Occupy Sunset Park: 99% Solidarity Grows in Brooklyn Community as Tenants Stage Rent Strike
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 18 September 2012
“This summer, members of Occupy Sunset Park got word of the rent strike when they saw banners that residents hung on the outside of their buildings so they contacted the residents and have since tried to assist them as they resolve many of the concerns themselves.”

For the past two years, residents of the heavily immigrant neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn have refused to pay rent on their apartments in three buildings where the same landlord has refused to ensure safe living conditions. This summer, members of Occupy Sunset Park got word of the rent strike when they saw banners that residents hung on the outside of their buildings. They contacted the residents and have since tried to assist them as they resolve many of the concerns themselves. There is now talk of the tenants taking ownership of their buildings by forming a tenants’ association or an affordable housing corporation. We’re joined by Sara Lopez, a longtime resident and organizer in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Dennis Flores, an organizer with Occupy Sunset Park; and Laura Gottesdiener, a freelance journalist who has been covering the Occupy Our Homes movement and author of the forthcoming book, "A Dream Foreclosed: The Great Eviction and the Fight to Live in America."

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Tonight, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González will be speaking at the National Press Club in 

OWS Plans to Surround NYSE for One Year Anniversary
Amanda Rae
Published: Sunday 16 September 2012
Occupy Wall St.: Year One
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 9 August 2012
On Sep. 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street started a revolution.

As you know, real change does not come easy and does not come overnight. In order to make real change we need the world to contribute and help. On Sep. 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street started a revolution. One year later, join us for three days of education, training, and protest in New York City. http://s17nyc.org

Fighting Foreclosure Together
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 22 May 2012
“The demand for housing justice is bringing activists from different ideologies together to fight—and win—against foreclosures.”

Some Occupiers just want the banks to act more reasonably; others want to abolish capitalism. Most cruise to meetings on two wheels; others hate bike lanes. In Minneapolis, as in places across the United States, Occupy Our Homes has brought union members, anarchists, lawyers, grassroots organizers, democrats and veterans all under the same roof, united by a common goal of saving homeowners from eviction and full neighborhoods from displacement. They might not all share the same vision of utopia, but housing justice work is demonstrating that, for today’s era of activism, humanity can trump ideology.

Last Saturday, more than 25 community members celebrated with Monique White, a resident of north Minneapolis, who had recently won a new mortgage from US Bank. They were all packed into White’s small kitchen, eating spiced chicken legs barbecued by Bobby Hull, a homeowner and Marines veteran from south Minneapolis who had won back his own home three months earlier.

“If anyone needs to use my bathroom, it’s—” Monique White began to say, then stopped herself. The crowd laughed; everyone in the room not only knew where her bathroom was, they’d slept on her living room floor, marched with her to US Bank, sat beside her in court and helped water the cabbage in her backyard, which White planted a mere two weeks before her scheduled eviction.

The seven-month campaign brought together activists and community members across entrenched and often irreconcilable political and ideological lines, unifying those pushing for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system with those advocating for reform such as widespread principal reduction. The coalition ...

Disabled Woman Arrested Outside Wells Fargo Executive’s Home While Protesting Her Foreclosure
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 1 May 2012
Ana Casas Wilson waited on Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Tim Sloan’s front porch so she could hand him a payment on her foreclosed home, but was arrested for refusing to leave.

Protesters gathered last week outside the California home of Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Tim Sloan, where one homeowner was arrested while trying to deliver her mortgage payment directly to Sloan.

Ana Casas Wilson, a California homeowner who has cerebral palsy that forces her to use a motorized wheel chair, waited on Sloan’s front porch so she could hand him a payment on her foreclosed home. Casas Wilson has lived in her home for 27 years, but fell behind on her payments during a hospital stay. Wells Fargo, she said, has been unwilling to negotiate a modification, even though she is again able to make regular payments. After police allowed her to remain on Sloan’s porch for 15 minutes, she was 

Finally, OWS Gets Police to Arrest the People in Suits
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 27 March 2012
Rebecca Manski, who helped organize the action and was among the five arrested, said the police really didn’t get that she and the others were just pretending to be corporate executives.

Sometimes justice requires a little imagination. On Saturday, when much of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York was loudly denouncing police violence against minorities and protesters, a small group of environmentalists dreamed up a way to get the police to focus on the crimes of the 1 percent, to the point of arresting five corporate suits on United Nations property.

Granted, those five were actually members of the OWS affinity group Disrupt Dirty Power, which used Saturday’s action (billed as a “mock’upation”) to launch a month of actions targeting the “corrupt partnership between Wall Street, politicians and the business of pollution.” Police officers seemed thrown for a loop as they tore down tents bearing corporate logos and cuffed people who claimed to be from Bank of America and ExxonMobil. Compared to the rowdy anti-NYPD march earlier that afternoon, this time, the cops had more of a chance to think about what side they’re really on.

As the action began around 5 p.m., the police presence was focused on the small group of OWS protesters gathered in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a few blocks away from U.N. headquarters. The officers must have noticed the signs and banners, heard the people’s mic, observed the silly improv performance skewering corporate polluters and thought they were in the right place. But if ...

Police Crack Down on Protesters on OWS Six Months Anniversary
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 20 March 2012

During protests of the Occupy Wall Street’s sixth month anniversary, police can be seen cracking down on protestors.

Why Occupy Needs Days of Action
Amir Gholi
Published: Tuesday 20 March 2012
“General assemblies and direct-action networks are forming spontaneously in cities, towns and neighborhoods across the country.”

As I sit in the New York City Police Department’s central booking, which has become my second home over the course of the last 48 hours, I’m reminded again why we keep mounting days of action and protest. Since last Saturday’s attempt to re-occupy Liberty Square, my role as an organizer in the Occupy movement feels more and more like it did back in the late fall. While doing jail support for arrested and brutalized comrades, my phone has been ringing and buzzing relentlessly with inquiries from fellow Occupiers, press, community-based organizations and union allies. Members of our movement, emboldened by #M17, have been living, sleeping and organizing in Union Square for the last two days, an occupation that continues as I write. It is safe to say that spring is here and that, once again, we have a day of action to thank for this resurgence.

An impromptu Direct Action Working Group meeting on the steps of the courthouse on Sunday turned into an hours-long whirlwind of organizing, regained momentum and vigor. We quickly reached consensus to acknowledge that the unwarranted acts of barbarism which ended Saturday’s celebration of the movement’s 6-month anniversary are not exceptions under Ray Kelly’s NYPD, but the rule. Systemically marginalized communities all over New York City live in fear of Kelly and his cronies every second of their lives. Plans were made to host a press conference on the steps on 1 Police Plaza at noon on Tuesday to highlight this reality. Speakers have been invited from the Muslim community, the homeless community, the LGBTQI community, communities of color, sex workers, the Occupy movement and countless others, to attest to the NYPD’s ongoing assault on the people of New York.

Plans are also being made to strike back on Saturday the 24th with a broad ...

The Purpose of Occupy Wall Street is to Occupy Wall Street
Amanda Rae
Published: Sunday 18 March 2012
“The people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their ‘American dream’—they cathartically cheered on this ragtag bunch who got right in the face of Wall Street and said, ‘We’re not leaving until you give us our country back!’”

Occupy Wall Street. What other political movement in modern times has won the sympathy and/or support of the majority of the American public—in less than two months? How did this happen? I think it was a revolt that has been percolating across the country since Reagan fired the first air traffic controller. Then, on September 17, 2011, a group of (mostly) young adults decided to take direct action. And this action struck a raw nerve, sending a shock wave throughout the United States, because what these kids were doing was what tens of millions of people wished they could do. The people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their “American dream”—they cathartically cheered on this ragtag bunch who got right in the face of Wall Street and said, “We’re not leaving until you give us our country back!”

By purposely not creating a formal, hierarchical organization with rules and dues and structure and charismatic leaders and spokespeople—all the things their parents told them they would need in order to get anything done—this new way allowed people from all over the country to feel like they were part of the rebellion by simply deciding that they were part of the rebellion. You want to occupy your local bank—do it! You want to occupy your college board of trustees—done! You want to occupy Oakland or Cincinnati or Grass Valley—be our guest! This is your movement, and you can make it what you want it to be.

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Can OWS Bring Down Bank of America?
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 8 March 2012
“Break up Bank of America and force a radical, necessary rethinking of our financial industry.”

The other day I sat in the living room of a friend’s house painting banners, designing flyers, scheduling nationwide conference calls, planning fun ways to protest—and discussing banks. Actually, it was just one bank in particular: Bank of America. I was at a “work party” for the Fight BAC campaign—BAC is the stock market ticker name for Bank of America—and we were preparing for last Wednesday’s F29 “Shut Down the Corporations” nationwide day of action. As we cheered the launch of fthebanks.org, put the finishing touches on a banner and discussed what we wanted from the campaign, I started having that nagging thought again: Can we really break up the largest bank in the country?

My involvement with Fight BAC began in January. The general idea was explained to me like this: Bank of America is almost totally bankrupt and is probably going to need a bailout sometime in the next year. It is already dependent on taxpayer money. This time around, there’s still time to prevent another bailout. The only way to prevent this from happening is through starting a massive public campaign to create a political climate in which an educated and empowered populace recognizes that this bank has already failed and must be broken apart. If we can pull this off, it would send a signal to the financial industry that it has to start being accountable to the public. From there, we would have a chance to change the whole system.

Instead of focusing on one of the bank’s particular practices—like the efforts against Chase’s investment in the environmentally devastating practice of mountaintop removal, or the protests against the bailouts that followed the 2008 financial crisis, after the fact—the goal here was preemptive: break up Bank of America and force a radical, necessary ...

Nurses Fight for a Dose of Tax Justice
Amir Gholi
Published: Wednesday 7 March 2012
“Before there was Occupy, thousands of nurses were already taking on Wall Street to demand a financial transaction tax.”

By now, nurses in bright red scrubs are a familiar sight at rallies in Washington, D.C., New York City, and at Occupy protests around the country. National Nurses United (NNU), a union representing registered nurses, is a major, visible force in the growing movements challenging corporate power.

Several months before the birth of the Occupy movement, they were already mobilizing thousands of their members to speak out against Wall Street. One of their key demands is a financial transaction tax: a small fee on each trade of stocks, derivatives, bonds, and other financial instruments, which could generate massive revenues while discouraging high-frequency speculative trading.

This may surprise some Americans whose image of the nursing profession has been formed by TV medical dramas. (Wikipedia lists 70 such programs in the United States and Canada since the 1950s.) The General Hospital drama queens aside, TV nurses haven’t been completely lacking in the social justice department. ER’s Carol Hathaway shielded her nursing staff from pompous M.D.s. “Hot Lips” Houlihan became a fighter for women’s rights in the male world of the M*A*S*H hospital tent. But do you recall a single scene in which nurses took to the streets, much less took on a force like Wall Street?

NNU Executive Director Rose Anne DeMoro says there’s a simple reason registered nurses have embraced a “Tax Wall Street” campaign: “The big banks, investment firms, and other financial institutions, which ruined the economy with trillion-dollar trades on people’s homes and pensions and similar ...

