Protests Erupt in Over 1,500 Cities Worldwide
Posted Oct. 16, 2011, 1:08 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

October 15th - Global Day Of Action
Posted Oct. 15, 2011, 6:12 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

The 1% Have Addresses. The 99% Have Messages
Posted Oct. 15, 2011, 11:43 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

October 15th Call to Action
Posted Oct. 14, 2011, 11:08 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

#OWS VICTORY: The people have prevailed, gear up for global day of action
Posted Oct. 14, 2011, 8:51 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

Parents bring Children to #ows tonight
Posted Oct. 14, 2011, 6:29 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

EMERGENCY CALL TO ACTION: Keep Bloomberg and Kelly From Evicting #OWS
Posted 1 month ago on Oct. 13, 2011, 2:14 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

EMERGENCY #OWS EVICTION DEFENSE:
Prevent the forcible closure of Occupy Wall Street

Tell Bloomberg: Don't Foreclose the Occupation.

NEED MASS TURN-OUT, SHOW UP NO LATER THAN 6 A.M.

This is an emergency situation. Please take a minute to read this, and please take action and spread the word far and wide.

Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum, with occupation actions now happening in cities across the world.

But last night Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD notified Occupy Wall Street participants about plans to “clean the park”—the site of the Wall Street protests—tomorrow starting at 7am. "Cleaning" was used as a pretext to shut down “Bloombergville” a few months back, and to shut down peaceful occupations elsewhere.

Bloomberg says that the park will be open for public usage following the cleaning, but with a notable caveat: Occupy Wall Street participants must follow the “rules”.

NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said that they will move in to clear us and we will not be allowed to take sleeping bags, tarps, personal items or gear back into the park.

This is it—this is their attempt to shut down #OWS for good.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION

1) Call 311 (or +1 (212) NEW-YORK if you're out of town) and tell Bloomberg to support our right to assemble and to not interfere with #OWS.

2) Come to #OWS TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT to defend the occupation from eviction.

For those of you who plan to help us hold our ground—which we hope will be all of you—make sure you understand the possible consequences. Be prepared to not get much sleep. Be prepared for possible arrest. Make sure your items are together and ready to go (or already out of the park.) We are pursuing all possible strategies; this is a message of solidarity.

Click here to learn nonviolent tactics for holding ground.

Occupy Wall Street is committed to keeping the park clean and safe—we even have a Sanitation Working Group whose purpose this is. We are organizing major cleaning operations today and will do so regularly.

If Bloomberg truly cares about sanitation here he should support the installation of portopans and dumpsters. #OWS allies have been working to secure these things to support our efforts.

We know where the real dirt is: on Wall Street. Billionaire Bloomberg is beholden to bankers.

We won't allow Bloomberg and the NYPD to foreclose our occupation. This is an occupation, not a permitted picnic.

1257 Comments

How To Hold Your Ground
Posted Oct. 13, 2011, 2:12 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY
Posted 1 month ago on Oct. 13, 2011, 2:10 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Following respectful and good-faith dialogue with members of the local community which has been rebuilding since the trauma of 9/11, Occupy Wall Street hereby announces the following Good Neighbor Policy:

OWS has zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol anywhere in Liberty Plaza;

Zero tolerance for violence or verbal abuse towards anyone;

Zero tolerance for abuse of personal or public property.

OWS will limit drumming on the site to 2 hours per day, between the hours of 11am and 5pm only.

OWS encourages all participants to respect health and sanitary regulations, and will direct all participants to respectfully utilize appropriate off-site sanitary facilities.

OWS will display signage and have community relations and security monitors in Liberty Plaza, in order to ensure awareness of and respect for our guidelines and Good Neighbor Policy.

OWS will at all times have a community relations representative on-site, to monitor and respond to community concerns and complaints.

Occupy Wall Street October 13, 2011

Note: In conjunction with local community members and their representatives, OWS is also working to establish off-site sanitary facilities such as port-a-potties.

113 Comments

Mr. Auctioneer! New Yorkers Call for Moratorium on Foreclosures. Organizing for Occupation and Occupy Wall Street visit the courts!
Posted Oct. 13, 2011, 2:13 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by anonymous

October 15th Global Day Of Action
Posted Oct. 12, 2011, 3:57 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

#OWS Stands In Solidarity With 100 Arrested At Occupy Boston
Posted Oct. 11, 2011, 11:52 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

Sign Language
Posted Oct. 9, 2011, 10:38 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

Today Liberty Plaza had a visit from Slavoj Zizek
Posted Oct. 9, 2011, 6:04 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

#ows Second General Assembly Of Manhattan Meets At 3PM In Washington Square Park - Anti-Flag To Play Set In Solidarity at Liberty Square
Posted Oct. 8, 2011, 1:30 a.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

AFT fully endorses Occupy Wall Street
Posted Oct. 6, 2011, 4:48 p.m. EST (1 month ago) by OccupyWallSt

Keith Olbermann Takes Down NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg While the Occupy Wall Street Movement Continues to Grow

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:51:00 +0000

All,

The extraordinary political journalist and inspiring progressive media activist Keith Olbermann makes one of his typically brilliant and patented 'Special Comments' on the Occupy Wall Street Movement and New York's dangerously clueless billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his futile attempts to crush it.

