The sound rang out at exactly 4 p.m. last Friday: four measured chimes increasing in pitch. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Standing in concentric circles with clasped hands, protesters held the last note, and it echoed against the New York Stock Exchange. Tourists and workers stopped to stare as the people-powered bell chimed again. Inside, another bell was ringing — a mechanical, computerized sound marking the end of the day’s trading. Six months since the Occupy movement began, it was clear that the bell inside was losing its resonance, and the “people’s gong” outside was getting louder.

After last weekend, news of the “police riot” on Saturday night in Liberty Plaza made headlines. Yes, the NYPD beat, kicked and stomped on peaceful people, using the type of violence that the department unleashes daily on communities of color across the boroughs. Officers broke bones, dragged people by the hair and ignored a woman suffering from seizures induced by the attack. They did it again at Union Square early Wednesday morning — throwing medics down to the sidewalk, pepper-spraying dozens of protesters, sending many to the hospital and barricading a 24-hour public park that has stood open and unobstructed for the last 20 years. This week has been one of Occupy Wall Street’s most extreme encounters with the violence and intimidation meant to maintain order in a society characterized by extraordinary inequality.

Yet our actions were not about violence or anger. From Wall Street to Bank of America to the courthouse at 100 Centre Street, we demonstrated a renewed sense of creativity as we confronted sites of injustice with a sense of carnival.

Even after Saturday’s eviction from Liberty Plaza, we gathered outside the courthouse at 100 Centre Street on Sunday and Monday, tired but festive. More than 50 people brought coffee, cigarettes, sandwiches and their bodies to greet the 70 ...

At the new Occupation of Union Square, a pattern is emerging. For five days, since the NYPD attacked the attempted re-occupation of Liberty Square, hundreds of people have Occupied the park in midtown Manhattan. For the past two nights, using the pretext of ¨midnight park cleaning¨, NYPD has responded with heavy-handed tactics to enforce a curfew on the park for the first time in history since it opened in 1882. Twice, NYPD has come under cover of darkness to harass and intimidate the peaceful Occupiers.

Last night, thousands of New Yorkers converged on Union Square for the #MillionHoodiesMarch to demand justice for Trayvon Martin and all victims of racist terror. The NYPD also turned out in massive numbers and attacked the marchers, who responded with chants of ¨no justice, no peace, no racist police!¨ In a scene reminiscent of the September march for Troy Davis during the early days of the Liberty Square Occupation, the NYPD once again stole the show, turning a march against the killing of a Black 17-year-old into yet another scene of police brutality against protesters.

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Occupy Amsterdam is again being threatened with eviction.

Amsterdam is home to the world´s oldest stock market - and it is #Occupied. Protesters in Amsterdam, along with dozens of cities across the Netherlands and hundreds throughout the world, took their square on a Global Day of Action on October 15, 2011, four weeks after Occupy Wall Street began. Occupy Amsterdam has occupied Beursplein (Exchange Square, directly in front of the Amsterdam stock exchange, now owned by Wall Street-based NYSE Euronext) ever since. Alongside the Acampadas in Spain and Portgual and the popular assemblies in Greece, the Netherlands remains among the most active Occupy movements in the non-English speaking world.

Other squares and buildings in Amsterdam and across the Netherlands have also been occupied, but Beursplein remains a centerpoint of the Dutch Occupy movement. On Dec. 3rd, Amsterdam Mayor Van der Laan echoed a line straight out of Mayor Bloomberg´s playbook: He claimed the ornately decorated and rigoursly cleaned encampment was a health and safety hazard. As in the U.S. and elsewhere, the Dutch media began demonizing the homeless, unemployed, and immigrant population inside the camp in an attempt to justify the mayor’s fear-mongering. The media also publicized a ...

At mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.

In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.

Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame, shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.

Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not a force of democratic passion and outrage.

The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.

If rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate ...

JP Morgan & Chase Co. CEO Jamie Dimon had an early birthday surprise last Monday: The bank was closed. The disruption happened not because the birthday of Forbes magazine's 41st “most powerful person” in the world had finally been declared a national holiday. It was because hundreds of Occupy Atlanta and Take Back the Land activists used their bodies, furniture, poetry, and more to shut down five bank branches in Atlanta in protest of the eviction of the family of Eloise Pittman, who had been sold a predatory loan with an interest rate of more than 10 percent. The action kicked off a national week of action foreclosures.