How Empires Fall (Including the American One)
Amir Gholi
Published: Friday 2 March 2012
“It seemed there was something in this world that did not love an empire. I began to wonder what exactly that was.”

When Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, a meditation on the history and power of nonviolent action, was published in 2003, the timing could not have been worse. Americans were at war -- and success was in the air. U.S. troops had invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad (“mission accomplished”) only months earlier, and had already spent more than a year fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Schell's book earned a handful of glowing reviews, and then vanished from the public debate as the bombs scorched Iraq and the body count began to mount.

Now, The Unconquerable World's animating message -- that, in the age of nuclear weaponry, nonviolent action is the mightiest of forces, one capable of toppling even the greatest of empires -- has undergone a renaissance of sorts. In December 2010, the self-immolation of a young Tunisian street vendor triggered a wave of popular and, in many cases, nonviolent uprisings across the Middle East, felling such autocrats as Tunisia's Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in mere weeks. Occupations, marches, and protests of all sorts spread like brushfire across Europe, from England to Spain to Greece, and later Moscow, and even as far as Madison, Wisconsin. And then, of course, there were the artists, students, and activists who, last September, heard the call to "occupy Wall Street" and ignited ...

Electing 99% Candidates
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 1 March 2012
“It’s time for ordinary Americans to turn frustration into action.”

What if our politicians truly represented the 99%? What would it look like to have government representatives with a vested interest in making our communities better? We all know the repercussions of a bi-partisan Congress controlled by money and radical interests — progressive voices and priorities are cut out of the national discussion.

It’s time for ordinary Americans to turn frustration into action. Rebuild the Dream has partnered with Progressive Majority’s “Run for America,” New Organizing Institute’s Candidate Project, and other ...

Now, Let’s Occupy the Ballot
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 29 February 2012
“During election season, all eyes turn to politics. How do we ensure that the interests of the 99 percent are represented in the halls of power?”

The protests of 2011—from Wisconsin to Wall Street—finally tore off the gag of silence about corruption and economic inequality in our country.

But the pundits at FOX “News” are not wrong when they say that our movement is nowhere near as powerful as the Tea Party movement—at least not yet. That is in part because the Tea Partiers used the momentum from their protests to seize a piece of institutional power through elections.

Today there are Tea Party caucuses in Congress. There are Tea Party-sponsored presidential debates. The actual “tea parties” are no longer well-attended. But the movement is still in a position to continue implementing its draconian agenda.

Candidate Barack Obama also successfully converted rising frustration and activist energy into an electoral triumph in 2008. But thus far, Occupy Wall Street has not tried to occupy the institutions of established, formal political power (e.g., elections and political parties).

This omission is not by accident. Rather than getting caught up in electioneering, Occupy is choosing to focus on the hard, risky, and often-thankless work of direct action protest. They are building their own community, presence, and power through participatory democracy. They fear that too much entanglement with the existing system would kill their independence, idealism, and chutzpah.

Theirs is a sensible stance, as far as it goes. Larger movements often need a bright spearhead, propelled by pure ideals that are untarnished by the exigencies of ordinary politics.

But the question remains: What about the rest of us? There are tens of millions of people who never slept outside in a tent—but

Conference Calling Across the Occupy Rhizome
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 9 February 2012
“It felt truly global when I heard an occupier say ‘Goodnight, from Italy’ on a call in November.”

 

As Occupy camps spread around Southern California in early October, a small group of occupiers located at City Hall in Los Angeles reflected on our experiences setting up a camp and our first assemblies. “It’d be awesome to see what they do in San Diego,” I remember saying, sitting in the comfort of Occupy LA’s People’s Library. “Do you think the cops will even let them put down tents?”

The librarian replied, “We should help them. We should be there so that their first GA isn’t as bad as ours was.” But, as we would soon learn, both the challenges and the potential of coordinating Occupy assemblies would be far greater than that.

I drove to San Diego on October 6th to meet with their General Assembly’s facilitation team as they marched around downtown, eventually settling in Children’s Park. We talked about the idea of having a team of people ready to keep the peace and teach horizontal democracy. Then, a week later, after moving the camp to the Civic Center and doggedly resisting pressure to leave, OSD was given an eviction notice. Occupiers were pepper-sprayed when they decided to defend one lonely tent in the middle of a public space. I raced down to San Diego to help arrange bail funds that night. Curiously, another person, a young man dressed in a Tommy Bahama shirt, also showed up and claimed to be from Occupy Wall Street.

He suggested that remaining members of OSD break off into smaller groups and ...

Occupy Community Gardens
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 1 February 2012
“Community gardens produce nutritious food while connecting people to their community.”

It’s time to prepare for spring.  The Arab Spring in the Middle East continues to move forward year round.

 Does the occupy movement stand for something positive or something negative?   It depends on the purpose and actions of those who are participating.

Is the occupy movement directionless?  Maybe.   Maybe not.   A positive direction will include a diversity of elements.  Some elements will be economic.  Some social.  Others political.   An element that is already playing a part is community gardening.

Occupying community gardens is a metaphor for the work that community gardeners perform.  Community gardens are associations of individuals who garden at a common location.   The gardeners can exchange ideas and the harvest of their work.

The occupy movement and community gardens have in common that they empower individuals to play more productive roles in their lives.    Community gardens can strengthen the occupy movement and the occupy movement can in turn strengthen community gardening.

Community gardens have an important history and can play an important role in creating a healthy society.  Community gardens produce nutritious food while connecting people to their community.  Some of the world's most respected restaurants acquire produce from community gardens.

Occupy movement locations have already included community gardens.   For example community gardens are part of the occupy movement in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

Spring is a metaphor for bringing new things to life.   The Arab spring is planting seeds of democracy.   Community gardens plant seeds of life.  These seeds produce food as well as plants that enhance our environment by adding interest and beauty.   In most places growing plants can be done year round.  Spring becomes an all seasons event. The time to begin is ...

National Park Service Threatens to Evict Occupy D.C. Encampments at 2 Parks Near White House
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 31 January 2012
The National Park Service is no longer allowing the Occupy protesters to camp overnight in the two parks near the White House where they have been living since October.

The National Park Service says it will begin enforcing a ban today on Occupy protesters camping overnight in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, two parks near the White House where they have been living since October. Members of the Occupy encampment say they will resist eviction. "We are going to do our best to make sure that they’re protected from what is effectively a criminalization of poverty and a criminalization of homelessness. By choosing to evict the people who have no place else to sleep, they’re effectively criminalizing those among us who are disenfranchised," says Justin Jacoby Smith, a member of the Occupy D.C. media team, who joins us live from McPherson Square.

Transcript: 

AMY GOODMAN: There is also news that the Occupy protests in Washington, D.C., are about to be raided. The National Park Service has said it will begin enforcing a ban today on Occupy protesters camping overnight in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, two parks near the White House where people have been living since October. We’re joined on the phone, as well, from McPherson Square by Justin Jacoby Smith, a member of the Occupy D.C. media team.

Justin, what’s happening right now?

JUSTIN 

Embody the Movement
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 24 January 2012
“The dance gave a positive message for our collective future with creative prowess, illustrating a cry of pain against oppression and injustice, and, through street theater, invoking a powerful bridge of reconciliation between the 1% and the 99%.”

A day of hard rain and wind could not dampen the spirits of activists representing the 99% as they gathered at Justin Herman Plaza (dubbed Bradley Manning Plaza by locals) in San Francisco on Friday, January 20th, 2012, to mark the dark anniversary of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with a day of action. Organized by a coalition of over 55 Bay Area organizations and dozens of OccupySF affinity groups, protestors disrupted business as usual with demands that banks end predatory evictions and foreclosures and that corporations lose the rights of personhood.  The day was called Occupy Wall Street West (OWSW), alluding to the power of the SF financial district and state in the global market – California is the 9th largest economy in the world.  Activists executed plans for traditional nonviolent direct action to block the doors to big banks, effectively shutting down Wells Fargo Corporate Headquarters and occupying Bank of America’s main branch.  And then came a surprise tactic: dance.

 

A flash mob called “

How Research can Support Occupy Movement Strategizing
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 21 January 2012
“As the movement reflects on last fall and prepares for spring, the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD) is becoming an ever more valuable resource.”

According to a Pew Research Center poll released January 11, two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “very strong” or “strong” class conflicts in their country—a marked increase from 2009. The Occupy movement is both a cause and a beneficiary of that change, if it can make the most of it. There is no need to start from scratch.

As the movement reflects on last fall and prepares for spring, the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD) is becoming an ever more valuable resource. Since its release on the web in September, the database has surged to more than 530 cases of nonviolent direct action campaigns, available at no charge to activists and researchers everywhere. The GNAD draws on people’s struggles from over 190 countries, and goes back in history as far as 12th century BCE Egypt. Most are from the 20th and 21st century. The student researchers from Swarthmore College—aided by students at Georgetown and Tufts—have found far more cases than they’ve had time to write up so far. A hundred additional cases are underway.

While many of the campaigns have used the “occupation” method in their struggle—77, in countries including Kenya, Mongolia, Paraguay, Brazil, Germany, England, and Chile—campaigners have used dozens of other methods as well. As the Occupy movement grows to encompass a wider range of tactics, from eviction blockades to strikes and boycotts, the GNAD can help organizers learn from past experiences.

Occupy Wall Street’s New-Year Resolve
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 11 January 2012
“By omission, it seems, this movement intends to create a countervailing narrative to the election-year joust among the powers that be, to get people thinking about a whole different kind of politics.”

It’s bizarre how often nowadays one hears Occupy Wall Street talked about in the past tense—bizarre, especially, if one was at the strategy meeting of OWS’s Direct Action group on January 8. Around 150 of the movement’s most restless radicals sat on the hardwood floor and in folding chairs at 16 Beaver Street, half a block from the Charging Bull in downtown Manhattan. The purpose was a big-picture strategic discussion about where the movement’s tactics had taken it so far and where to go next in the coming months. As if to match the scale of the conversation, huge sheets of paper were spread across the center of the room, which scribes markered up with the gist of what was being said.

There was no lack of confidence to go around—just the kind of infectious naivete that drove some of these same people to take and hold Zuccotti Park back in September. They reviewed their favorite things about what they’d done since then: moments that captured the world’s attention and, especially, the ones in which they shed their own fear and had enough fun to want to continue. For better or worse, a lot of this still fixated on defying the police, rather than really challenging the economic order.

“We’re somewhere between a movement and a revolution,” concluded Austin Guest, a 31-year-old with sideburns on only one side of his thick, brown beard. He added that, if they wanted to, they could bring down Bank of America in six months. Whenever there was a break, someone would jump up on a chair and start telling radical jokes. Why do anarchists only drink coffee? How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Somebody else would already know the punchline and shout it out, while others burst into laughter until they could hardly breathe. This was not the mood one would expect to find in a bygone movement.

Nor would one expect the litany of upcoming actions reeled off by a ...

Two Types of Demands?
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 10 January 2012
“It may be clarifying to make a distinction between two different kinds of demands a movement might make, transactional and transformational.”