Kofi

'Countdown' with Keith Olbermann--'Special Comment'
CURRENT TV BROADCAST MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2011

Chris Hedges On the Revolutionary Dimensions of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Crucial Role of Mass Resistance

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:25:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street protesters react and wave copies of the court order allowing them back into Zuccotti Park as police block them from re-entering, in New York, November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)

http://www.truth-out.org/what-revolution-looks/1321384587

All,

As always the indefatigable Chris Hedges eloquently and resolutely speaks truth to power and his searing analysis is as usual right on target. Dig...and pass the word...

Kofi

This Is What Revolution Looks Like
15 November 2011
by Chris Hedges
Truthdig [3] | Op-Ed

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.

There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backwards from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.

Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/9094
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/9094

[3] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_is_what_revolution_looks_like_20111115/

[4] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[5] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[6] http://www.truth-out.org/content/chris-hedges
[7] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[8] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=making-safer-spaces-occupy-wall-street-addresses-questions-security-zuccotti-park/1320679533
[9] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=minority-occupiers-confront-divsions-among-99-percent/1319898493

While Occupy Wall Street Is Attacked by the Police and the State It Only Strengthens the Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:05:00 +0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
All,

The state authorities think that if they merely continue to attack, assault, and harass the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators throughout the country that they can and will effectively cripple and destroy this movement. They are dead wrong. Just as in the mass based Civil Rights, black power, labor, women's, anti-war, and gay and lesbian movements of the very recent past (and present) neither they nor we have seen anything yet. This movement is only going to become larger and more resilient as time (and the attacks) go on. History tells us that much. Mark my words: This is only the beginning of what is destined to be the largest, most important, and sustained mass movement in this country in at least half a century. Stay tuned...

Kofi

Judge Backs Camping Ban at Protest Site
By JAMES BARRON and COLIN MOYNIHAN
November 15, 2011
New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Tuesday defended his decision to clear the park in Lower Manhattan that was the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement, saying “health and safety conditions became intolerable” in the park where the protesters had camped out for nearly two months.

Mr. Bloomberg said the city had planned to reopen the park on Tuesday morning after the protesters’ tents and tarps had been removed and the stone steps had been cleaned. He said the police had already let about 50 protesters back in when officials received word of a temporary restraining order sought by lawyers for the protesters. The police closed the park again while a judge heard arguments in State Supreme Court.

But late Tuesday afternoon, the judge ruled for the city, saying the protesters could go into Zuccotti Park but could not take their tents and sleeping bags. The judge, Justice Michael D. Stallman of State Supreme Court, said that the demonstrators “have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators and other installations” to the exclusion of the landlord or “others who might wish to use the space safely.”

Mr. Bloomberg had said at a City Hall news conference earlier in the day that in approving the police operation he had to balance free speech against concerns about what had been happening in the park.“New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” the mayor said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

The mayor’s comments at a City Hall news conference came about seven hours after hundreds of police officers moved in to clear the park, after warning that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” but that demonstrators who did not leave would face arrest. The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, initially resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!”

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that nearly 200 people had been arrested, 142 in the park and 50 to 60 in the streets nearby. Most were held on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, among them City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat who represents northern Manhattan. He was with a group near the intersection of Broadway and Vesey Street that was trying to link up with the protesters in the park. The group tried to push through a line of officers trying to prevent people from reaching the park.

Later in the day, the police cleared a lot at Canal Street, about a mile away, where some of the protesters had gone after the sweep. About two dozen people were arrested there after protesters snipped a chain-link fence with bolt cutters. At least four journalists who trailed the protesters as they went through the opening in the fence were also led out in handcuffs, including a reporter and photographer for The Associated Press and a reporter from The Daily News.

The mayor’s comments at his news conference came about seven hours after hundreds of police officers moved in to clear the park, after warning that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” but that demonstrators who did not leave would face arrest. The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, initially resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!”

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that nearly 200 people had been arrested, 142 in the park and 50 to 60 in the streets nearby. Most were held on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, among them City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat who represents northern Manhattan. He was with a group near the intersection of Broadway and Vesey Street that was trying to link up with the protesters in the park. The group tried to push through a line of officers trying to prevent people from reaching the park.

