Note: A translation provided by a human translator is clearly preferable, but a less than perfect one is still better than none...
September 28, 2011
The American Fall Series #1: Mr Obama... Tear Down This Empire!
Hello Every One!
Just a quick one to keep you all posted on what is happening right now in the US.
The Spirit of Seattle is being revived by a new generation of courageous souls. This is the U.S. equivalent of the Arab Spring, soon to be widely know as the American Fall.
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THE QUOTES
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, Look at that, you son of a bitch.
- Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell -- Taken from HERE
"We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table - and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can."
THE LATEST ON THE GROWING PROTEST MOVEMENT AGAINST THE CORPORATE DOMINATION OF AMERICA
Nobody Can Predict The Moment Of Revolution ( Occupy Wall Street ) Excellent! Must Watch! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwWInp75ua0
We want to share insights into the formation of a new social movement as it is still taking shape in real time. The video was shot during the 5th and 6th day of the occupation. This idea to occupy the financial district in New York City was inspired by recent uprisings in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and Tunisia which most of us were following online. Despite of the corporate media's effort to silence the protests, and Yahoo's attempt to to censor it in e-mail communication, the occupation is growing in numbers and spreading to other cities in the US and abroad. Please forward our video to like-minded people via email, facebook, twitter - and make the voices of dissent circulate.
Occupy Wall Street: Police brutality, media blackout (Sept 27) Covered by Russian Television! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV9uZ00bqD8
As Occupy Wall Street demonstrations enter their second week, over 80 people were arrested over the weekend and police brutality surges on the streets. Many protesters say the mainstream media is undergoing a black-out since many corporate networks sleep in the same bed with Wall Street. The crowd at the park grows each day. More through http://livestream.com/globalrevolution and http://www.mobilebroadcastnews.com/NewsRoom/
MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall Street Lawrence O'donnell with "The Last Word" (Sept 26, 2011) A MUST WATCH! Note from Jean: The police has probably received orders to incite anger so as to turn the protesters violent and then have an excuse to turn even more violent against the American people they are sworn to serve and protect. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgr3DiqWYCI
An excellent piece of main stream coverage on this past weekend protests.
Countdown with Keith ...: Michael Moore on support of Occupy Wall Street protest (Sept 23, 2011) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrFQs5X-I1Y
Michael Moore, filmmaker, activist and author of "Here Comes Trouble," calls on people all over the country to bring the Occupy Wall Street movement to their communities. Later, Moore denounces the state of Georgia for executing Troy Davis.
Michael Moore At Occupy Wall Street 9-26 LIVE with crowd mic - Note: Because bullhorns are forbidden by the police, the crowd repeats all he says so others may hear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRPbe3fVDcE
Director Michael Moore stopped by to say what up!! :D - Moore demands a perp walk of Wall Street Criminals! Tax them -- not enough! Kleptocracy and the 400 richest Americans vs 200 million+
The Richest 0.1% Have Launched A War On Us (23 Sep 2011) http://ampedstatus.org/the-richest-0-1-have-launched-a-war-on-us-its-time-to-fight-back-and-hold-these-400-billionaires-personally-responsible-for-our-economic-crisis/
The Richest 0.1% Have Launched A War On Us Its Time To Fight Back And Hold These 400 Billionaires Personally Responsible For Our Economic Crisis. We have endured financial oppression for long enough. In a time of national crisis and shared sacrifice, the richest one-tenth of one percent of the population cannot continue on their merry way, living in obscene wealth and detached from reality, while the majority of the population desperately struggles to make ends meet. We are under attack, and its time to fight back.
Occupy Wall Street https://occupywallst.org/
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza - On September 27th, 2011, we marched on the Financial District's Luxury Night Out, where couples wore outfits that cost more than we will ever make in a month and looked at cars that cost more than we will ever make in a year, afterward, they went back to one of their many houses that cost more than we will make in our lifetime. - Occupied San Francisco grows larger every day. Occupied Chicago was dispersed but not defeated. They will regroup and reoccupy. So far at least 52 cities in America are occupied or organizing. We span at least three continents. We are growing. Block by block - city by city. We will see change in this country, in this world.It will happen sooner than you can imagine.