The question of demands has been contested ever since Occupy Wall Street began last September. Do the Occupiers have any? Should they? Does making demands confer undeserved legitimacy on the powers that be? The word “demand” can mean something different for every ear that hears it. It may be clarifying, therefore, to make a distinction between two different kinds of demands a movement might make, transactional and transformational.

Transactional goals are immediate and concrete achievements that can be won relatively rapidly: saving a home, or reaching agreements with banks about certain reforms. They are changes that take place in the here and now, benchmarks, successes that can propel a movement forward, unifying and sustaining the involvement of participants. Transformational demands, on the other hand, are longer-term, aspirational and transcendent.

To Jeffrey A. Ordower, director of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, if some of the groups with whom he works could win $250 billion in principal reduction for homeowners, he would consider it more transactional than transformative—because as he put it, “we are still applying arbitrary pricing to a bundle of bricks and mortar.” Some transactional wins might look like less of a transaction. Take, for instance, Rosa Gudiel’s success in putting her story onto the front pages of Los Angeles newspapers for several days, as she fought for a reduced monthly loan payment after her brother died in the midst of recession. A catchy slogan was heard in southern California: “Let a thousand Rosas bloom.”

While students organizing for reductions on their tuition are making transactional demands, they may simultaneously be working toward the transformational demand of a universal right to free or affordable education. ...

Decentralized People Power: What OWS can Learn from South Africa’s United Democratic Front
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 4 January 2012
“When OWS’s New York City-based leaders appear divided over the question of how much emphasis to place on the GAs and on the general ethos of consensus-based politics, the UDF’s victories seem instructive.”

At an Occupy Wall Street meeting in midtown Manhattan on December 20th, a debate broke out about the general assemblies (hereafter, GAs)—the core decision-making forums of the movement and its most visible embodiment of direct democracy. The meeting was the second of its kind devoted to exploring the idea of a city-wide general assembly. About 80 people attended, including members of several OWS working groups and GAs across the city, of which there are now about a dozen. While some people seemed dissatisfied with the GAs, and perhaps even ready to dispense with them, others appeared intent on popularizing them even more. The discussion reminded me that this movement is growing and deepening its ties with local neighborhoods—yet as it does, it is encountering the challenge of how to accommodate new communities and support existing organizations that share its goals. While this challenge is still fairly new for OWS, it is one that has been faced and overcome by other movements before.

As a participant-observer who wants the Occupy movement to flourish, this strikes me as an appropriate moment to look back at another social movement that promoted consultation and consenus-building. In the 1980s, South Africa’s United Democratic Front (UDF) helped to end apartheid by empowering existing community-based organizations and developing the leadership capacities of local leaders, some of whom had little or no prior experience as activists. Notably, the UDF inspired and mobilized diverse affiliates without trying to impose one political framework upon them. At this particular juncture, when OWS’s New York City-based leaders appear divided over the question of how much emphasis to place on the GAs and on the general ethos of consensus-based politics, the UDF’s victories seem instructive.

Jeremy Seekings’ definitive account, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991, shows that ...

Scott Olsen, Vet Wounded at Occupy Oakland, on Recovery, Protests, Iraq & Bradley Manning
Anna Gilliam
Published: Friday 30 December 2011
Democracy Now! interviews someone who became one the faces of the global Occupy movement this year, Scott Olsen.

Democracy Now! interviews someone who became one the faces of the global Occupy movement this year. Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old former U.S. Marine who served two tours in the Iraq war, was critically wounded after being shot in the head by a police projectile at Occupy Oakland. In a rare interview, Olsen joins us to discuss his life-threatening ordeal, his involvement in this year's historic Wisconsin and Occupy protests, the case of accused Army whistleblower Bradley Manning and how he too had access to similar types of information, and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. "They aren't respecting our right to assemble, protest and redress our government for grievances," Olsen says of police repression of the Occupy protests. "They are terrorizing us from going out [to demonstrations]. That is a sad statement for our country." Olsen also says he expects to rejoin the Occupy and antiwar protests as his recovery progresses. "I look forward to being a part of the 99 percent and Iraq Veterans Against the War in 2012," he says.

Occupy Activists Prepare to Take Message to Rose Parade
Anna Gilliam
Published: Friday 30 December 2011
“The group says the protest will be “G-rated” and will stick to nonviolence in expressing Occupy’s messages against wealth inequality and corporate power.”

An army of volunteers from across the nation has once again descended upon Pasadena's Rose Palace, where several floats are being built and flowered.

 

Half a mile away in Singer Park, dozens of Occupy activists worked Thursday to prepare for a protest.

 

The protesters, whose encampments across the country grabbed headlines for months, are trying to take their message into 2012 with a high-profile foray into the Rose Parade.

 

While volunteers at the Rose Palace were armed with scissors, thousands of gallons of glue and millions of flower petals, Occupy activists worked with plastic pipe and banners.

 

At the Rose Palace, a few young women perched atop an enormous elephant, gluing flowers to its head. In Singer Park, activists practiced walking with a 70-by-40-foot octopus made of recycled plastic bags.

 

"This is the real Rose Parade, and the other is the Rose Charade," said Pete Thottam, 40, an Occupy activist.

 

Occupy activists will march the parade route at the end of the parade, after the floats and marching bands have passed. The group has been working with Pasadena police and Tournament of Roses officials on how not to disrupt the parade itself.

 

"Our goal is to put Occupy's best foot forward," Thottam said, adding that they expect more than 1,000 participants in the protest. "We recognize that this is a historic, iconic event geared toward Middle America and the family."

 

The group says the protest will be "G-rated" and will stick to nonviolence in expressing Occupy's messages against wealth inequality and corporate power.

 

Though the Occupy movement is leaderless, it has taken some organization to get ready for Monday's event.

 

During a rehearsal Thursday, activists were assigned roles, such as working with an Occupy ...

2012: The Year of Nonviolence?
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 29 December 2011
“This yes to nonviolence signals the awakening consciousness that summarily connects us to that which is most important in our lives and our communities.”

If 2011 was the year of the protester, 2012 may prove to be the year of nonviolence. What’s the difference? It’s as great as between yes and no. A crucial awakening that envelopes humanity’s collective struggle for justice, peace and democracy is happening; it is an awakening that clarifies the circumstances we embrace with a yes and those by which we respond with a vehement no. Like many I know, I often teeter between despair and hope–stuck in a kind of uncomfortable tension resembling Wendell Berry’s poetic instruction to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts” –grasping for some measure of sanity to make sense of all that is happening.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough! Resistance was in the streets and occupations in city squares. A resounding “no” echoed around the world–what Bernard Harcourt has perceptively termed “political disobedience”–signifying contempt, dissatisfaction, and rejection of entrenched governments and status quo economics. Dictators were ousted in Egypt and Tunisia. ...

Occupy Wall Street, the First Amendment, and the Politics of Free Speech
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 29 December 2011
“This teach-in is the first of three teach-ins that we hope to hold in the coming months here in law school about various aspects legal and policy issue raised by the Occupy Wall Street Movement.”

Kendall Thomas, Nash Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture, Columbia University moderates the first of three teach-ins. Alicia White, an occupier says: “I ended up going to Occupy Wall Street because of a video. Like a lot of people, I saw a video that was posted online of some people who were marching in the street and looking very inspired.” 

Occupy Atlanta: Life After Eviction
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 22 December 2011
“Like other Occupations, as Occupy Atlanta has grown, it has also developed into a more community-based movement that addresses a number of local issues.”

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, a beautiful autumn afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia. Elsewhere in the city, crazed shoppers flocked to stores and malls, celebrating—and in many cases fighting for—their right to consume things they mostly don’t need. But downtown, Occupy Atlanta had decided to “Occupy Black Friday” in Woodruff Park—or Troy Davis Park, as the Occupiers call it—where their encampment was until the group was evicted by police just after midnight on October 26.

For Occupiers, Black Friday was a perfect occasion for action. The day is a symptom, a quite spectacular one too, of the capitalist system the movement critiques; a display of just how extreme consumerism has become in this country. As I entered Troy Davis Park on that day, I saw a piece of white cloth hung between two poles that read “Really Really Free! Market.” The “market” looked more like a crossbreed of a community yard sale and a family picnic: a mother, her teenage daughter and toddler son set up their shop under a tree; not far from them, dozens of people were arranging donated goods on a number of sheets spread out on the fallen leaves that covered the grass; a man with shoulder-long hair under a cap and a massive beard was playing the guitar, singing, his wheelchair parked nearby; a few kids were running around, kicking a small soccer ball back and forth among each other. It was hard to tell who were the venders and who were the customers, but as everyone told me, everything there was free—shirts, jeans, boots, dolls, stuffed ponies, diapers, toy trucks and food. “If you see something you like, take it,” they told me.

I spotted Tim Franzen in the crowd. Tall, slim, wearing a red knit cap, a washed-out denim jacket and an “Occupy Everywhere” button, Franzen looked exactly as I remembered him from a dozen YouTube videos and countless photos online. In this ...

Seed and Blossom: Reflections on Occupy Oakland
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 22 December 2011
“Ours is a revolution cradled by love and carried by hope.”

Shudders seize me into daylight iridescence. Though unlonely, I’m alone.

Kaleidoscopic memories of flash grenades, tear gas, and bellowing, writing bodies insurrect my morning mind. I’m back on 14th street standing speechless, blanched by the screams of a young man struck in the skull by a rubber bullet. I watch indefensibly as my tax dollars cleave his flesh with contempt. His name is Scott Olsen. Complicity. Belligerence. Time alone will adjudicate my paralysis, and his.

Defiance, derision; audacity, aversion; abasement, and abuse.

Since yesterday morning over 160 peaceful “Occupy Oakland” demonstrators have been arrested by the O.P.D. An additional 170 occupiers were violently evicted from their encampment in Oscar Grant Plaza, a home that they had placidly established nearly three weeks prior. Tyrants always have a thin trace of rectitude; they serve the law before sabotaging it.

Flash grenades illuminate the untamed threat of impermanence; they speak to the liability of lability, of the unchanging truth of change. The vaporous tear agents echo the evanescence of late capitalism— serpentine, slithery, like the unremitting constancy of the ocean’s tide as it batters the shore. The water leaves not a single cavity unsearched. Accommodate, privatize, adapt, capitalize. Indocile rubber bullets hurl from guns, just like credit on a long leash or choke-chain Calvinists whose faith leans on the unseen.

And from the discord and the violence I hear chants pullulating to the rhythm of bursting hearts and weary feet. “We | are | the 99 per cent, | We | are | the 99 per cent!” First within, then without, the calls for unity summon order from chaos as we hum to the melody of the sacred.  A bit louder we cry, “We | are | the 99 per cent,” but repetition isn’t resistance, it’s inertia.  What we mean to say is that if Oakland isn’t leveled, then ...

Why Occupy Calls for “Sanctuary”
Anna Gilliam
Published: Monday 19 December 2011
It’s a cry, a plea, for the institutions which uphold the way of things to no longer stand aside, but to join in making the rupture grow—to radicalize, and to occupy.