The operation in and around the park struck a blow to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which saw the park as its spiritual heart. The sweep was intended to empty the birthplace of a protest movement that has inspired hundreds of tent cities from coast to coast. On Monday, hundreds of police officers raided the main encampment in Oakland, Calif., arresting 33 people. Protesters returned later in the day. But the Oakland police said no one would be allowed to sleep there anymore, and promised to clear a second camp nearby.

The police action was quickly challenged as lawyers for the protesters obtained a temporary restraining order barring the city and the park’s private landlord from evicting protesters or removing their belongings. That left the protesters in a kind of limbo as they waited for Justice Stallman to issue his ruling.

Lawyers for the protesters had argued that the city and the owner of Zuccotti Park had impinged on the protesters’ free-speech rights. The lawyers took particular exception to the fact that the landlord, Brookfield Properties, had imposed rules for use of the park after the protests were underway.

“They issued these rules after the activity started in order to try to limit the activity,” said Arthur Schwartz, a lawyer representing the Transport Workers Union, the Working Families Party and New York Communities for Change, organizations that have joined in the protesters’ cause.

A lawyer for Brookfield said that the company had no problem with people expressing their First Amendment rights in the park. But the lawyer, Douglas H. Flaum, said the protesters needed to be removed because their tents and other equipment posed a safety risk. He also said they preventing other people from using the park.

“It is not meant to be a tent city,” Mr. Flaum said, adding that Brookfield would welcome the protesters back without the tents. “There are very specific health and safety concerns.” The mayor, at his news conference in the morning, read a statement he had issued around 6 a.m. explaining the reasoning behind the sweep. “The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day,” the mayor said in the statement. “Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with” because the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

“I have become increasingly concerned — as had the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties — that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community,” Mr. Bloomberg said. He added that on Monday, Brookfield asked the city to assist in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules.

“But make no mistake,” the mayor said, “the final decision to act was mine and mine alone.”

Some of the displaced protesters regrouped a few blocks away at Foley Square, with the row of courthouses on Centre Street as a backdrop, and swapped stories of their confrontations with the police as they talked about what to do next.

One protester, Nate Barchus, 23, said the eviction from Zuccotti Park was likely to galvanize supporters, particularly because a series of gatherings had already been planned for Thursday, the protest’s two-month anniversary.

“This,” he said, referring to the early morning sweep, “reminds everyone who was occupying exactly why they were occupying.”

The midday arrests at the Canal Street lot unfolded next to a triangular space known as Duarte Square, for the first president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Pablo Duarte. The city owns slightly less than half an acre of land there, on the eastern edge of the square. The western section is owned by Trinity Church, a major landowner downtown, and had been fenced off for the winter recently after an art installation was dismantled.

With dozens of police officers watching, protesters climbed to the top of the plywood fence and held a general-assembly-style discussion on whether to “liberate another piece of property,” and about an hour later — after some protesters said they had tried to obtain permission to enter the church’s lot — two protesters dressed in black appeared with bolt cutters. They quickly made an opening in the fence.

As the crowd poured in, police vans sped down Varick Street toward Zuccotti Park, where another group of several hundred protesters was trying to retake the space where they had camped out since mid-September. It was cleaner than it had been in some time: after the protesters were thrown out, workers using power washers blasted water over the stone that covers the ground.

The cleaned-up park caught the attention of passers-by who had become accustomed to seeing the protesters’ tents and tarps. One young father, pushing his toddler son in a stroller, gave police officers guarding Zuccotti Park a thumbs-up sign.

Another man, rushing by in a cream suit, flashed them a huge grin, and a blonde woman stopped in her tracks. “Ooh, good,” she said.

Marybeth Carragher, who lives in a building overlooking the park, said she and other residents were apprehensive about the city’s plan to let the protesters return, without their tents. “I think my neighbors and I are very thankful that the mayor acted,” she said, “but we remain completely outraged for having to endure this for nine weeks.”

The operation to clear the park had begun near the Brooklyn Bridge, where the police gathered before riding in vans to the block-square park. As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “This is our home” and “Barricade!”

The mayor’s office sent out a message on Twitter at 1:19 a.m. saying: “Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protesters can return after the park is cleared.” Fliers handed out by the police at the private park on behalf of the park’s owner and the city spelled out the same message.

The protesters rallied around an area known as the kitchen, near the middle of the park, and began putting up makeshift barricades with tables and pieces of scrap wood.

Over the next two hours, dozens of protesters left the park while a core group of about 100 dug in around the food area. Many locked arms and defied police orders to leave. Some sang “We Shall Overcome” and chanted at the officers to “disobey your orders.”

“If they come in, we’re not going anywhere,” said Chris Johnson, 32, who sat with other remaining protesters near the food area.

By 3 a.m., dozens of officers in helmets, watched over by Commissioner Kelly, closed in on those who remained. The police pulled them out one by one and handcuffed them. Most were led out without incident.

The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of encampment, which has prompted similar demonstrations across the country.