Across the country, homeowners, activist organizations, lawyers, and Occupiers are uniting to create a direct-action campaign against foreclosures. Begun as a national campaign on December 6th by Occupy our Homes, the coalition movement has already stopped nearly one hundred evictions and the actions are intensifying. Less than 24 hours after the Chase protests, 7 families across Detroit publicly vowed to fight their own foreclosures, building on a string of successful anti-eviction actions in a city where the extent and effects of foreclosures (about 100,000 in the last five years) has remaining city residents describing the banks as “economic terrorists.”

Thursday, New York City Occupiers moved an entire ...

I learned a new word today: clicktivism.

Oh, I’m sorry. Am I the last person on the planet to know this word?

In my defense, I am closer to 40 than 30 and closer to 50 than 20 (if you must know) at this point. I am a classic late adopter. I got my first cellphone in 2003 and have not advanced much beyond rudimentary texting (full words and proper punctuation intact). Tablets and iPhones and all of their paraphernalia make me physically anxious (so small, so fragile, so powerful).

The reason this all comes up is that I did my own bit of clickivism recently. I signed an e-petition asking President Barack Obama to veto a bill sitting on his desk.

House Resolution 347 and Senate Bill 1794 were reconciled and approved on March 1 (with only three dissents), resulting in a bill that now sits on President Obama’s desk awaiting his signature. It’s innocuously called “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.” Sounds like a public works program, doesn’t it? Is it one of Obama’s shovel-ready projects aimed at getting the unemployed back in the saddle? Not quite.

In essence, the bill places much harsher limitations on when and where protests can happen by allowing law enforcement to charge protesters with federal crimes if they protest on federal grounds, or at any location occupied by someone protected by the Secret Service, or at any location deemed of “national significance.” This could be any place that the Department of Homeland ...

Debuting at yesterday’s “Shut Down the Corporations” action, the + Brigades is a new and growing part of Occupy Wall Street intent on supplementing upcoming protest actions with life-affirming energy, color, dance, song and costumes. A squad of dancing clowns led a rainy day of protest in Midtown Manhattan, targeting the offices of Bank of America, Pfizer and Koch Industries.

At the initial + Brigades meeting a couple weeks ago, there were cross-dressing, rollicking games, buffoonery, strategizing and one thoroughly orange man. Andy Bichelbaum of The Yes Men presented a slide show that had the 40 of us transfixed with images of Civil Rights marchers, Chilean students paint-bombing police and Abbie Hoffman pretending to burn a puppy in a bid to set America’s wartime conscience alight. Occupy organizers cheered as images of themselves appeared among those of others. Afterwards, the brainstorming began about how to drastically expand the movement’s repertoire in the streets.

The meeting raised questions for me about what happens when people working toward changing their society tell stories about the past. What role, I began to wonder, does the creative interweaving of past and present play in supporting radical thought? The history of West Central Africa’s Antonian movement, active mainly between 1704 and 1706, suggests that what historian Peter Burke has called “social memory” might be an especially valuable supplement for people resisting oppression and also seeking strength and inspiration.

The Antonian movement, like Occupy Wall Street, fought against unchecked greed—to limit the power of self-serving local elites, to end two generations of civil war and to deal ...

“Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of injustice . . . And in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have — if only in the form of a fairy tale.” 

— Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1981)

In the late 1950s, a handful of peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a major U.S. university campus by carrying signs and wearing green buttons. Back when The Adventures of Robin Hood was a giant hit on television, most everybody knew that green was Robin Hood’s color and that Robin could not side with the king’s soldiers or future soldiers of any empire. Five decades later, the lead protagonist of a cult favorite American cable ...

Recently, discourse, within the free-range pathogen zone of the U.S. political realm, has been infected and inflamed by the use of verbiage (applied both in the metaphoric and literal sense) related to disease and contagion by editorial scribes and political hacks. For example, we have been informed that Occupy D.C. sites were attacked and destroyed by police authorities for reasons related to public health and hygiene.

These actions (part of a series of ongoing coordinated, anti-democratic measures) carried out on orders from the current governing class of the U.S. display the tendency of the hyper-authoritarian mindset to regard the inherent messiness of freedom--including those individuals who engage in acts of dissent in public space-- to pose a danger to civil order and the wellbeing of the general public on the level of that of bio-hazardous material. 