As Occupy Wall Street’s birthday party got going at midday today, the mood was mixed—not unlike the mood with which, in a series of improvisations, the movement began three months earlier on September 17. I talked with organizers I’d known from the movement’s first planning meetings, who were milling around Duarte Square, an open space a mile north of the old encampment at Zuccotti Park. Cars were rushing by along Canal Street toward the Holland Tunnel, spewing exhaust. The square was full; lots of music, planning, anticipating, sign-making, puppeteering, the works. Usual protest stuff. But uncertain.

The imperative for the day was to “Re-Occupy”—specifically, to occupy the empty lot next to Duarte, owned by Trinity Wall Street, which is one of the oldest churches in Manhattan and one of the city’s largest property owners. This was also the place where the occupiers had come the morning after the surprise eviction on November 15, only to be promptly ejected by riot police. Now, after a 15-day hunger strike, failed negotiations with Trinity, and even a letter from Desmond Tutu calling on the church to let the occupiers use the lot (followed by another one denouncing protester trespassing), they were back. They wanted a place to build a new encampment, a new headquarters for the movement. Trinity, for its part, gave no sign of budging. And some in the movement weren’t sure it made sense to keep pushing.

“When it comes to space, Trinity has been pretty good to us,” one organizer told me. The church, after all, has already allowed occupiers to use its indoor spaces downtown for meetings, WiFi, bathrooms, and breaks from the cold.

I repeated this to Father Paul Mayer, a Catholic priest and longtime radical. “No, Trinity hasn’t done enough,” he replied. When people are ...

The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
Anna Gilliam
Published: Monday 19 December 2011
If “we exist” is the signature statement of 2011, the name of the year would have to be “Occupy Wall Street.”

On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!”  Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words shouted by massed Russian demonstrators.

“We exist!”  Think of it as a simple statement of fact, an implicit demand to be taken seriously (or else), and undoubtedly an expression of wonder, verging on a question: “We exist?”

And who could blame them for shouting it?  Or for the wonder?  How miraculous it was.  Yet another country long immersed in a kind of popular silence suddenly finds voice, and the demonstrators promptly declare themselves not about to leave  the stage when the day -- and the demonstration -- ends.  Who guessed beforehand that perhaps 50,000 Muscovites would turn out to protest a rigged electoral process in a suddenly restive country, along with crowds in St. Petersburg, Tomsk, and elsewhere from the south to Siberia?

In Tahrir Square in Cairo, they swore: “This time we’re here to stay!”  Everywhere this year, it seemed that they -- “we” -- were here to stay.  In New York City, when forced out of Zuccotti Park by the police, protesters returned carrying signs that said, “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”

And so it seems, globally speaking.  Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Madison, ...

The Making of the American 99%
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 15 December 2011
It took the crash and its grim economic aftermath to awaken the 99% to a widespread awareness of shared danger.

“Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”

-- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1% of the wealth distribution -- the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “super-rich,” in recent years.

Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1% to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.

Still, until a few months ago, the 99% was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating “the identity of their interests.” It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawns of the affluent.

It was divided not only by these class differences, but most visibly

A Lesson in Love From the Protest at the Port
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 15 December 2011
A minister and occupier, beaten and arrested by police, on his continuing belief in the power of love.

On Monday evening, I was brutally beaten by my brothers on the Seattle Police force as I stood before an entrance to Pier 18 of the Seattle Port, wearing my clergy garb and bellowing, “Keep the peace! Keep the peace!” 

An officer pulled me down from behind and threw me to the asphalt. Between my cries of pain and shouts of “I’m a man of peace!” he pressed a knee to my spine and immobilized my arms behind my back, crushing me against the ground. With the right side of my face pressed to the street, he repeatedly punched the left side. I was cuffed and pulled off the ground by a different officer who seemed genuinely appalled when he saw my bleeding face and my clerical collar. He asked who I was and why I was here, to which I replied, “I’m a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I believe another world is possible.” He led me shaking to a police van where began a 12-hour journey of incarcerated misery.

How did this happen?

The afternoon of Monday December 12 began with a march from downtown Seattle to the Port in a coordinated attempt by west coast Occupy movements to expose exploitation of workers and interrupt business as usual at major Pacific ports. Upon arrival, the crowd spread out to picket or blockade entrances. I joined a small group of about 40 to picket a side entrance (we did not stop anyone from walking in or out). Several hours later, word came that business had been canceled for the day and our group dispersed in high spirits. My wife, Freddie, and I considered going home after a long, chilly day of standing up for what we believed in, but decided to check other parts of the protest to see if there were important needs we might fill before departing.

As we neared a major entrance, Pier 18, the tension was ...

‘Occupy the Voting Booth’-Thousands March to Protect the Vote
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 13 December 2011
On Saturday, in conjunction with UN Human Rights Day, thousands of activists and concerned citizens in New York City held a march and rally to protest these restrictive new [voting] laws.

Tomorrow Attorney General Eric Holder will gave a major speech on voting rights at the LBJ presidential library in Austin. According to the library, “Holder will discuss the importance of ensuring equal access to the ballot box and strengthening America's long tradition of expanding the franchise.”

Holder’s speech could not come at a more critical time. Over the last year we’ve witnessed an unprecedented GOP war on voting, with a dozen Republican governors and state legislators passing laws to restrict voter registration drives, require birth certificates to register to vote, curtail early voting, mandate government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot and disenfranchise ex-felons who’ve served their time. The Brennan Center for Justice has estimated that “these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012,” and notes that “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.”

On Saturday, in conjunction with UN Human Rights Day, thousands of activists and concerned citizens in New York City held a march and rally to protest these restrictive new laws. The march began outside the New York headquarters of the Koch brothers, who have given more than $1 million to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy conservative advocacy group that has masterminded the push for new voter ID requirements this year. Protesters held signs that read “

Occupy the Classroom?
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 13 December 2011
The students were part of a growing chorus of protest against modern economics as it is taught in the world’s leading academic institutions.

Early last month, a group of students staged a walkout in Harvard’s popular introductory economics course, Economics 10, taught by my colleague Greg Mankiw. Their complaint: the course propagates conservative ideology in the guise of economic science and helps perpetuate social inequality.

The students were part of a growing chorus of protest against modern economics as it is taught in the world’s leading academic institutions. Economics has always had its critics, of course, but the financial crisis and its aftermath have given them fresh ammunition, seeming to validate long-standing charges against the profession’s unrealistic assumptions, reification of markets, and disregard for social concerns.

Mankiw, for his part, found the protesting students “poorly informed.” Economics does not have an ideology, he retorted. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, he pointed out that economics is a method that helps people to think straight and reach the correct answers, with no foreordained policy conclusions.

Indeed, though you may be excused for skepticism if you have not immersed yourself in years of advanced study in economics, coursework in a typical economics doctoral program produces a bewildering variety of policy prescriptions depending on the specific context. Some of the frameworks economists use to analyze the world favor free markets, while others don’t. In fact, much economic research is devoted to understanding how government intervention can improve economic performance. And non-economic motives and socially cooperative behavior are increasingly part of what economists study.

As the late great international economist Carlos Diaz-Alejandro once put it, “by now any bright graduate student, by choosing his assumptions….carefully, can produce a consistent model yielding just about any policy recommendation he favored at the start.” And that was in the 1970’s! An apprentice ...

Occupy Moves to the Home Front
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 13 December 2011
Why the attempt to take on foreclosures directly is our clearest glimpse yet of what Occupy Phase II will look like.

Occupy Wall Street found a new home this week—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house. Just weeks after the eviction from its encampment in the financial district, hundreds of occupiers joined local community members in a foreclosure tour of the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn through the rain, which concluded with a celebratory block party as a family reclaimed a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America.

As the march passed, I heard a local woman saying, “This was a long time coming.”

The action was one of many anti-foreclosure actions taking place in communities across the United States yesterday; the Guardian reported actions in at least 25 cities under the banner of a new Occupy campaign, Occupy Our Homes.

Across the country, millions of people face foreclosure or have already lost their homes; budget cuts mean that public housing assistance is becoming less available. Meanwhile, foreclosed houses sit empty, deteriorating and losing value. The Occupy Our Homes movement, according to its website, is meant to take on the tragic irony of "people without homes and homes without people" while also calling attention to one of the root causes of the financial crisis: bankers and speculators "gambling with our most valuable asset, our homes—betting against us and destroying trillions of dollars of our wealth."

Other similar movements, including ...

Occupy Our Homes Occupies with More Moving Parts
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 8 December 2011
The movement’s actions will rely more and more on coordination with institutions more firmly entrenched in neighborhoods where it works—as well as, despite the movement’s own leaderless structure, those institutions’ leaders.

Occupy Wall Street found a new home today—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house. Just weeks after the eviction from its encampment in the financial district, hundreds of occupiers joined local community members in a foreclosure tour of the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn through the rain, which concluded with a celebratory block party as a family reclaimed a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America. It was one of many anti-foreclosure actions taking place in communities across the United States today.

As the march passed, I heard a local woman saying, “This was a long time coming.”

For those of us who have been organizing and reporting on Occupy Wall Street for months, the afternoon was a reunion of familiar faces, of people who used to see each other daily in Liberty Plaza. But more visible than usual at Occupy Wall Street actions were collared clergy and members of the State Assembly and City Council. Together with locals and organizers with the NYC General Assembly’s Direct Action Committee, they were leading the marches and queuing the chants—all through the people’s mic, of course, megaphone-free. Along the way, staffers of groups that were once waiting-and-seeing from afar what Occupy Wall Street would do were now busily coordinating the action; among these are Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream, New York Communities for Change, and Organizing for Occupation. And this, it seems, is our clearest glimpse yet of what Occupy Phase II will look like.

The General Assembly and its related working groups are only able to do so much on their own. Without the focal point of an encampment anymore, the movement’s actions will rely more and more on coordination with institutions more firmly entrenched in neighborhoods where it works—as well as, despite the movement’s own leaderless structure, those institutions’ leaders.

While occupiers have almost always ...

Why We Occupy: The Declaration of Occupy D.C.
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 8 December 2011
Some complain that they don’t know why the occupiers are upset. In this declaration, adopted by consensus, Occupy D.C. clears up the mystery.

What does the Occupy movement want, anyway?

Critics like to say that the movement is made up of whiners without clear demands. This declaration from Occupy D.C. shows that the grievances are many, but the focus is clear: The 1% are laying claim to the wealth and power of our world, and the 99% will no longer stand for the destruction of our society and our Earth.

The following was approved by consensus by the General Assembly of Occupy D.C. on November 30, 2011.

* * *

We have been captives of corrupt economic and political systems for far too long. The concentration of wealth and the purchase of political power stifle the voices of the increasingly disenfranchised 99 percent. Corporate dominance subverts democracy, intentionally sows division, destroys the environment, obstructs the just and equitable pursuit of happiness, and violates the rights and dignity of all life.