The move also came hours after a small demonstration at City Hall on Monday by opponents of the protest, including local residents and merchants, some of whom urged the mayor to clear out the park.

Before the police moved in, they set up a battery of klieg lights and aimed them into the park. A police captain, wearing a helmet, walked down Liberty Street and announced: “The city has determined that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard.”

The captain ordered the protesters to “to immediately remove all private property” and said that if they interfered with the police operation, they would be arrested. Property that was not removed would be taken to a sanitation garage, the police said.

About 200 supporters of the protesters arrived early Tuesday after hearing that the park was being cleared. They were prevented from getting within a block of the park by a police barricade. There were a number of arrests after some scuffles between the two sides, but no details were immediately available. After being forced up Broadway by the police, some of the supporters decided to march several blocks to Foley Square.

In the weeks since the protest began, Mr. Bloomberg had struggled with how to respond. He repeatedly made clear that he did not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics, but he has also defended their right to protest and in recent days and weeks has sounded increasingly exasperated, especially in the wake of growing complaints from neighbors about how the protest has disrupted the neighborhood and hurt local businesses.

Reporting was contributed by Cara Buckley, Joseph Goldstein, Matt Flegenheimer, Rob Harris, Steve Kenny, Corey Kilgannon and Sarah Maslin Nir.

On the Creative Clarity and Vision of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:25:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street, November 6th. (Photo: [clint] [4])

http://www.truth-out.org/originality-occupy-wall-street/1321203807

All,

An excellent analysis by Mr. Wolff of the OWS movement. I thoroughly agree...

Kofi

The Originality of Occupy Wall Street
13 November 2011
by Richard D. Wolff, RDWolff.com [3] | Op-Ed

The political movements of the left that I have participated in over many decades were almost always focused on or prioritized particular issues (wars, civil liberties, civil rights, poverty, collective bargaining, etc.) and/or particular subsections of the population (African-Americans, women, gay people, immigrants, etc.). The authorities almost always took advantage of that focus to separate and isolate the movement from society generally. They were often successful. Even when the authorities failed to provoke general hostility to the movement, they were able to prevent the development of more than a general sympathy for it.

In the short history of OWS and its spread to date, I am struck by its impressive insistence on remaining a movement around a very general and inclusive critique of an unjust economy (99% against 1%) that has corrupted much of US politics and culture. The net result is a built-in systemic critique, sometimes explicit (remarkably often named as capitalism) and almost always implicit. The hesitation to choose among and focus on specific demands reflects the wisdom of maintaining the broad, systemic critique. The taboo against systemic critique – a legacy of post-war anti-communism – seems to be broken. Nonetheless, the struggle to select and prioritize specific demands needs to take time and great care, especially if that struggle is to be accomplished without losing the invaluable systemic critique and demand for change. Most other movements of the left could not accomplish that to their detriment and often destruction.

In its short history, OWS seems already well along in discovering and instituting a new kind of leadership system and organization. The task is daunting and its accomplishment has likewise eluded most left movements in the past. The polarities to avoid are (1) purely horizontal collectives lacking the coordination and shared focus without which massive duplications and wastes of energy and effort breed disorientation and demoralization, and (2) conflict-ridden power concentrations that dissipate and de-energize general initiative and enthusiasm. Here too, interesting explorations of how to navigate between these polarities are underway in OWS. The US left is littered with the debris of movements that crashed on these polarities and/or atrophied from settling into one or the other.

OWS is rooted in the mass disaffection felt about the basic political economy of the US. Those dominating economics, politics and culture seem determined to keep the society moving in just those directions that will deepen that disaffection and thereby strengthen OWS. Income and wealth inequality, alienation from politics, deteriorating job, educational and retirement opportunities all conspire to recruit for OWS. The increased stresses and strains of personal life and relationships do likewise. OWS has already managed to exert combined political and personal attractions on a broad public.

Since 2007, the US has been engaged in this sequence of social events: a capitalist crisis, a trickle-down economic recovery program (that helped the top but never trickled down to anyone else), and an austerity program to pay for that trickle down program. Europe experienced a parallel engagement. However, Europe had much more viable and in-tact labor unions and anti-capitalist political parties and party factions. They enabled the mobilization of Europeans against austerity programs and in some cases also against the trickle-down policies and crisis-ridden capitalism that produced austerity programs. They also reaffirmed and reinforced existing organizational patterns that did not attract much of the new energy emerging on the left.

In contrast, the US has taken longer to react and respond. Yet therein lies an important dialectic of opposites. Precisely because the US has long-declining and therefore weak labor unions and no significantly influential anti-capitalist parties, opposition to the crisis-trickle-down-austerity sequence takes much longer to form and mobilize. People in the US have to rebuild old shells of organization from the bottom up or build altogether new organizations. Yet with this difficulty comes a certain distance from and relative freedom to consider, evaluate and pick carefully among the many old habits, presumptions, organizational forms and styles that have demonstrated their strengths and weaknesses in and for left movements.