(In a vain attempt to assuage his germophobic mania, J. Edgar Hoover had a throne-sized commode constructed for his exclusive use that included an appurtenance that allowed his feet to perch upon an elevated pedestal to prevent contact with the subversive-enabling floor of his bathroom where, presumably, seditious microorganism seethed and plotted his doom.)

Hoover's OCD pathology is axiomatic of the anti-freedom mania gripping the nation's capital where the concept of freedom has become so repellant to the ruling establishment that expressions thereof have been relegated to be almost exclusively expressed in cold marble statuary and soldier's tombstones. Not only is this approach fitting for late empire's cult of death, it is convenient for D.C.'s insular culture of prevaricators, for the dead don't protest; hagiographic monuments cannot mic-check liars.

Authoritarian personality types favor empty spectacle, such as sporting events and parades, over occupations and protest marches, because there is little danger of the primary taking on a life of its ...

There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations—the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts—to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM—Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement—or front groups acting in the name of the movement—to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process. 

Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily about, in the old cliché, hearts and minds. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar to those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. These operatives are, in fact, often the same people. The state has expended ...

This past fall, Occupy transformed the political landscape by seizing a moment, wedding righteous anger to high spirits—by existing and enduring in public places. The occupations cleared spaces for public life, for mutual education and controversy. From them came all kinds of direct actions that carried symbolic weight. From them also came the marches of tens of thousands where the inner movement of the encampments was joined by the outer movement of the membership organizations—the unions, progressive groups and so on. That was when the movement broke through to the larger public—by looking like the 99 percent.

Then, in house occupations and anti-foreclosure actions, the movement began to deliver palpable results—putting real families in real homes, preventing evictions. And despite ample provocation by paramilitarized police, the movement occupied the moral high ground by staying almost wholly nonviolent. Now, ready or not, here comes the election cycle of 2012, putting pressure on the movement to keep up a vital tension between self-maintenance and growth, between challenging the whole plutocratic political economy and upping the odds of reforms that can arrest and reverse it.

And, right on cue, here come the city governments of Chicago, Tampa and Charlotte, readying noxious rules and massive armament to corral the likely thousands of demonstrators who will gather, in the Occupy spirit—though not necessarily with any official imprimatur—to greet the G-8 and NATO in May, the Republicans in August and the Democrats in September, respectively.

In Chicago, at the behest of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the City Council on January 18 passed a stupendous ordinance, requiring, among other things, that all applicants for demonstration permits (1) supply at the time of application “a description of the size and dimension of any sign, banner or other attention-getting device that is too large to be carried by one ...

New York University professor Lisa Duggan says that the Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired an entire generation to want to learn about what might otherwise seem like a dry subject: financial history.

That’s why she’s teaching the course “Cultures and Economies: Why Occupy Wall Street? The History and Politics of Debt and Finance” in the NYU Department of Cultural and Social Analysis this spring. And indeed, although NYU does not begin its semester until Jan. 23, the 80-student course is already 3/4 full and Duggan expects it to be totally booked by the time classes begin.

NYU was not the only New York City university planning to bring Occupy Wall Street to the classroom. The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University listed the course “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” in its literature, only to announce — following some bad press — that the course hadn’t yet been fully vetted by the administration and might not happen.

“The proposal for a new anthropology course involving fieldwork on this topic had yet to be considered for approval by the faculty Committee on Instruction,” Brian Connolly, associate vice president for public affairs at Columbia, said in an email. ”A course does not appear in the official directory of classes and cannot be offered in advance of required approvals. News reports and some departmental postings regarding the spring semester were premature.”

The NYU students in Duggan’s course will read current texts about Occupy Wall Street as well as essays by anarchist/activist David Graeber and the sociologist and political economist Giovanni Arrighi. They will also screen documentaries including “Too Big to Fail” and Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis,’ “The Take,” as well as hear guest ...

"USA: We're No. 1!"

Oh, wait — Iceland is No. 1. But we did beat out Poland and Slovakia, right? Uh...no. But go on down the rankings and there we are! No. 27, fifth from the bottom. So our new national chant is, "USA: At Least We're Not Last!"