Occupy D.C. is an open community of diverse individuals, facing different forms of oppression and impacted by economic exploitation to differing degrees, but united by a shared vision of equality for the common good. The harsh economic conditions that have plagued the poor, working class, and communities of color for generations have begun to affect the previously financially secure. This acute awareness of our common fate has united us in our struggle for a better future. We recognize that inequality and injustice systemically affect every aspect of our society: our communities, homes, and hearts. To build the world we envision, we commit ourselves to overcoming our personal biases so we can successfully challenge systems of oppression in solidarity.

We are peaceably assembled at McPherson Square, practicing direct democracy on the doorstep of ...

Words that Don’t Work
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 8 December 2011
When Luntz says he is “scared to death” [of the Occupy movement], he means that the Republicans who hire him are scared to death and he can profit from that fear by offering them new language.

Progressives had some fun last week with Frank Luntz, who told the Republican Governors’ Association that he was scared to death of the Occupy movement and recommended language to combat what the movement had achieved. But the progressive critics mostly just laughed, said his language wouldn’t work, and assumed that if Luntz was scared, everything was hunky-dory. Just keep on saying the words Luntz doesn’t like: capitalism, tax the rich, etc.

It’s a trap.

When Luntz says he is “scared to death,” he means that the Republicans who hire him are scared to death and he can profit from that fear by offering them new language. Luntz is clever. Yes, Republicans are scared. But there needs to be a serious discussion of both Luntz’s remarks and the progressive non-response.

What has been learned from the brain and cognitive sciences is that words are defined by fixed frames we use in thinking, frames come in hierarchical systems, and political frames are defined in moral terms, where “morality” is very different for conservatives and progressives. What lies behind the Occupy movement is a moral view of democracy: Democracy is about citizens caring about each other and acting responsibly both socially and personally. This requires a robust public empowering and protecting everyone equally. Both private success and personal freedom depend on such a public. Every critique and proposal of the Occupy movement fits this moral view, which happens to be the progressive moral view.

What the Occupy movement can’t stand is the opposite “moral” view, that democracy provides the freedom to seek one’s self-interest and ignore what is good for other Americans and others in the world. That view lies behind the Wall Street ethic of the Greedy Market, as opposed to a Market for All, a market that should maximize the well-being of most Americans. This view leads to a ...

Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 6 December 2011
It is the church, especially Trinity Church in New York City with its open park space at Canal and 6th, which can make manifest its commitment to the Gospel and nonviolent social change by permitting the Occupy movement to use this empty space.

Chris Hedges gave an abbreviated version of this talk Saturday morning in Liberty Square in New York City as part of an appeal to Trinity Church to turn over to the Occupy Wall Street movement an empty lot, known as Duarte Square, that the church owns at Canal Street and 6th Avenue. Occupy Wall Street protesters, following the call, began a hunger strike at the gates of the church-owned property. Three of the demonstrators were arrested Sunday on charges of trespassing, and three others took their places.

The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.

Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It was the church in ...

Occupy Economics: Because We’re Teaching it Wrong
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 6 December 2011
Does Occupy Wall Street highlight the failures of traditional Econ 101? These economists think so.

Economists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst vouched their support for the Occupy movement and the 99% in an open statement to Occupiers. Economists from around the world have added their names to this statement.

The economists who created the statement and the organization Econ4 believe there needs to be fundamental change in the field of economics in order to influence change in the economy and political spheres.

To find out more about the statement to Occupiers and the possibilities these economists see for the future visit Econ4.org.

You Can Arrest an Idea
Moderator
Published: Friday 2 December 2011
A poster from the debris read “99% you can’t arrest an idea.” Actually, you can, and the bankers have been able to reoccupy Los Angeles’ City Hall and every other contested outpost of power throughout the nation.

The bankers slept well. Their homes in Beverly Hills were not spotlighted by a noisy swarm of police helicopters, searchlights burning through the sanctity of the night, harassing the forlorn City Hall encampment of those who dared protest the banks’ seizure of our government. I live within sight of the iconic Los Angeles City Hall, and at first I thought it was being used once again as a movie location, given the massive police presence, as if an alien invasion was being thwarted.

Not eager to test the resilience of my new heart valve, I hesitated until the first crack of dawn to visit the place where former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and I had spoken weeks before at a teach-in on the origins of the economic crisis. I described the scene back then as a Jeffersonian moment, exactly the kind of peaceful assembly to redress grievances that the Founders of our nation enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But at 5 a.m. Wednesday there was only a graveyard of democratic hope. The protesters were gone, 200 arrested for exercising their constitutional rights, and only the television crews stayed to pick over the carcass of tents, books and posters, including one I pulled from the debris that read “99% you can’t arrest an idea.” Actually, you can, and the bankers have, as a result, been able to reoccupy Los Angeles’ City Hall and every other contested outpost of power throughout the nation.

The liberal Democratic mayor, a past president of the Southern California ACLU, was pleased with the efficiency of the “community policing” approach of his police department. “I said that here in L.A. we’d chart a different path, and we did,” Antonio Villaraigosa boasted. However, the result was the same as elsewhere; the bankers were protected from the scorn they so richly deserve and there will no longer be a visible monument to the ...

Women in Occupy Denver
Moderator
Published: Thursday 1 December 2011
“Here, internal strains have led some—including many women—to start an alternative group, more centrally focused on anti-oppression work.”

Occupy Denver (OD) has been a tenacious occupation—and some say the angriest—fighting on despite external pressures and internal strains along the fault lines of oppression and privilege. The following is mostly about the latter, particularly the role and projects of women organizers, but the external pressures are great and not unrelated, so let me first say a few words about them.

The two greatest external threats to OD have no doubt been inclement weather and aggressive policing under the direction of the Democratic political establishment here—the first in the nation to forcibly uproot an Occupy encampment. Three weeks after OD’s emergence, John Hickenlooper, a pro-business Democratic governor, gave a press conference with Democratic Mayor Michael Hancock, declaring the encampment illegal. Days later, riot police carried out a middle-of-the-night raid, arresting dozens and removing some 80 tents from the encampment near the Capitol building. It would be the first of three forcible evictions.

Wesleyan demonstrators at the governor’s alma mater symbolically revoked his degree two weeks ago at a protest against his campus visit. They have an online petition, which reads in part: “As members of the Wesleyan University community, we denounce the actions of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, Class of 1974, toward the Occupy Denver ...

Occupy LA: Tents Gone, but Campaign Not Over
Moderator
Published: Thursday 1 December 2011
Protestors insist that their campaign is not over and are already planning to take over the Rose Parade in January.

It took Los Angeles police less than 30 minutes last night to take down the Occupy Wall Street encampment that had spent the past two months staked out in front of City Hall. Despite some 200 arrests, the night passed without serious incident, with protestors vowing to continue the fight.

By 5 a.m. the camp had been cleared and remained under a heavy police presence. Cleaning crews sifted through the rubble of mangled tents, trash and the remains of manmade structures erected during the occupation.

While tense at times, there have been no reports of excessive violence on the part of the police, who forced protestors to vacate the premises nearly a day after a city-imposed deadline to end the occupation had passed. Occupy protestors had filed an injunction with the city seeking to prevent the police action. No word on a decision has yet come.

Protestors, meanwhile, say they plan to move several blocks north to La Plazita Church, an iconic structure built back in 1822 by the original Los Angeles settlers. Others say they plan to erect a new camp about a mile north of City Hall, in an open park known as the “corn fields.”

“We are almost certain that the police will try to clear up this camp tonight,” said C.J., who co-moderates a daily assembly held by protestors. Speaking several hours before police moved in, she added, “We might be removed from here, but we won’t stop the fight.”

The crowds cheered.

Stand Aside or Face Arrest

Despite the feisty mood, there was little doubt among protestors about what was in fact coming. During an assembly held the day before, speakers urged the crowd not to confront the police and informed those present that they were free to remain inside a marked area where they would face arrest, or move to the sidewalks and act as witness the impending action.

“Those who are willing to face arrest must not show any ...

Take Our Children, Please!
Moderator
Published: Thursday 1 December 2011
“The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99% of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets.”

In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” 

His idea was simple: the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food. 

His inspiration, as it happened, came from across the Atlantic.  As he explained, “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young, healthy child well nourished is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

Inspired in turn by Swift, I want to suggest that we put in motion a similar undertaking: on January 16th, Martin Luther King Day, citizens from around the country should gather at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street.  Let’s call this macabre gathering -- with luck and even worse times, it should be mammoth -- “We Surrender” or “Restore Debtor’s Prisons” or “De-Fault Is Ours” or “Collateralize Us.”  And plan on a mirthful day of mourning.

The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99% of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets.  It was Karl Marx who first observed that high finance is “the Vatican of capitalism.”  How right he turned out to be -- right with a vengeance! 

The Death of Democracy

Whole governments, democratically elected, are collapsing, or ...

The Occupy Movement Focuses on Foreclosures
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 30 November 2011
“The movement has deemed December 6th a National Day of Action to Stop and Reverse Foreclosures.”

As the Occupy movement enters its third month, it is moving into a new phase. Colder weather in the north, combined with aggressive push back from city officials around the country, is requiring the movement to adopt new, innovative approaches that include, but transcend, public presence as protest.

Pundits are wondering aloud whether Occupy is through. But this young movement is just getting started. An exciting piece of evidence to that effect is a new focus on foreclosures.

Alongside its call for job creation, corporate accountability, and relief from crushing student loan debt is a growing demand that Wall Street and Washington make right the disaster for homeowners that their greed and neglect respectively caused. The movement has deemed December 6th a National Day of Action to Stop and Reverse Foreclosures.

The new “OccupyOurHomes.org” website describes the stakes and the problem well:

“Everyone deserves to have a roof over their head and a place to call home. Millions of Americans have worked hard for years for the opportunity to own their home; for others, it remains a distant goal. For all of us, having a decent place to live for ourselves and our families is the most fundamental part of the American dream, a source of security and pride.

In 2008, we discovered bankers and speculators had been gambling with our most valuable asset, our homes—betting against us and destroying trillions of dollars of our wealth. Now, because of the foreclosure crisis Wall Street banks created with their lies and greed, millions of Americans have lost their homes, and one in four homeowners are currently underwater on their mortgage.”

These Americans are joining many others, particularly in communities of color, who were victimized by predatory lending and lax enforcement for decades. A new report by the Center for Responsible Lending, for example, shows that African Americans and ...

It Takes People Power to Make Clear That Corporations Are NOT People
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 30 November 2011
“Congress is sensing these political tremblers — and beginning to move.”

In the Nov. 8 elections, the national media gave extensive coverage to a proposed "personhood amendment" to Mississippi's state constitution. This was an extremist anti-abortion ballot initiative to declare that a person's life begins not at birth, but at the very instant that a sperm meets the egg. However, extending full personhood to two-cell zygotes was too far out even for many of Mississippi's zealous antagonists against woman's right to control her own fertility, so the proposition was voted down.

Meanwhile, the national media paid practically zero attention to another "personhood" vote that took place on that same day over a thousand miles from Mississippi. This was a referendum in Missoula, Mont., on a concept even more bizarre than declaring zygotes to be persons with full citizenship rights.

