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5. The Year of the Protest

Dec-16-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: 2011 was the year when it seemed as though the people’s voices might be heard. As we reach the year’s end, there are ongoing protests in Russia and China, while in the UK, the ‘occupy’ movement has been classified as “terrorists”. But Time magazine picks them as the ‘Person of the Year’. We include links to a lovely video abut the OWS movement, and a selection of posters for downloading and waving.

* The Protester TIME’s Person of the Year 2011

No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters didn’t just voice their complaints; they changed the world.

* Occupy Wall St – The Revolution Is Love – YouTube

A taste of the upcoming feature documentary, Occupy Love. … “Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says ‘more for you is less for me.’ But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%.” ~ Charles Eisenstein

This short film was Directed by Ian MacKenzie, co-produced with Velcrow Ripper

* Posters from the Occupy Movement (Thanks, Kyla!)

2. Post-Occupied

Nov-25-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It is impressive what the occupy movement has achieved: a change in the worldwide political agenda to focus on the problem of a corporate plutocracy. It is unprecedented to achieve that in three months. Proof? Paul Martin, Canada’s ex-Prime Minister, came out in support of OWS. But now what? Rolling Stone sums up the OWS history; the Toronto Star looks at the disbanding of the occupied parks as the best thing possible for the movement at this point, and it appears the 1% is very worried, indeed.

* Inside Occupy Wall Street Rolling Stone

It started with a Tweet – “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule” – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a hard-to-say slogan that never took off, “Democracy, not corporatocracy,” and some advice that did: “Bring tent.”

….Even the instigators and architects present at the creation marvel at how things just happened. “It was a magic moment,” says Kalle Lasn, Adbusters’ 69-year-old co-founder. “After that, things took on a life of their own, and then it was out of our hands.”

Adbusters’ call to arms had been timid by the standards of the movement quickly taking form. The magazine had proposed a “worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” but their big ideas went no further than pressuring Obama to appoint a presidential commission on the role of money in politics. In Lasn’s imagination, though, that would be just the start…. They were still thinking in inches.

* Occupy Toronto: They Can’t Evict A Conversation Toronto Star

“Where are the actionable deliverables?” is the repeated objection right-wingers have used to dismiss the movement outright. But, in just a month, big things have come out of the conversation unfurling in St. James Park. To name a few:

1. People affected by decisions should be at the table making them. …This is a radical idea.

2. Tenet Number Two: No one gets left behind

3. The revival of volunteerism. Go down to St. James Park any day, and you will see people chopping wood, ladling soup, delivering water, picking up garbage. The motto here is: “Be the change you are asking for.”

4. The medium for discussion they’ve developed at the general assemblies: the speakers’ microphone. This is sharing personified – each person gathered repeats the words of the speaker, so others can hear them. Have you tried it? It’s amazing, once you get over the embarrassment of participating so heartily.

Over the past month, I’ve visited St. James Park a dozen times. I’ve always left inspired. So have other people.

* Memo Reveals How Seriously Powerful Interests Take Occupy Wall Street NationofChange

This morning, Up With Chris Hayes unveiled a major scoop: the show obtained a written pitch to the American Bankers Association from a prominent Washington lobbying firm, proposing a $850,000 smear campaign against Occupy Wall Street.

The memo, issued by Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, described the danger presented by the burgeoning movement, saying that if Democrats embraced Occupy, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street.… It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Furthermore, it notes that “the bigger concern…should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

3. Assault with Pepper

Nov-25-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: If you haven’t heard about the UC Davis pepper spraying, this will bring you up to date. Below, some followups. The multiple angle video gives you four angles of the spraying, rolling simultaneously, that lets you see what happened. (Also interesting from a media perspective: our lives are like this now.) Walk of Shame is one of the most impressive actions I’ve ever seen: the UC students shame -in absolute silence- the chancellor who authorized (ordered?) the spraying. Mark Ames gives us the background on who the chancellor is, and her past anti-student actions. Occupy Lulz shows 40+ of the better iconic images of Lt. John Pike and his spray can that have proliferated across the internet.

* Viewing the UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles

* Walk of Shame: UC Davis Chancellor Katehi

* How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities Mark Ames (Thanks, Kim!)

Today, thanks in part to UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, Greek university campuses are no longer protected from state security forces. She helped undo her native country’s “university asylum” laws just in time for the latest austerity measures to kick in. Incredibly, Katehi attacked university campus freedom despite the fact that she was once a student at the very center of Greece’s anti-junta, pro-democracy rebellion–although what she was doing there, if anything at all, no one really knows.