In Europe, those oppositional forces that seek to start afresh and independent of the older movements – for example, the various “indignant” groupings – slip quickly into disunity and tension with the existing left organizations. This weakens and divides the left just when the opposite is needed most. In the US, OWS may well be able to avoid that problem precisely because of the old left’s long period of decline and demoralization.

The stunning growth and social influence of OWS in its few weeks of existence augur well for its survival and maturation.

Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/8973
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/8973
[3] http://rdwolff.com/content/originality-occupy-wall-street
[4] http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintw/6320547357/
[5] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[6] http://www.truth-out.org/content/richard-d-wolff
[7] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[8] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[9] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=lessons-original-occupation-madisons-sheriff-dave-mahoney/1319735448
[10] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=occupy-obama-could-turn-heat-democracy/1319313907

Occupy Cal Protest Rally at University of California Berkeley Campus, Nov. 15, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (C.S.) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:19:00 +0000

General Assembly in front of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley

PHOTOS BY CHULEENAN

All,

On Monday evening, November 15, 2011, Chuleenan and I participated in a massive rally and protest of Occupy Cal at Sproul Plaza on the University of California, Berkeley campus in which over 4,000 students and community citizens and activists declared our collective intellectual, spiritual, political and ideological solidarity with the national Occupy Wall Street movement and demanded that the state of California honestly address the crucial issues of the need for real democracy in public education, the exploitive and corrupting influences of the banks and Wall Street on the U.S. economy generally, and the critical political, cultural, and economic relationships between higher education, health care reform, financial regulation, systemic structural investment, and science and technology in a global context. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and currently Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley Robert Reich was the keynote speaker who had been chosen by student groups to give the annual Mario Savio memorial lecture in honor of the great and profound legacy left by the late UC, Berkeley philosophy graduate and leader of the famed Free Speech Movement in 1964 Mario Savio (1942-1996). Reich gave his inspiring speech on the exact same steps on the Plaza directly in front of Sproul Hall that Savio gave his famous speech on top of a police car in December of 1964 at the height of the extraordinary campus wide Free Speech Movement (see Video of that incredible speech below). BTW: The huge rally and Reich's speech were terrific. Mario would have been very proud of us...

Kofi

MARIO SAVIO AT SPROUL HALL
DECEMBER 2, 1964

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

--Mario Savio, University of California, Berkeley Sproul Hall Plaza--December 2, 1964

Major Evidence of How the Occupy Wall Street Movement Has Changed the Direction of American Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 08:28:00 +0000

(Photo: Robert Stolarik / The New York Times)

http://www.truth-out.org/ten-ways-occupy-movement-changes-everything/1321111931

All,

Facts on the ground...

Kofi

Ten Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything
10 November 2011
by Sarah van Gelder, David Korten and Steve Piersanti
YES! Magazine [3] | News Analysis

Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was little discussion of the outsized power of Wall Street and the diminishing fortunes of the middle class.

The media blackout was especially remarkable given that issues like jobs and corporate influence on elections topped the list of concerns for most Americans.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that “we the people” will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time. Here’s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything:

1. It names the source of the crisis.
Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed [4], perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in.

2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want.
We can create a world that works for everyone [5], not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.

3. It sets a new standard for public debate.
Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually “trickle down.”

4. It presents a new narrative.
The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance

5. It creates a big tent.
We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.[6]. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.

6. It offers everyone a chance to create change.
No one is in charge; no organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement nearly impossible to shut down.

7. It is a movement, not a list of demands.
The call for deep change [7]—not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms—is the movement’s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.

8. It combines the local and the global.
People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.

9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community.
Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.

10. We have reclaimed our power.
Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us [8]. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.

Like all human endeavors, Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of variations and spin-offs will be imperfect. There have already been setbacks and divisions, hardships and injury. But as our world faces extraordinary challenges—from climate change to soaring inequality—our best hope is the ordinary people, gathered in imperfect democracies, who are finding ways to fix a broken world.

This article is adapted from the book, This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement [9]edited by Sarah van Gelder and the staff of YES! Magazine [10] and published November 2011 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers [11].

Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/8958
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/8958
[3] http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/ten-ways-the-occupy-movement-changes-everything
[4] http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/wall-street-occupiers-the-future-is-in-your-hands
[5] http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/occupywallstreet
[6] http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/people-vs-corporations
[7] http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/sarah-van-gelder-pbs-newshour-interview
[8] http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-most-important-thing-in-the-world
[9] http://store.yesmagazine.org/this-changes-everything
[10] http://www.yesmagazine.org/
[11] http://www.bkconnection.com/ProdDetails.asp?ID=9781609945879&PG=1&Type=RLMa&PCS=BKP
[12] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[13] http://www.truth-out.org/sarah-van-gelder/1303574087
[14] http://www.truth-out.org/david-korten/1311104389
[15] http://www.truth-out.org/steve-piersanti/1321111739
[16] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[17] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[18] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=stunning-victory-occupy-wall-street-has-already-achieved/1319637976
[19] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=making-safer-spaces-occupy-wall-street-addresses-questions-security-zuccotti-park/1320679533

The Ongoing Importance of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and Its Impact on National Political Discourse

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:40:00 +0000

http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/152860/the_stunning_victory_that_occupy_wall_street_has_already_achieved/

All,

From just two weeks ago...