It was a vote on overturning last year's democracy-killing decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the now-infamous Citizens United case. A narrow five-man majority had decreed that — abracadabra! — lifeless, soulless corporations are henceforth persons with human political rights. Moreover, said the five, these tongueless artificial entities must be allowed to "speak" by dumping unlimited sums of their corporate cash into our election campaigns, thus giving them a far bigger voice than us real-life persons.

Missoulians, of ...

The Supercommittee of the One Percent Goes Down in Flames
Moderator
Published: Thursday 24 November 2011
“It became impossible for Congress to back a package that had cuts to Social Security and Medicare at its center, while actually lowering taxes for the richest 1 percent, as the Republican members of the supercommittee were demanding.”

Congress gave us a wonderful Thanksgiving present when we got word that the supercommitee was hanging up its capes. While many in the media were pushing the story of a dysfunctional Congress that could not get anything done, the exact opposite was true. The supercommittee was about finding a backdoor way to cut Social Security and Medicare, and create enough cover that Congress could get away with it.

It is important to remember the basic facts about the budget and the economy. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, it is easy to show (by looking at the website of the Congressional Budget Office) that we do not have a chronic deficit problem. In 2007, prior to the collapse of the housing bubble and the resulting economic downturn, the deficit was just 1.2 percent of GDP.

The deficit was projected to remain near this level for the immediate future, even if the Bush tax cuts did not expire as scheduled in 2011. If the tax cuts were allowed to expire than the budget was projected to turn to surplus.

All this changed when the collapse of the housing bubble wrecked the economy. The story is simple, the housing bubble generated over $1 trillion in annual demand by stimulating record levels of construction and causing a home equity-driven consumption boom. This demand disappeared when the bubble burst. This is what created the large deficits that we are now seeing.

The trillion-dollar-plus deficits are replacing lost private sector demand. Those who want lower deficits now, want higher unemployment. They may not know this, but that is the reality since employers are not going to hire people because the government has cuts its spending or fires government employees. The world does not work that way.

While this is the reality, the supercommittee was about turning reality on its head. Instead of the problem being a ...

The People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street Lives On
Moderator
Published: Thursday 24 November 2011
“We’re still accepting donations and lending books just as we always have, but we’ve reorganized ourselves somewhat.”

The People’s Library at Zuccotti Park—a collection of more than 5,000 donated books of every genre and subject, all free for the taking—was created not only to serve the Occupy Wall Street protesters; it was meant to provide knowledge and reading pleasure for the wider public as well, including residents of Lower Manhattan. It was also a library to the world at large, since many visitors to the park stopped by the library to browse our collection, to donate books of their own and to take books for themselves.

 

At about 2:30 am on November 15, the People’s Library was destroyed by the NYPD, acting on the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With no advance notice, an army of police in riot gear raided the park, seized everything in it and threw it all into garbage trucks and dumpsters. Despite Mayor Bloomberg’s Twitter promise that the library was safely stored and could be retrieved, only about 1,100 books were recovered, and some of those are in unreadable condition. Four library laptops were also destroyed, as well as all the bookshelves, storage bins, stamps and cataloging supplies and the large tent that housed the library.

For the past six weeks I have been living and working as a librarian in the People’s Library, camping out on the ground next to it. I’m an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and I’ve chosen to spend my sabbatical at Occupy Wall Street to participate in the movement and to build and maintain the collection of books at the People’s Library. I love books—reading them, writing in them, arranging them, holding them, even smelling them. I also love having access to books for free. I love libraries and everything they represent. To see an entire collection of donated books, including many titles I would have liked to read, thoughtlessly ransacked and destroyed by the forces of law and order was one of the most disturbing experiences of my ...

Civil Society at Ground Zero
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 22 November 2011
“What was born and what died that day a decade ago has everything to do with what’s going on in and around the park, the country, and the world now.”

Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.

Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.

When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified.  They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.

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Occupy Our Consciences
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 22 November 2011
“The occupations have done their work. Now it’s time to occupy the majority.”

Everyone on the left side of American politics, from the near end to the far end, has advice for Occupy Wall Street. I’m no exception. But it’s useful to acknowledge first that this movement has accomplished things that the more established left didn’t.

The problems of growing economic inequality and abuses by the masters of the financial world have been in the background for years. Many progressives longed to make them central political questions.

Occupy realized that the old approaches hadn’t worked. So it provided the media with a committed group of activists to cover, a good story line and excellent pictures. Paradoxically, its unconventional approach fit nicely with current media conventions. And its indifference to immediate political concerns gave the movement a freedom of action that others on the left did not have.

The breakup of some of Occupy’s encampments signals a new phase for the movement. This does not have to mean its end. On the contrary, it is an opportunity.

Let’s first dispense with a kind of narcissism that exists among Americans who ...

The Global Revolt of 2011 - A Turning Point in History
Moderator
Published: Monday 21 November 2011
“What we do know is that the great revolt of 2011 marks a turning point in history as a global mass movement takes on the economic and political forces that are plundering our world.”

“Shut It Down,” “No More Shipping for the 1 Percent” and “Death to Capitalism” proclaimed some of the banners near me as I joined thousands of demonstrators who converged on the Port of Oakland on a sunny afternoon. This city is part of a global movement that has changed the terms of the national political debate, stealing much of the thunder from the Tea Party movement. It is part of a global insurgency that is shaking governments around the world in a way not seen since the 1960s.

It started with Tunisia and the Arab Spring, then spread to Spain and the Indignados movement, to Chile with the massive student mobilization for an end to education for profit, to England with the urban riots, to Athens with the massive demonstrations against the tyranny of the Euro and the financial markets, and then to New York with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Two comparable uprisings have rocked the course of history.

The revolutions of 1848 in Europe—known as the Spring Time of the Peoples—challenged monarchs, aristocrats and autocrats alike as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels penned the Communist Manifesto. Disturbances and revolutions occurred in more than 50 countries and thousands died with untold numbers fleeing abroad.

Then, exactly one century and two decades later, a broad anti-systemic movement roiled the globe on many fronts: the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the global anti-war movement, the student and worker uprising in Paris, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the riots in Chicago at the Democratic convention and the Mexican student protests that led to the massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza.

None of these historic revolts was successful in terms of taking power, but they changed the world in profound ways, just as the great revolt of 2011 is doing.

As in 1968, today’s uprising is anti-systemic—calling for fundamental changes in the world's political and economic ...

National Lawyers Guild Files FOIA Requests Seeking Evidence of Federal Role in Occupy Crackdown
Moderator
Published: Monday 21 November 2011
“The Guild and other observers strongly suspect that the 72 so-called Fusion Centers created buy the Homeland Security Department around the country, and the many Joint Terror Task Forces operated by the FBI in conjunction with local police in many cities, are serving as coordination points for the increasingly systematic attacks on the Occupy Movement.”

With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days and weeks."

According to a statement by the NLG, each of the FOIA requests states, "This request specifically encompasses disclosure of any documents or information pertaining to federal coordination of, or advice or consultation regarding, the police response to the Occupy movement, protests or encampments."

National Lawyers Guild leaders, including Executive Director Heidi Beghosian and NLG Mass Defense Committee co-chair and PCJ Executive Director Mara Veheyden-Hilliard both told TCBH! earlier this week that the rapid-fire assaults on occupation encampments in cities from Oakland to New York and Portland, Seattle and Atlanta, all within days of each other, the similar approach taken by police, which included overwhelming force in night-time attacks, mass arrests, use of such weaponry as pepper spray, sound cannons, tear gas, clubs and in some cases "non-lethal" projectiles like bean bags and rubber bullets, the removal and even arrest of reporters and camera-persons, and the justifications offered by municipal officials, who all cited "health" and "safety" concerns, all pointed to central direction and guidance.

As we reported, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted publicly in an interview on a San Francisco radio program earlier this week that prior to her first order to police to clear Oscar Grant Plaza of ...

How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights
Moderator
Published: Monday 21 November 2011
“Occupy Wall Street has already won its first victory its own way - in Ohio, when voters repealed Republican governor John Kasich’s law to slash bargaining rights for 350,000 public workers and gut what remained of organized labor’s political power.”

No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.

You might have missed OWS's win amid the recent wave of Occupy crackdowns. Police raided Occupy Denver, Occupy Salt Lake City, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Portland, and Occupy Seattle in a five-day span. Hundreds were arrested. And then, in the early morning hours on Tuesday, New York City police descended on Occupy Wall Street itself, fists flying and riot shields at the ready, with orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. Later that day, a judge ruled that they couldn't rebuild their young community, dealing a blow to the Occupy protest that inspired them all.

Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists

Forced Eviction Takes Occupy Wall Street into Its Next Phase
Moderator
Published: Thursday 17 November 2011
“It suggested that perhaps the time has passed for the movement to be so focused on encampments, and that it might move on to bigger and better things instead.”

Liberty Plaza (or Park or Square) looks an awful lot like Zuccotti Park again—aside from the damaged flower beds and a broken plastic peace sign lying in the gutter. At 1 in the morning, hundreds of police in riot gear stormed the plaza, shining floodlights and tearing down tents. Sanitation workers loaded occupiers’ belongings into garbage trucks, including the books of the occupation’s library. LRAD sound cannons were on the scene, and as many as five police helicopters hovered high overhead, where airspace was closed to media aircraft. On the ground, police cornered reporters out of view from the plaza during the eviction of the protesters, some of whom locked arms around the kitchen area and nonviolently resisted removal. They faced pepper spray and batons for doing so.

When I arrived at around 2:20 a.m., riot police were preventing anyone from getting closer than a block away from the site. By the time I returned there just after sunrise, after hours following marches and spontaneous assemblies and affinity groups meeting in the streets, the place had been completely cleared and washed. It was blocked off with barricades, despite a court order that the occupiers should be allowed to return. Back in Duarte Square on Canal Street, though, where hundreds had temporarily gathered, it was surprising how positive the mood actually was.

So, then, what next? What does the Occupy movement do when its flagship occupation is, at least for now, gone?

It happens that just hours before, Adbusters magazine—which originally called for the occupation—promulgated "Tactical Briefing #18: Occupy the High Ground." It suggested that perhaps the time has passed for the movement to be ...

Occupy Cal Stands Its Ground
Moderator
Published: Thursday 17 November 2011
We are saying to you, to the Regents, and to the State, that if you don’t do that for us, we will do everything in our power to do it for ourselves.

On Wednesday, November 9th, Berkeley undergraduate Margaret Zhou was one of roughly 500 students to link arms around the Occupy Cal encampment as the police vowed to take the tents down. The student activists were beaten with batons, and shoved to the ground when they refused to break the link. After the police tore down the tents, the demonstrators, including students and community members from Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco, crowded onto the steps of Sproul Hall, still refusing to leave, where they were again beaten and told to disperse. Finally, after hours of holding their ground, the crowd was allowed to stay on the steps and hold a general assembly, during which they decided their next steps. A proposal to organize a state-wide strike of higher education that will take place on Tuesday, November 15th, won with a 95 percent consensus. It was also decided that general assembly meetings would take place daily on the Sproul steps at 6:00pm, with the hopes of building and sustaining an Occupy Cal movement. The next day, Chancellor Birgeneau sent a mass email to UC Berkeley faculty and students titled “Letter to Campus Community.” In her response to the letter below, Margaret explains the reasoning behind the Occupy Cal movement and the greater movement for public education in California.