A foundation in Germany has analyzed the social justice records of all 31 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ranking each nation in such categories as health care, income inequality, pre-school education, and child poverty. The overall performance by the United States — which boasts of being an egalitarian society — outranks only Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. Actually, three of those countries performed better than ours in the education of pre-schoolers, and Greece did better than the United States on the prevention of poverty.

Our bottom-of-the-heap ranking in social justice confirms the economic and political inequality that the Occupy movement is protesting. It also helps explain why this grassroots uprising in America has spread so rapidly to more than 600 communities and has generated such broad public support. After all, our nation is fabulously rich, ranking well ahead of nearly every other OECD member in national wealth, so there's no excuse for us sitting at the bottom of the list in education, health care, poverty, and other measures of a democratic and egalitarian society.

Bluntly put, We the People have let today's elites abandon America's founding principles of fairness, justice, and equal opportunity for all.

These privileged few have purchased our government, stolen the wealth and economic future of working families, and reduced America to a plastic imitation of the country we thought we had. The Occupy rebellion is long overdue and on target.

Join it.

Poised on the threshold of a new year, I’m again drawn to a metaphor for the challenges and opportunities we face in this urgent time of ours: the crossroads.

Two roads intersect, and now we confront an unavoidable choice. Do we carry on as we always have—or do we, with courage and imagination and verve, make a dramatic course correction?

While it may be too early to definitively rank 2011 as the year of the Great Nonviolent Turning (even greater things may be coming in the new year or in the years that will follow it; or, on the contrary, the passage of time may reframe this period entirely), the events of the past twelve months—from Tunisia to Egypt, from Greece to Spain, from Chile to Jeju Island, from China and Russia to a more or less Occupied America—have signaled a growing determination for a qualitative shift.

Here the symbol of the crossroads is especially apt. Traditionally it signifies, not an arbitrary or simplistic decision (Coke or Pepsi?), but a momentous choice: a turning point, a decisive situation, or a set of life-altering options. The worldwide movement for nonviolent change that has been gathering momentum this year seems to be placing before us such immense choices: Radical economic disparity or sustainable equality? Oligarchy or democracy? Militarized culture or a more nonviolent civil society?

These are not minor alternatives. Real change of this magnitude will require profound structural metamorphosis. This will not appear out of the blue. Nor will it happen merely because we wish it so. Instead, it will depend on movements that derive their power from a deep transformation of personal and social consciousness and identities; a willingness to let go of certain reliable (if debilitating) assumptions about how the world is ordered; and a commitment to face the consequences for taking these still as yet unclear steps for change.

The crossroads in its deepest sense may also be useful ...

Chris Hedges tells a gathering of smarties at Princeton, “I feel that I’ve learned as much from the movement as I’ve given to it, if I’ve given even very much to it.”

A little after 7 last Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive police eviction two days earlier, into the warren of streets that surround the New York Stock Exchange.  It was the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which has introduced a new language of political confrontation—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, Occupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the national conversation. An entire “Day of Action” was in the works. For the early morning event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal barricades, police vans, motorcycles, and riot police that have effectively privatized that narrow strip of once-public land. It was perhaps the movement’s most carefully-orchestrated action—though you might not have known it by watching the news that day.

Occupy Wall Street’s unorthodox approach to direct action was on full display Thursday morning as multiple columns of marchers encircled Wall Street. The flood of protesters stopped to chant or quickly moved on, depending on the density of police personnel arrayed to corral and disperse the crowd. Others sat down in front of barricades when the police refused further access to the public. This seemingly chaotic rhythm of the protest was, in fact, intentional.

For many days prior to the November 17 day of action, Occupiers met to map out the multiple stages of the action, noting the various intersections where police would try to bottleneck marchers, and devising routes of retreat that would allow them to re-group when faced with overwhelming police force.  In order to spread out the police presence, the march was staggered; different strands would leave minutes apart and aim for different access points to Wall Street. Although these general contours of the action were planned en masse, over a dozen affinity ...

The One Percent are not only the bankers and traders on Wall Street — they're alive and thriving in Silicon Valley. And yet no one is encamped outside of Google in Mountain View or in front of Facebook. The protestors have rather targeted Wall Street and the government. But the new super rich of Silicon Valley have managed to come up in an economy that has shed jobs and houses and social safety nets — and their money allows them to set its rules.