Kofi

The Stunning Victory That Occupy Wall Street Has Already Achieved
26 October 2011
by Joshua Holland AlterNet [3] | Op-Ed

In just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street.
Occupy Wall Street has already achieved a stunning victory – a victory that is easy to overlook, but impossible to overstate. In just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs -- and especially jobs with decent benefits -- spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families' debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point. To borrow the loosely defined terms that define the Occupy movement, these ordinary citizens have shifted the conversation away from what the “1 percent” -- the corporate right and its dedicated media, network of think-tanks and PR shops -- want to talk about and, notably, paid good money to get us to talk about. Peter G. Peterson, a Wall Street mogul and Nixon administration cabinet member, has reportedly dedicated a billion dollars of his fortune to the effort since the 1980s. How successful have he and his fellow travelers been? In 2009, the Washington Post came under fire for running an article – in its news section, not its opinion pages – written by Peterson's Fiscal Times, which the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting described [4] as “a propaganda outlet … [formed] to promote cuts in Social Security and other entitlement programs.” (It was Peterson Foundation employees, among those from other outside groups, who staffed Obama's “bipartisan deficit commission.” [5]) As I noted back in May, a study done by the National Journal that month quantified what the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, described [6] as a “deficit feedback loop,” in which “the relentless bipartisan focus on the deficit convinces voters to be worried about it, which in turn leads lawmakers to spend still more time talking about it and less time talking about the economy.” According to the Journal [7], “major U.S. newspapers have increasingly shifted their attention away from coverage of unemployment in recent months while greatly intensifying their focus on the deficit.” The analysis -- based on a measure of how often the words "unemployment" and "deficit" appear in major publications -- portrays a dramatically shifting landscape of coverage over the past two years, as the debate over how to fix the federal deficit has risen to prominence and the question of how to handle still-high unemployment has faded from the media's consciousness.

Consider the impact that relentless focus on the deficit – and declining coverage of the jobs crisis and housing meltdown -- had on public opinion until very recently:

Now fast-forward five months, and we see an entirely different media landscape. According to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism [9], the economy dominated last week's news, grabbing 24 percent of the mainstream media's “news hole.” Occupy Wall Street accounted for 10 percent of the news hole, up from 7 percent the week before, and 2 percent the week before that. (The death of Libyan leader Moammar Ghaddafi drew more attention to foreign policy issues this week [10], but the economy continued to be a dominant topic.)

Last week, Zaid Jilani of Think Progress offered [11] some data which tell the tale of a dramatically shifting media landscape. He noted that “at the beginning of August, when Washington, DC was debating the debt ceiling crisis, the national debt dominated the airwaves.”

While it was appropriate for the media then to be covering the deficit due to the debt ceiling debate at the time, there was a stunning lack of coverage of the jobs crisis. A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times.

But, writes Jilani, a recent “review of the same three networks between Oct. 10 and Oct. 16 finds that the word 'debt' only netted 398 mentions, while 'occupy' grabbed 1,278, Wall Street netted 2,378, and jobs got 2,738.”

This sea-change can't be attributed only to the Occupy movement – it also correlates with the White House's “pivot” toward jobs and the economy – but there is no doubt that Occupy Wall Street has played a major role in bringing attention to the plight of working America. Even House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, acknowledged the occupiers' grievances when his office announced that he would be giving an address “about income disparity and how Republicans believe the government could help fix it.” One would be naïve to believe Cantor would ever support such measures, but it nonetheless marked a dramatic departure from the GOP's usual class-war stance. (Cantor later canceled the speech when he learned he would be greeted by protesters.)

The real-world impact of this shift is difficult to predict, but the problems on which our mainstream discourse focuses are the ones most likely to be addressed.

Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/8073
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/8073
[3] http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/152860/the_stunning_victory_that_occupy_wall_street_has_already_achieved/
[4] http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3991
[5] http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/05/21/revolt-of-the-wonks-former-obama-advisors-want-to-know-whats-happening-on-his-deficit-commission/
[6] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/here-it-is-scientific-proof-of-the-beltway-deficit-feedback-loop/2011/03/03/AFTo4s5G_blog.html
[7] http://www.nationaljournal.com/economy/in-media-coverage-deficit-eclipses-unemployment-20110516
[8] http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimages_1306453870_screenshot20110526at12.54.27pm.png
[9] http://www.journalism.org/index_report/pej_news_coverage_index_october_1016_2011
[10] http://www.journalism.org/index_report/pej_news_coverage_index_october_1723_2011
[11] http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/10/18/346892/chart-media-jobs-wall-street-ignoring-deficit-hysteria/
[12] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[13] http://www.truth-out.org/joshua-holland/1313676769
[14] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[15] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[16] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=we-people-not-we-corporations/1319632343

Art Handler Workers Engaged In Union Battle With Sotheby's In Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:10:00 +0000

http://www.truth-out.org/sothebys-and-beyond-occupy-movement-boosts-unions/1320958796

All,

Like I've been saying for two months now the Occupy movement in all of its many dimensions is off to a very powerful and necessary beginning and it can only grow and become even more so as it continues to rapidly evolve and mature...Holla!

Kofi

At Sotheby’s and Beyond, "Occupy" Movement Boosts Unions
10 November 2011
by Mark Brenner and Jenny Brown, Labor Notes [3] | Op-Ed

What started as mostly young people hunkering down in New York’s financial district has mushroomed into an inspiring protest movement against runaway corporate power and staggering income inequality.

One of the most visceral examples of the disconnect between the 99 percent and the 1 percent has been highlighted by a series of actions bringing together locked-out Teamsters and Occupy Wall Street activists in New York.

The two groups returned to the high-end art auction house Sotheby’s Wednesday night, bringing crowds that packed the sidewalk and spilled into the street.

About 400 blew whistles and shouted “shame” as patrons in suits filed through a police cordon to enter Sotheby’s much ballyhooed contemporary art sale.

Management has locked 43 blue-collar art handlers out of their jobs since August 1, as punishment for refusing to accept cuts to their hours, benefits, and job security. They’re members of Teamsters Local 814.

Occupy Wall Street protesters have conducted serial disruptions during Sotheby’s auctions, standing up one by one and denouncing union-busting by the company, which is making soaring profits but insists it should be able to replace full-time workers with lower-paid temps. Sotheby’s responded by requiring a $5,000 deposit to enter its auctions.

The Occupy Movement couldn’t ask for a better poster child for wealth and power run amok. “Sotheby’s: Where the .01 percent go to shop,” said one sign Wednesday. “Art for the masses, not the upper classes,” they chanted. “All day, all week, occupy Sotheby’s.”

Seven protesters were arrested inside Wednesday. One neatly dressed demonstrator was carried out of the building and down the sidewalk suspended only by his arms. “Let him go!” yelled the crowd as police loaded him into a squad car. The protesters had locked themselves to each other inside the building to make them difficult to remove.

Last week four were arrested for sitting-in at the auction house, and pickets have targeted Sotheby’s board members constantly in recent weeks. At a fancy dinner last week for the New York Women’s Foundation, where Sotheby’s board member Diana Taylor chairs the board, the wives of five art handlers called on Taylor to end the lockout.

“The art market is flush with money and booming,” noted an arts writer reviewing the auction season for the New York Times. The author expressed vague surprise that this was true despite continuing economic misery for American workers.

Inside, one painting sold for $61.7 million, more than double its estimated value, which the Times reported as the “high point,” of the auction, noting “the salesroom burst into applause.”

The article didn’t mention the noisy picket line outside. Instead, it quoted a former Sotheby’s expert: “People still really enjoy the auction process,” she said. “It’s enthralling, they get a thrill and they get to take something home besides.”

Changing the Debate

Labor has embraced Occupy Wall Street because the movement is succeeding where unions have stumbled—turning the national attention back onto those responsible for the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and onto who should pay to clean up the mess.

In two-and-a-half years on the defensive about the auto bailout, health care reform, and so-called greedy public sector workers, unions have spent untold time and treasure trying to turn the tide of public opinion. From the One Nation rally last fall to the AFL-CIO’s April actions in solidarity with Wisconsin, labor has struggled to silence the drumbeat of austerity and anti-unionism.

“We endorsed Occupy Wall Street because they’re 100 percent right that banks caused this problem,” said Marvin Holland, director of community action for Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents 38,000 bus and subway workers.

Some unions, notably the Service Employees, with their Fight for a Fair Economy campaign, and National Nurses United, with their Main Street Contract with America, have made changing the national economic debate a major thrust of their activity. But outside the Wisconsin uprising, none of labor’s efforts have pricked the national consciousness in the same way as Occupy Wall Street.

“This has really struck a nerve way up the spinal cord,” said Jason Chambers, a 10-year ironworker who’s been camping out in Dewey Square since the start of Occupy Boston. “People are just fed up that there’s no accountability for these banks that got bailed out. Meanwhile our rights are under attack across the country.”