Dear Chancellor Birgeneau,

As a Berkeley student and one of the protestors who peacefully demonstrated on Sproul Plaza on November 9, I am deeply offended by your "Message to Campus Community." Students and professors, not only on this campus but across the UC system, note how you shift the blame for Wednesday night's violence away from your inability to fulfill your role as Chancellor and onto the students who were standing up for the social value of a right to public education, and for all their peers for whom they wish to secure this right.

You and the UC Regents have a responsibility to lobby the State of ...

Police State Tactics: Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities
Moderator
Published: Thursday 17 November 2011
Both Siegel and Boghosian say they strongly suspect federal involvement in the planning of the recent spate of police violence against occupiers.

The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.

Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, and most recently New York, NY, where the Occupation Movement began on September 17. The two most recent eviction efforts, in Oakland and New York, have been the worst.

The police attacks have had a lot in common. They have been "justified" based upon trumped up pre-textural claims that the occupiers are creating a health hazard, or a fire hazard, or a crime problem, generally on little or no evidence, or there has been a digging up of obscure and constitutionally questionable statutes, for example laws outlawing the homeless. Then the police come in, usually in dead of night, dressed in riot gear and heavily armed with mace weapons, batons, plastic cuffs and tear gas, or even assault rifles in some cases and so-called flash-bang stun grenades--all weapons to be used against peaceful demonstrators.

So violent has been the response that some returned veterans have condemned the police for using weapons and tactics that are not even permitted by occupying troops in war-torn countries.

"We definitely feel, especially in a movement like this that has arisen so quickly in a number of cities, that there will be a coordinated national effort to try and shut it down," says Heidi Bogosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, which has been playing a key role providing legal services to the new movement.

"We see the scapegoating of these movements, the attacks at night, and in general tactics designed to terrorize and to scare protesters away. I can’t see this ...

The Brave New World of Occupy Wall Street
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 16 November 2011
The encampment, motivated in large part by the opposition to the supremacy of commerce and globalization, was being destroyed.

We got word just after 1 a.m. Tuesday that New York City police were raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment. I raced down with the “Democracy Now!” news team to Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square. Hundreds of riot police had already surrounded the area. As they ripped down the tents, city sanitation workers were throwing the protesters’ belongings into dump trucks. Beyond the barricades, back in the heart of the park, 200 to 300 people locked arms, refusing to cede the space they had occupied for almost two months. They were being handcuffed and arrested, one by one. 

The few of us members of the press who managed to get through all the police lines were sent to a designated area across the street from Zuccotti Park. As our cameras started rolling, they placed two police buses in front of us, blocking our view. My colleagues and I managed to slip between them and into the park, climbing over the trashed mounds of tents, tarps and sleeping bags. The police had almost succeeded in enforcing a complete media blackout of the destruction.

We saw a broken bookcase in one pile. Deeper in the park, I spotted a single book on the ground. It was marked “OWSL,” for Occupy Wall Street Library, also known as the People’s Library, one of the key institutions that had sprung up in the organic democracy of the movement. By the latest count, it had accumulated 5,000 donated books. The one I found, amidst the debris of democracy that was being hauled off to the dump, was “Brave New World Revisited,” by Aldous Huxley.

As the night progressed, the irony of finding Huxley’s book grew. He wrote it in 1958, almost 30 years after his famous dystopian novel, “Brave New World.” The original work described society in the future where people had been stratified into haves and have-nots. The “Brave New World” denizens were plied with pleasure, distraction, advertisement and ...

Occupy Wall Street is Many Things, but One Thing It’s Not is Partisan
Moderator
Published: Monday 14 November 2011
“Above all, most protesters said they felt it was simply too early in the organizing process to get involved formally with politics.”

The Occupy Wall Street protest may be a movement, a momentary phenomenon or something in between, but one thing its most fervent activists insist that it's not is a team of shock troops for any partisan political campaign.

That's a big disappointment to Democrats who wish the Occupy activists would animate their party the way the tea party lit up Republicans the past two years, but the protesters at the original Occupy Wall Street scene say that's not what it's about.

"I don't see us endorsing candidates or trying to form a party," said Mark Bray, 29, a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University and a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team. Efforts to shift the movement in a partisan direction would be unlikely to be approved by the consensus process at the protesters' regular General Assembly meetings, he and other protesters say.

"There would be so many people who would balk at the endorsement of any party or candidate that I don't think it would happen," Bray said.

Not yet, at least.

Like other protesters from various Occupy Wall Street organizing groups, Bray did not rule out political possibilities for the future. Indeed, protesters from the Occupy Cincinnati group have announced a platform for a new political party — the Occupation Party.

And after all, these protests are far from apolitical in nature. It's difficult to walk even a few feet in Zuccotti Park, the New York protest's base in Manhattan's financial district, without hearing political issues being debated and finding groups weighing in on a wide range of political subjects such as healthcare, education, national debt and defense spending.

Yet though most activists at Occupy Wall Street claim to be dissatisfied with the state of American government and politics, their views come in many flavors. Some are leftists of the '60s generation, others are curious newcomers to ...

The Undeserving One Percent?
Moderator
Published: Friday 11 November 2011
“The rich can certainly afford to pay more, but if governments increase taxes on the wealthy, they should do it with the aim of improving opportunities for all, rather than as a punitive measure to rectify an imagined wrong.”

It is amazing how the “one percent” epithet, a reference to the top 1% of earners, has caught on in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. In the United States, this 1% includes all those with a 2006 household income of at least $386,000. In the popular narrative, the 1% is thickly populated with unscrupulous corporate titans, greedy bankers, and insider-trading hedge-fund managers. Reading some progressive economists, it might seem that the answer to all of America’s current problems is to tax the 1% and redistribute to everyone else.

Of course, underlying this narrative is the view that this income is ill-gotten, made possible by Bush-era tax cuts, the broken corporate governance system, and the conflict-of-interest-ridden financial system. The 1% are not people who have earned money the hard way by making real things, so there is no harm in taking it away from them.

Clearly, this caricature is based on some truth. For instance, corporations, especially in the financial sector, reward too many executives richly despite mediocre performance. But apart from tarring too many with the same brush, there is something deeply troubling about this narrative’s reductionism.

"Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Raghuram Rajan, click here."

It ignores, for example, the fact that many of the truly rich are entrepreneurs. It likewise ignores the fact that many of the wealthy are sports stars and entertainers, and that their ranks include professionals such as doctors, lawyers, consultants, and even some of our favorite progressive economists. In other words, the rich today are more likely to be working than idle.

But what might be the ...

Social Justice Groups Engage Occupy Movement
Moderator
Published: Friday 11 November 2011
”Some organizations like the Chinese Progressive Association that works for low-income immigrants’ rights in San Francisco are reaching out to their own members to raise awareness about the Occupy movement by integrating it in their advocacy work.”

Social justice organizations in the Bay Area are joining forces with the Occupy movements in Oakland and San Francisco.

Local nonprofits that have been advocating for the eradication of economic inequities in various sectors of society for years are finding that the Occupy movements are presenting a unique opening to engage in dialogue across socioeconomic lines on the widespread wealth disparity in the country.

“Organizations like ours that have been doing base-building work and community organizing work have a lot in common with those protestors,” said María Poblet, executive director of Causa Justa, which works to promote low-income tenants’ rights in Oakland and San Francisco.

“In fact, some of us are those protestors,” she added. “So there’s a great opportunity there to get even more concrete on what we’re asking for and use our collective strength to win some gains for our community, ‘cause we want both to build a long-term movement and transform our society.”

Poblet said that her organization was one of those behind last week’s general strike in Oakland.

The relationship forming between the Occupiers and community groups, however, seems to be symbiotic in nature.

Poblet said members of Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco have been supportive of Causa Justa’s three-year-old campaign against Wells Fargo.

“We found a lot of the protestors have joined us in demanding from Wells Fargo a few key things,” she said. Those key demands on Wells Fargo, she added, include a moratorium on foreclosures, reinvestment in poor communities and an end to predatory lending practices including payday loans.

Community-based organizations are also participating in the Occupy movements by defending the first amendment rights of the movement’s members.

“There was a police raid about two weeks ago and we saw that as a threat ...

We are the 1% ... And We Stand with the 99%
Moderator
Published: Thursday 10 November 2011
“Not everyone at the top of the economic system thinks it's a fair one. Why Jesse Estrin—and many others—decided to stand with the rest of us.”

I first realized that I came from wealth when I discovered that not everybody’s family had more than one house.

It was a further revelation when, growing up, it dawned on me that not everybody else went to the same kind of school I did. I began to understand that my experience of elementary and high school – going to nicely furnished schools with state-of-the-art facilities in a safe neighborhood of West L.A., and with very little diversity and an obsession with getting students into Ivy League colleges—was not the experience of the majority of other children my age. When you are surrounded by peers in the same financial bracket as yourself, it can take some time to recognize the bubble that separates you from the rest of society. This bubble is what I eventually came to understand as privilege.

It was a long and bumpy journey to come to terms with what this privilege of wealth meant, especially in light of the glaring differences of experience that I began to see all around me. By the time I made it to college, and began to get involved with social and environmental activism, I would find myself in the confusing position of listening to angry insults and generalized stereotypes about “rich people.” My new friends—people I respected and admired—were adamant about social justice but had a great amount of anger and resentment toward people with wealth. It was extremely awkward for me, and I found myself keeping my background hidden—even to close friends—and never outing myself as someone who came from wealth. I felt a tremendous amount of embarrassment and shame around it. Interestingly, I discovered that many of my friends who also came from wealth felt the same way. It was actually very isolating. It wasn’t cool to be a rich kid. 

It wasn’t until I discovered Resource Generation, an organization that works with young people to ...

Occupy Wall Street Joins an Assembly of Struggles in Athens
Moderator
Published: Thursday 10 November 2011
“As they take hold in neighborhoods, the Greek and Argentine assemblies are concerned less with ideology than with finding direct ways to address the needs of people and the crises of the community.”

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The meeting, convened by a group called Assembly for the Circulation of Struggles, consisted of progress reports from neighborhood assemblies around Athens. Located down some stairs under a graffiti black cat, the basement included a ping-pong table, a kitchen, a bar, and a selection of radical books in Greek. (“If the books do better than the bar,” said a woman who would know, “we consider that a good night.”) For five hours, 50 or so people sat in an ovular jumble of plastic chairs and cafe tables, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and nursing beers. Among them were Argentine activist Claudia Acuna and Marina Sitrin, a New York-based activist, lawyer, and scholar who has been a central organizer of Occupy Wall Street since the planning stages. The Assembly had just published a Greek translation of Sitrin’s book, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in ...

Occupy Movement is Spreading and Growing
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 9 November 2011
“Now it’s everywhere: Hundreds of towns like Occupy Orlando and Chicago and Portland and Nashville and Asheville and Oakland and even little towns like Redwood City.”