President Obama flies to Silicon Valley and is flattered by the company of the valley's One Percent. Steven Jobs even famously criticized the way the president was doing his job. And the president took it.

At the southern end of Silicon Valley, in front of San Jose's City Hall, there are dozens of Occupy San Jose protesters, championing the call to action that originated with New York's Occupy Wall Street. But at the Martin Luther King Library around the corner, a young rapper named Ookie is showing a photo essay on the impact of closing youth centers and libraries. It's the image of a baggie stuck on a fence of a closed city community center that raises the most anger in the audience. They held an event called "Growing Up Poor" where young people — through photo, video, spoken word — are sharing to a group of policy-makers, advocates, and media what their Silicon Valley looks like in a time when family poverty has climbed to unprecedented levels, and in a place with such a high cost of living, the impact is even more acute.

In San Jose, the city that used to promote itself as the capitol of Silicon Valley, city budget cuts have either eliminated or dramatically slashed hours for youth sanctuaries like libraries and community centers. And for young people, libraries had been the only public spaces left where they could shelter themselves from the fall out of the economy — the escalating violence on the streets, cops, the cold — and as ...

After getting pepper-sprayed Tuesday night in downtown Seattle, 84-year-old Dorli Rainey of the Occupy Seattle movement felt fired up, ready for more protesting.

And like many other Occupy activists and social-trend analysts Wednesday, she said that similar police confrontations taking place across the country will have a predictable effect.

"It just grows the movement," Rainey said.

As they prepare for a "national day of action" on Thursday, protesters from Seattle to New York are feeling energized, preparing to turn out perhaps the biggest crowds yet of the 2-month-old Occupy Wall Street movement. Unions and liberal groups are teaming up with Occupy groups across the country in an attempt to boost the turnouts.

With thousands expected to participate, all eyes will be on the police, who have cracked down on protesters from coast to coast in recent days.

Marchers are expected to take to the streets in major cities including Seattle, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Portland, Ore., Miami, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Washington.

In Washington, protesters hope to form a human chain that will stretch from Georgetown across the Key Bridge into Virginia. The rallies and marches are intended to draw attention to bridges ...

I’ve noted before that Occupy Wall Street has had trouble coming to consensus on a statement of nonviolence (as opposed to, say, the October 2011 movement in DC, which publicized one at the outset). This was an issue both in the planning process and in the early days of the occupation. In my essay on the notion of “diversity of tactics” for Occupy Wall Street, I wrote:

Since the early stages of the movement, it is true, those taking part have been in a deadlock on the question of making a commitment to nonviolence. At a planning meeting in Tompkins Square Park prior to September 17, I recall one young man in dark sunglasses saying, knowingly, “There is a danger of fetishizing nonviolence to the point that it becomes a dogma.” In response, a woman added a “point of information,” despite being in contradiction to what Gandhi or King might say: “Nonviolence just means not initiating violence.” The question of nonviolence was ultimately tabled that night and thereafter. “This discussion is a complete waste of time,” someone concluded.

However, this is long overdue for ...

The bursting to life of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the most hopeful development in American politics since Barack Obama was elected president three years ago this month. Obama's election has turned out to be largely a false hope. But that false hope might still be redeemed - and the president motivated to become the reformer he once pledged to be - if the Occupy movement grows into the kind of massive, broad-based, relentless movement no president can afford to ignore.

Already, the Occupy Wall Street website claims that the movement has spread to 100 cities in the United States and inspired sympathy actions in 1,500 cities around the world. Momentum appears to be building in other ways as well. Activists in other progressive movements - environment, labour, anti-poverty and housing - are beginning to collaborate with Occupy. TV commercials are airing on mainstream media outlets, even Fox News, spreading Occupy's message that the US political and economic system is rigged in favour of the top one per cent. And opinion polls are indicating that a sizeable majority of Americans agree with this analysis, though there seems to be less support for the Occupy activists themselves.

The latest big protest targeted the White House itself, when an estimated 12,000 people physically surrounded the home of the US president last Sunday to urge rejection of a ...

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

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

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

1. It names the source of the crisis.
The problems of the 99% are caused by Wall Street greed, corrupt banks, and a corporate take-over of the political system.

2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want. READ FULL POST 16 COMMENTS