About OCCUPY TOGETHER http://occupytogether.com/
Welcome to OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. As we have followed the news on facebook, twitter, and the various live feeds across the internet, we felt compelled to build a site that would help spread the word as more protests organize across the country. We hope to provide people with information about events that are organizing, ongoing, and building across the U.S. as we, the 99%, take action against the greed and corruption of the 1%.
(...) We've witnessed an exponentially growing list of communities that are banding together with our brothers and sisters on Wall St. by organizing solidarity actions in their cities. This rise in support has been incredibly inspiring and has promoted many of you to become active in organizing an event in your area. Through the enthusiasm and excitement of wanting to show your support you are all working diligently to organize events in a short amount of time. CLIP
Occupy LA!!! 10-01-11 http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/12
Occupy LA begins this Saturday Oct 1st! (11:00am) We are Occupying LA in solidarity with Occupy Wall St @ City Hall - 1st Street and Main Street
Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination
By David Graeber - 25 September 2011
The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future
Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation - despite the latest police crackdown - sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated - faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.
But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.
Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid - in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"
It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.
Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad - the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".
The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US - for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.
When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult - beginning with the Arab Spring - will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.
We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table - and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.
Mocked at first by some, Occupy Wall Street is showing the potential of online 'hacktivism' allied with street protest.
Defying harsh critiques from Stephen Colbert and slews of bloggers who scoffed last week at the "leaderless", "directionless", Frisbee-throwing hipsters camping out on cardboard at a random New York City park in the financial district, Occupy Wall Street appears to be gaining ground. From the modest 200 occupiers last week, numbers of protesters rose to an estimated peak of approximately 3,000 to 5,000 at the weekend's march. Media attention has grown exponentially.
After taking their inspiration from the Egyptian "one demand" model, Occupy Wall Street have now released their list of "one" demands, bringing much-needed clarity to their objectives. The movement has moved to reach out to a broader base, including labor unions. Last week's execution of Troy Davis also contributed to the growth of Occupy Wall Street as crowds of protesters in Zucotti Park, renamed Liberty Plaza, swelled to approximately 1,500 last Thursday night demanding an end to capital punishment.
Violence caught on camera over the weekend of police arresting approximately 80 protesters and, in one now-notorious case, apparently spraying mace into the faces of female protesters has generated an outcry over the NYPD's "cowardly" use of force on peaceful protesters. Thanks to these two incidents, says one protester, Danny Garza, "Occupy Wall Street has gotten bigger than we ever thought it could be."
But the protest's profile cannot be measured purely in numbers of street protesters: on the periphery of Liberty Plaza is a parallel internet-based activism buttressing the movement. Under the banner of the virtual collective Anonymous, these "hacktivists" are now engaged in the physical action of street protest. "Groundfags" in Liberty Park communicate back and forth with online activists. The new dynamics of combined street and online activism have significantly underpinned Occupy Wall Street as a distinctive new movement.
Naming an individual police officer may be a controversial tactic, but Occupy Wall Street has used social networking media as a positive organisational tool. When it emerged that a handful of activists were prepared to incite rioting and provoke the police days before Occupy Wall Street was to begin, Anonymous developed a Twitter application called URGE, launching an online campaign designed to quell potential violence. Anonymous "culture-jammed" Twitter with messages to keep protests peaceful, using top Twitter trends from around the world.
The involvement of Anonymous activists has also helped the movement make new connections. When activists expressed outrage at Troy Davis's execution on Wednesday night, Anonymous linked the death penalty with the protests. One Anonymous figure, by the name of "Jackal", says:
"This is a new way to protest. Many of us have done our fair share of street protesting. But they drag us into the streets, and they mace us. Now we have brought our protests into the online social media space. We do it all at once - the street protesting along with our distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks. We are a bit of an online flash mob."
What will become of Occupy Wall Street is uncertain: protesters now face eviction from Zucotti Park; yet the movement has sparked similar activism in Chicago, Boston, Denver and other cities throughout the United States. Much has been written about the "Twitter revolution" dimension of the Arab Spring; now it looks as though, in this emerging alliance between street protest and online activism, the Arab Spring is turning to American.
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