Our captured government won’t do its job. It doesn't keep Wall Street and banks and giant corporations from ripping us off and doesn't prosecute them after they do. It doesn't stop polluters - even as the effects of climate change increase. It doesn't enforce employment and labor laws, so all of us who work fall further and further behind. It doesn't take care of those in need even as more and more of us are in greater and greater need. It just helps the connected rich get richer. So people finally got fed up, and started "occupying." Now the occupy movement is spreading to more and more cities, growing with more and more people, and expanding people's understanding of the power that comes from speaking out.

It started with Occupy Wall Street, people rising up over the greed and inequality, the1% vs 99%. Labor joined, adding their voice and grievances. Veterans, teachers and others are showing up in greater and greater numbers now. Others are joining. Now it's everywhere: Hundreds of towns like Occupy Orlando and Chicago and Portland and Nashville and Asheville and Oakland and even little towns like Redwood City.

People are getting arrested as the powers-that-be react to the spreading and growing crowds. According to Chris Bowers at Daily Kos,

Arrests in Chicago, New York City, Fresno, Eureka, Denver, Portland, Boston, Seattle, Oakland, Ashville, Riverside and more cities over the weekend has brought the total number of arrests of Occupy protesters over 3,350.

Globalization Of ...

An All-American Nightmare
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 8 November 2011
“So hold Bush’s American Dream in your head for a few moments longer and consider the devastation that followed.”

How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream?  M.R.I.C.  (May it rest in carnage.)

No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the package that’s so yesterday, so underwater, so OWS.  I’m talking about a far more recent dream, a truly audacious one that’s similarly gone with the wind.

I’m talking about George W. Bush’s American Dream.  If people here remember the invasion of Iraq -- and most Americans would undoubtedly prefer to forget it -- what’s recalled is kited intelligence, Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal, dumb and even dumber decisions, a bloody civil war, dead Americans, crony corporations, a trillion or more taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet... well, you know the story.  What few care to remember was that original dream -- call it The Dream -- and boy, was it a beaut!

An American Dream

It went something like this: Back in early 2003, the top officials of the Bush administration had no doubt that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, drained by years of war, no-fly zones, and sanctions, would be a pushover; that the U.S. military, which they idolized ...

The One Percent Turns Class War into Generational War
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 8 November 2011
“One might think that Congress would convene a supercommittee to get people back to work rather than figuring out a way to undermine programs that people need, but it’s the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from their greed and incompetence.”

Major news outlets like the Washington Post and National Public Radio constantly bombard us with news pieces on the budget deficit. Invariably these stories focus on the cost of “entitlements,” which most of us know as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The story pounded home in these pieces – often explicitly – is that these programs, that primarily benefit the elderly, are creating the basis for a generational war between the young and the old.

The media focus both contributes to and follows the Washington policy debate. At the moment, we have the congressional “supercommittee” scheming to produce a deficit-reduction plan that will almost certainly involve large cuts to all three programs. There is a commonly repeated view in Washington policy circles, based on no evidence whatsoever, that there will be a disaster if the supercommittee comes up empty handed. This means that members of the committee are feeling great pressure from the 1 percent to produce a package with big cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

It is truly impressive how the Washington elite have managed to make these modest protections for the country’s working population (the 99 percent) into the greatest problem facing the country. The obsession with cutting these programs is occurring at a time when we have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work altogether. One might think that Congress would convene a supercommittee to get people back to work rather than figuring out a way to undermine programs that people need, but it’s the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from their greed and incompetence.

Since almost no one can be immune to the hysteria that the media have created around the cost of these programs, it is worth putting it in some context. Starting with Social Security, the

Finding Freedom in Handcuffs
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 8 November 2011
“I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not make this journey.”

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and disease.

I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War ...

Oakland Police Shoot Protester with Rubber Bullet as He Films Them
Moderator
Published: Monday 7 November 2011
Video has emerged of Oakland police using a rubber bullet to shoot a protester as he was filming them. The incident apparently occurred after midnight on November 3rd, the night after the general strike activists had called for.

Video has emerged of Oakland police using a rubber bullet to shoot a protester as he was filming them. The incident apparently occurred after midnight on November 3rd, the night after the general strike activists had called for.

Young Turks Video Clip - Rick Perry Asks Occupy Movement: What’s with the Money Hangup, Man?
Moderator
Published: Monday 7 November 2011
Rick Perry told the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators not to think about money so much. “Just find your passion,” said Perry. “Stop thinking about money.”

Incredible but true: In a television interview, Rick Perry told the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators not to think about money so much. "Just find your passion," said Perry. "Stop thinking about money."

The other day Yours Truly co-hosted The Young Turks with Brian Unger, and in this segment Brian and I show the video and argue whether Perry is a shrewd re-framer of the debate, the last real hippie on Earth ... or just has a screw loose. Watch the video and decide for yourself - is the Governor a canny re-framer of political perceptions, a carefree spirit letting his inner love child out for a stroll, or speaking to us from a state of profoundly altered perceptions?

Oakland Occupied - Will Washington Listen at Last?
Moderator
Published: Friday 4 November 2011
“But Washington continues to ignore the public, debating a national motto, as Republicans block jobs and an elitist "super committee" debates cutting the things government does for the 99%.”

It was an amazing thing to be part of, an entire city downtown occupied, then a huge march that shut down a major port. Oakland was #occupied! This was a game changer, a turning point. What happened in Oakland was a very big deal. On the same Wednesday there were big, big #occupy events in several other cities. But will Washington pay attention?

Occupy Oakland

I arrived at Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland yesterday about 11:30am. The streets were blocked off by police (a single police car keeping traffic out) a block or three out in all four directions, and a large crowd was gathered. The Plaza itself was surrounded by occupier tents, the surrounding street had several booths, and there was a bit of a festival atmosphere.

At the corner of 14th and Broadway there was a stage set up with speakers throughout the day. Hundreds of people milled about, many with signs saying everything from "We Are The 99%" to "Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out," "Tax The Rich," "Stand With The 99%," "We Get Cut, They Get Rich," etc...

There was a harmonious energy with people of all ethnicities, ages, cultures and from all over the area. People were friendly, helpful, welcoming, and overall supportive of each other. It was a very pleasant event on a ...

Wall Street is Still Playing Us for Suckers
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 2 November 2011
“Why not a single major banker has been cuffed and frog-marched to some Financial District Guantanamo is unclear.”

As a mere youth, I bought a used car in New York to drive to California to be with the woman of my dreams. Inexplicably, she decided to rush back to New York, so I promptly took the car back to the dealer. He made a shockingly low offer. The car had been in an accident, he explained. The chassis was bent. I was flabbergasted. I had just bought the car from him. If the chassis was bent, it was bent when I bought it. The salesman offered me a take-it-or-leave-it shrug. He probably now works on Wall Street.

That the morality of the used car lot has been adopted by Wall Street is now abundantly clear. Citigroup recently settled a civil complaint in which it was accused of selling mortgage-related investments that it knew were dogs. It was so certain that the investments were the financial equivalent of my used car that it bet against them — heads I win, tails you lose — and even selected the investments themselves, choosing from a cupboard of depleted and exhausted financial instruments. An investment in the Brooklyn Bridge would have been safer.

These investments are known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and they consisted of the sort of mortgage securities that nearly sunk the U.S. financial system. According to federal regulators, they were sold with the full knowledge that they were careening toward worthlessness and that, by deduction, their buyers were patsies. The bank made substantial profits on them. But when the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to act, it got Citigroup to pony up a mere $285 million fine that, to presumed chuckles, will doubtlessly be taken out of petty cash. The bank last quarter reported a profit of $3.8 billion.

Mirth must have turned to guffaws when Citigroup read on. It did not even have to admit guilt — “without admitting or denying” is the language the SEC ...

Call of Duty: Veterans Join the 99 Percent
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 2 November 2011
“A group calling itself Veterans of the 99 Percent has formed, and with the New York City Chapter of IVAW set Nov. 2 as the day to march to Liberty Plaza to formally join and support the movement.”

11-11-11 is not a variant of Herman Cain’s much-touted 9-9-9 tax plan, but rather the date of this year’s Veterans Day. This is especially relevant, as the U.S. has now entered its second decade of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in the nation’s history. U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are appearing more and more on the front lines—the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that is.

Video from the Occupy Oakland march on Tuesday, Oct. 25, looks and sounds like a war zone. The sound of gunfire is nearly constant in the video. Tear-gas projectiles were being fired into the crowd when the cry of “Medic!” rang out. Civilians raced toward a fallen protester lying on his back on the pavement, mere steps from a throng of black-clad police in full riot gear, pointing guns as the civilians attempted to administer first aid.

The fallen protester was Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old former U.S. Marine who had served two tours of duty in Iraq. The publicly available video shows Olsen standing calmly alongside a Navy veteran holding an upraised Veterans for Peace flag. Olsen was wearing a desert camouflage jacket and sun hat, and his Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) T-shirt. He was hit in the head by a police projectile, most likely a tear-gas canister, suffering a fractured skull. As the small group of people gathered around him to help, a police officer lobbed a flashbang grenade directly into the huddle, and it exploded.

Four or five people lifted Olsen and raced with him away from the police line. At the hospital, he was put into an induced coma to relieve brain swelling. He is now conscious but unable to speak. He communicates using a notepad.

I interviewed one of Olsen’s friends, Aaron Hinde, also an Iraq War veteran. He was at Occupy San Francisco ...

The Disuniting of America
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 2 November 2011
“If the widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us is not addressed, our society will devolve into a jungle — and not even billionaires will enjoy living there.”

In the Bible, Paul doesn't say that money is the root of all evil — rather, it is the love of money that he warns against.

In recent years, the insidious love of mammon (in the form of greed and excess) has not merely been tolerated in our country, but celebrated and even exalted into official public policy, marring our economy with dangerous inequality and injustice. The reigning ethos of those at the apex of our nation's wealth pyramid is that too much is not enough. They're not merely out to make loads of the money they love, but to make a killing, everyone else be damned.

New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office confirm that as the moneyed elites have been making their killing, wealth disparity has become extreme in a country that once prided itself on trying to build a more egalitarian society.

Analyzing 30 years of income data, the nonpartisan CBO reports that the richest 1 percent of our population has enjoyed a stunning 275 percent increase in their income during that time. As a result, these privileged few have more than doubled the slice of America's income pie that they consume, going from 8 percent to 17 percent of the whole in just three decades.

From whom did these richest 1-percenters get their extra-big slice? From us, the 99 percent. The share of national income going to middle class and poor families shrank in this period — which is why there is such broad support today for Occupy Wall Street's "We are the 99 percent" movement.

At the extreme tip of America's wealth pyramid are the multimillionaire CEOs and billionaire Wall Streeters. They are the richest .01-percenters (a mere 14,836 households). These few now take 6 percent of all U.S. income — the biggest piece ever consumed by America's mega-rich.

If the widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us is not addressed, our society will devolve into a jungle — and not even ...

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