* Occupy Lulz Boing Boing

3. What Now for the Occupy Movement?

Nov-18-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Different confrontations are happening all over the world in the Occupy movement. There are some powerful implications in the degree of violence being used to break up the camps, which we’ll get to in the next section. But where should the movement go from here? We look at four pieces: an In Focus photo essay of the Zuccotti park sweep, a 360º panorama of London/ St Paul’s Occupation, a Common Dreams look at why this movement matters, and Adbusters’ suggestion about where to go from now. (It was Adbusters who catalyzed the Occupy movement, of course.)

* Occupy Wall Street Faces Evictions Alan Taylor – In Focus

* Occupy London at St Paul’s – 360º Panoramic interactiveThe Guardian

* More Than A Movement Against Big Banks, It’s A Rejection Of What Our Society Has Become. Common Dreams

he first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. …That’s what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. … People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

* TACTICAL BRIEFING Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

Here are a couple of emerging ideas:

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we’ve got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare “victory” and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Whatever we do, let’s keep our revolutionary spirit alive … let’s never stop living without dead time.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

4. OWS: How we Got here, Where We’re Going

Nov-11-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Certain things are clearer from the bird’s perspective, such as that the protests world-wide in the occupy movement, and the protests called the “Arab Spring” and the protests in Tel-Aviv are all focussed on the same thing: the policies that have lead to the extreme concentration of wealth. Juan Cole looks at the commonalities; ex-NY Gov. Spitzer looks at where OWS needs to go from here, and we end with a cheering and true story about a protester and his confrontation with the Man.

* From Tunisia to Oakland, How a New Age of Activism Was Born Juan ColeMother Jones

From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended. The massive popular protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.

Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting. They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas, and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere. They are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted futures, and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as the matrix of human ethics and life.

* Occupy Wall Street: Eight Ideas For Making The Protests Even More Successful. Eliot Spitzer Slate Magazine

Those of us who have written and spoken vigorously in support of OWS and for its capacity, almost unparalleled in today’s political environment, to shift our political focus, have an obligation to contribute our answers to the question of what OWS should do. We should answer not because there is any reason for this organic movement—which has done just fine without advice from outsiders—to listen to any of the advice rendered, but because it will help those of us outside the movement clarify our own political ideas. So here are my answers:

From an organizing perspective, OWS should…

* “He has a right to speak,” said the cop to the banker Daily Kos

Like most bullies, the banks are cowards. They talk a big game, but if confronted with their crimes, they run for cover and go whining to “mommy”. Today, I walked up and down a sidewalk, in front of a branch of Chase and a branch of BofA. I handed out about 250 flyers during lunch hour.

They panicked and called their private security people, then more private security and finally the cops. That’s when they found out that they didn’t have a leg to stand on.

4. Why OWS Won’t Work

Oct-21-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Some people are cynical, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Two essays and a New Yorker cover really come down to the same basic point: that we don’t like being ruled by an arbitrary and corrupt plutocracy doesn’t make any difference to them. Rarely, in history, have people been given power. If you want it, you have to grab it. Editorial note: I hope Welsh and Tard are wrong. I wish I had some argument that would convince at least myself.

* Revolution Basics #1: Who cares what you think? Ian Welsh

Bloomberg and Wall Street may not like Occupy Wall Street, but they aren’t going to negotiate in any meaningful sense. Why should they?What are the consequences, for them, of not cooperating? They have to see some noisy people. Does it appreciably reduce their income? No. The men or women they get to sleep with? No. The amount of power they have over DC? No. Their actual physical safety, or the safety of those they care about? No.

For Occupy to be successful, on its own terms, will require shutting down Wall Street and probably all of NYC. There must be so many people on the street that it is impossible to arrest them all or to get rid of them without resorting to a lot more than a whiff of grapeshot. The elites must be be faced with a decision tree “negotiate or lose a ton of money and be massively inconvenienced or shoot hundreds of thousands of people and build mass detention camps.” That will require two or three million people occupying New York City.

Remember, modern elites are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. If the cost to them of not giving in is less than the cost of giving in, they won’t give in. It took trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. They take home billions of dollars in personal bonuses. You must cost them, personally, more than that, for them to want to give in.

* Occupy Wall Street: Can peaceful protests work anymore?War Tard

I’m munching popcorn watching the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

Truth is though, I’m pretty skeptical on the efficacy of protest movements in our current sci fi dystopia. I’m talking protest movements that actually achieve their aims. For instance, one million people marched and peacefully waved signs in London against the Iraq war and that changed absolutely nothing. The corporate oligarchy went ahead with their proxy resource war even when a sizable portion of the general public called bullshit on the reasons behind it. Entrenched power structures just don’t give a shit what the plebs think anymore.

…Since when did asking the ruling elite nicely by peaceful protest ever work in human history? When you look at it, human history is just one long narrative of who killed who to take their shit. It is certainly not a story of who asked nicely for some shit and was given it because the enlightened rulers gave up power and control because they suddenly developed a new found respect for people with no shit.

* Current New Yorker Cover