Although participating in the occupy movement has been an adjustment for labor activists unaccustomed to the lack of formal demands or clearly identified leaders, for others it’s opened up new horizons. “This is the first time I’ve seen real democracy in my lifetime, at the general assembly at Occupy Boston,” Chambers said.

This third-generation ironworker, die-hard Bruins fan, and self-described regular guy says the “occupy” phenomenon has had a profound impact on him and his co-workers. “My vote counts and my voice is heard. To be able to contribute to it is amazing.”

One-Two Punch

With Occupy Wall Street’s meteoric rise has come pressure to clarify who’s in charge and what protesters want. But rather than pressing occupiers to move beyond the rallying cry “We are the 99%,” unions should treat the movement as a strategic ally—a megaphone and a magnifying glass for labor’s ongoing battles over everything from public sector layoffs to preserving defined-benefit pensions.

Together it’s a powerful one-two punch, with Occupy Wall Street crystallizing the big-picture problems of our upside-down economy and labor providing potent examples of corporate excess—like Sotheby’s—and clear targets for a movement ready to take to the streets.

It’s a combination that has worked well in previous challenges to the long winter of corporate rule, from local living wage fights and campus-worker struggles to flashpoints that brought labor together with new allies, such as the global justice movement that emerged from 1999’s “Battle in Seattle.”

Where's It Going?

These actions are starting to unwind the conventional wisdom that there is no alternative to budget cuts and unemployment, by taking aim directly at the 1 percent who’ve gotten filthy rich by squeezing the rest of us.

Thanks to the occupy movement, new flying squads are springing up every day ready to join the fight. Occupiers are planning creative disruptions, whether it’s a pie in the face at a bankers convention or a glitter bomb during a corporate cocktail party. More than a thousand have been arrested in New York alone since the protest began.

More arrests will surely follow if protesters and their labor allies continue to disrupt business as usual, and especially if they move from symbolic civil disobedience to shut-it-down confrontations. Those can be powerful, as shown this fall by mobile picketers at Verizon and by longshore workers in Washington state who blocked trains from delivering grain to scabs in a port.

But the most important lessons union activists should soak up from time spent shoulder to shoulder with the occupiers are their audacity and their commitment to direct democracy.

After a generation of defeats, union leaders instinctively head for what’s “politically possible.” The occupiers have turned that conventional wisdom on its head, focusing not on what we can win this minute but on what we deserve.

The ground is fertile for a new common sense, and the seeds are just hitting soil.

Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/8915
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/8915
[3] http://labornotes.org/2011/10/sothebys-beyond-occupy-movement-boosts-unions
[4] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[5] http://www.truth-out.org/mark-brenner/1309020436
[6] http://www.truth-out.org/jenny-brown/%5Bfield_published_date-timestamp%5D
[7] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[8] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[9] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=mortgage-bankers-association-comes-chicago-receives-wrathful-welcome/1318431407
[10] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=occupy-wall-street-protest-links-locked-out-teamsters/1317314640

Robert Reich On The Real Stakes of the 2012 National Elections, The Wall Street Debacle, And the Collapse of the U.S. Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:30:00 +0000

(Photo: Andrew Bossi / Flickr)

http://www.truth-out.org/washington-pre-occupied/1320501362

"The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.

I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.

Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy – 1968 and 1989?

I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.

Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising."

--Robert Reich

All,

Robert Reich says it all here and then some. This is just the beginning of a massive social movement that will-- if intelligently sustained and expanded --serve as the very foundation in the short and longterm for any real concrete social, economic, and political change in this society. So while it's just a (brilliant) beginning the important thing to remember is that it is a very POWERFUL beginning and for the first time in a very long time we, the People are in the forefront of actually making or at least demanding these changes. That is an inspiring reality in itself that will continue to serve as a major incentive for mass participation and elevating the very principle of grassroots struggle and mobilization that animates all genuine radical change in society and culture. This is our major opportunity to ACT on our own collective behalf for once without crippling ourselves with the eternal copouts and lazy equivocations of cynicism, solipsism, fatalism, nihilism, and despair. We dare not blow, take for granted, or smugly dismiss this great opportunity for creating real change. If we do so it will only be at our own peril as citizens and human beings...

Kofi

3 November 2011
by Robert Reich
Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.

Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.

The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.

I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.

Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy – 1968 and 1989?

I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.

Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.

Links:

[1] http://www.truth-out.org/print/8617
[2] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail/8617
[3] http://robertreich.org/post/12303771388
[4] http://www.flickr.com/photos/thisisbossi/4393355562/in/photostream/
[5] http://www.truth-out.org/printmail
[6] http://www.truth-out.org/content/robert-reich
[7] http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6694/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=2160
[8] https://members.truth-out.org/donate
[9] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=occupied-what-now/1318825916
[10] http://www.truth-out.org/?q=food-system-pays-dearly-wall-street-occupies-washington/1319462814