The Elites Are In Trouble (Finally)! Plus Defusing DC Protestors.
| Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars' worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn's 'A People's History of the United States' and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence." Read the Article Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence. The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave a few days ago to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris. Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda? The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back. This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind. “The world can’t continue on its current path and survive,” Ketchup told me. “That idea is selfish and blind. It’s not sustainable. People all over the globe are suffering needlessly at our hands.” The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. If the police shut down the encampment in New York tonight, the power elite will still lose, for this vision and structure have been imprinted into the thousands of people who have passed through park, renamed Liberty Plaza by the protesters. The greatest gift the occupation has given us is a blueprint for how to fight back. And this blueprint is being transferred to cities and parks across the country. “We get to the park,” Ketchup says of the first day. “There’s madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that’s what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don’t know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn’t very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn’t very optimistic. And then my response was that, well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody’s going to get anything done, it’s going be us here. People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world.” “After the circles broke I felt disheartened because it was sort of chaotic,” she said. “I didn’t have anybody there, so it was a little depressing. I didn’t know what was going to happen.” “Over the past few months, people had been meeting in New York City general assembly,” she said. “One of them is named Brooke. She’s a professor of social ecology. She did my facilitation training. There’s her and a lot of other people, students, school teachers, different people who were involved with that … so they organized a general assembly.” “It’s funny that the cops won’t let us use megaphones, because it’s to make our lives harder, but we actually end up making a much louder sound [with the “people’s mic”] and I imagine it’s much more annoying to the people around us,” she said. “I had been in the back, unable to hear. I walked to different parts of the circle. I saw this man talking in short phrases and people were repeating them. I don’t know whose idea it was, but that started on the first night. The first general assembly was a little chaotic because people had no idea … a general assembly, what is this for? At first it was kind of grandstanding about what were our demands. Ending corporate personhood is one that has come up again and again as a favorite and. … What ended up happening was, they said, OK, we’re going to break into work groups. “People were worried we were going to get kicked out of the park at 10 p.m. This was a major concern. There were tons of cops. I’ve heard that it’s costing the city a ton of money to have constant surveillance on a bunch of peaceful protesters who aren’t hurting anyone. With the people’s mic, everything we do is completely transparent. We know there are undercover cops in the crowd. I think I was talking to one last night, but it’s like, what are you trying to accomplish? We don’t have any secrets.” “The undercover cops are the only ones who ask, ‘Who’s the leader?’ ” she said. “Presumably, if they know who our leaders are they can take them out. The fact is we have no leader. There’s no leader, so there’s nothing they can do. “There was a woman [in the medics unit]. This guy was pretending to be a reporter. The first question he asks is, ‘Who’s the leader?’ She goes, ‘I’m the leader.’ And he says, ‘Oh yeah, what are you in charge of?’ She says, ‘I’m in a charge of everything.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah? What’s your title?’ She says ‘God.’ ” “So it’s 9:30 p.m. and people are worried that they’re going to try and rush us out of the camp,” she said, referring back to the first day. “At 9:30 they break into work groups. I joined the group on contingency plans. The job of the bedding group was to find cardboard for people to sleep on. The contingency group had to decide what to do if they kick us out. The big decision we made was to announce to the group that if we were dispersed we were going to meet back at 10 a.m. the next day in the park. Another group was arts and culture. What was really cool was that we assumed we were going to be there more than one night. There was a food group. They were going dumpster diving. The direct action committee plans for direct, visible action like marches. There was a security team. It’s security against the cops. The cops are the only people we think that might hurt us. The security team keeps people awake in shifts. They always have people awake.” The work groups make logistical decisions, and the general assembly makes large policy decisions. “Work groups make their own decisions,” Ketchup said. “For example, someone donated a laptop. And because I’ve been taking minutes I keep running around and asking, ‘Does someone have a laptop I could borrow?’ The media team, upon receiving that laptop, designated it to me for my use on behalf of the Internet committee. The computer isn’t mine. When I go back to Chicago, I’m not going to take it. Right now I don’t even know where it is. Someone else is using it. But so, after hearing this, people thought it had been gifted to me personally. People were upset by that. So a member of the Internet work group went in front of the group and said, ‘This is a need of the committee. It’s been put into Ketchup’s care.’ They explained that to the group, but didn’t ask for consensus on it, because the committees are empowered. Some people might still think that choice was inappropriate. In the future, it might be handled differently.” Working groups blossomed in the following days. The media working group was joined by a welcome working group for new arrivals, a sanitation working group (some members of which go around the park on skateboards as they carry brooms), a legal working group with lawyers, an events working group, an education working group, medics, a facilitation working group (which trains new facilitators for the general assembly meetings), a public relations working group, and an outreach working group for like-minded communities as well as the general public. There is an Internet working group and an open source technology working group. The nearby McDonald’s is the principal bathroom for the park after Burger King banned protesters from its facilities. Caucuses also grew up in the encampment, including a “Speak Easy caucus.” “That’s a caucus I started,” Ketchup said. “It is for a broad spectrum of individuals from female-bodied people who identify as women to male-bodied people who are not traditionally masculine. That’s called the ‘Speak Easy’ caucus. I was just talking to a woman named Sharon who’s interested in starting a caucus for people of color. “A caucus gives people a safe space to talk to each other without people from the culture of their oppressors present. It gives them greater power together, so that if the larger group is taking an action that the caucus felt was specifically against their interests, then the caucus can block that action. Consensus can potentially still be reached after a caucus blocks something, but a block, or a ‘paramount objection,’ is really serious. You’re saying that you are willing to walk out.” “We’ve done a couple of things so far,” she said. “So, you know the live stream? The comments are moderated on the live stream. There are moderators who remove racist comments, comments that say ‘I hate cops’ or ‘Kill cops.’ They remove irrelevant comments that have nothing to do with the movement. There is this woman who is incredibly hardworking and intelligent. She has been the driving force of the finance committee. Her hair is half-blond and half-black. People were referring to her as “blond-black hottie.” These comments weren’t moderated, and at one point whoever was running the camera took the camera off her face and did a body scan. So, that was one of the first things the caucus talked about. We decided as a caucus that I would go to the moderators and tell them this is a serious problem. If you’re moderating other offensive comments then you need to moderate these kinds of offensive comments.” The heart of the protest is the two daily meetings, held in the morning and the evening. The assemblies, which usually last about two hours, start with a review of process, which is open to change and improvement, so people are clear about how the assembly works. Those who would like to speak raise their hand and get on “stack.” “There’s a stack keeper,” Ketchup said. “The stack keeper writes down your name or some signifier for you. A lot of white men are the people raising their hands. So, anyone who is not apparently a white man gets to jump stack. The stack keeper will make note of the fact that the person who put their hand up was not a white man and will arrange the list so that it’s not dominated by white men. People don’t get called up in the same order as they raise their hand.” While someone is speaking, their words amplified by the people’s mic, the crowd responds through hand signals. “Putting your fingers up like this,” she said, holding her hands up and wiggling her fingers, “means you like what you’re hearing, or you’re in agreement. Like this,” she said, holding her hands level and wiggling her fingers, “means you don’t like it so much. Fingers down, you don’t like it at all; you’re not in agreement. Then there’s this triangle you make with your hand that says ‘point of process.’ So, if you think that something is not being respected within the process that we’ve agreed to follow then you can bring that up.” “You wait till you’re called,” she said. “These rules get abused all the time, but they are important. We start with agenda items, which are proposals or group discussions. Then working group report-backs, so you know what every working group is doing. Then we have general announcements. The agenda items have been brought to the facilitators by the working groups because you need the whole group to pay attention. Like last night, Legal brought up a discussion on bail: ‘Can we agree that the money from the general funds can be allotted if someone needs bail?’ And the group had to come to consensus on that. [It decided yes.] There’s two co-facilitators, a stack keeper, a timekeeper, a vibes-person making sure that people are feeling OK, that people’s voices aren’t getting stomped on, and then if someone’s being really disruptive, the vibes-person deals with them. There’s a note-taker—I end up doing that a lot because I type very, very quickly. We try to keep the facilitation team one man, one woman, or one female-bodied person, one male-bodied person. When you facilitate multiple times it’s rough on your brain. You end up having a lot of criticism thrown your way. You need to keep the facilitators rotating as much as possible. It needs to be a huge, huge priority to have a strong facilitation group.” “People have been yelled out of the park,” she said. “Someone had a sign the other day that said ‘Kill the Jew Bankers.’ They got screamed out of the park. Someone else had a sign with the N-word on it. That person’s sign was ripped up, but that person is apparently still in the park. “We’re trying to make this a space that everyone can join. This is something the caucuses are trying to really work on. We are having workshops to get people to understand their privilege.” But perhaps the most important rule adopted by the protesters is nonviolence and nonaggression against the police, no matter how brutal the police become. “The cops, I think, maced those women in the face and expected the men and women around them to start a riot,” Ketchup said. “They want a riot. They can deal with a riot. They cannot deal with nonviolent protesters with cameras.” I tell Ketchup I will bring her my winter sleeping bag. It is getting cold. She will need it. I leave her in a light drizzle and walk down Broadway. I pass the barricades, uniformed officers on motorcycles, the rows of paddy wagons and lines of patrol cars that block the streets into the financial district and surround the park. These bankers, I think, have no idea what they are up against. Occupy Wall St.'s drumbeat grows louder CBS News Protesters from the Occupy DC movement, marching in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in New York's Financial District, demonstrate in front of the White House in Washington, Sunday, Oct. 9, 2011. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen) The drumbeat of the Occupy Wall ... Iowa Politics Insider: GOP candidates rip on 'Occupy Wall Street' movement DesMoinesRegister.com As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads, so does GOP criticism of it. Here's the latest Iowa-related news from the presidential campaign trail: Iowa State Patrol officials warned those gathered at the peaceful "Occupy Iowa" event at about 10:30 pm ... See all stories on this topic » Occupy Wall Street Movement Snags Major PR Coup Human Events by JWF The fledgling Occupy Wall Street movement, now entering its fourth week, really hit the big time over the weekend. First we were treated to this horrifying image that went viral, with a protester leaving his mark on an NYPD cruiser. ... See all stories on this topic » Occupy Wall Street movement might hit the QC Quad City Times The Occupy Wall Street movement that has inspired similar events across the country is beginning to be felt in the Quad-Cities. Local progressive activists say they are considering ways they can support the effort, and one Davenport man has taken steps ... See all stories on this topic » Everybody has an opinion about the Occupy Wall Street movement MinnPost.com By Brad Knickerbocker | Published Mon, Oct 10 2011 8:16 am Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about the Occupy Wall Street movement and related demonstrations now headed into their fourth week. At the most elemental level, some merchants near the hub ... See all stories on this topic » Occupy Wall Street protests spread to Houston The Daily Cougar By Brian Jensen The 99-percenter movement reached Houston this Thursday in the form of OccupyHouston — a grassroots movement which is “dedicated to ending the corporate corruption of democracy,” according to occupyhouston.org. ... See all stories on this topic » Geraldo Greeted By Occupy Wall Street Protestors Chanting 'Fox News Lies' Mediaite by Colby Hall | 8:27 am, October 10th, 2011 Fox News weekend host Geraldo Rivera went to Zucotti Park this weekend toreport on the Occupy Wall Street protest movement that has been going on for a number weeks and host his eponymous show remotely. ... See all stories on this topic »-Mediaite Ben & Jerry's lends its backing to Occupy Wall Street protesters and calls for ... Daily Mail By Mark Duell Occupy Wall Street has its first corporate backing after Ben & Jerry's today announced it is getting behind the protesters. It followed House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi backing the movement as the political debate around the protests... See all stories on this topic »-Daily Mail Did Elizabeth Warren Predict Occupy Wall Street? 2009 Interview Goes Viral Mediaite Now, her words take on additional relevance as the Occupy Wall Street protests continue to spread across different US cities. About every 15 to 20 years we have another crisis. We call them panics. We have different names for them. [...] Depression. ... See all stories on this topic »-Mediaite Occupy Wall Street: An Anthem « Hot Air By Tina Korbe Originally, I thought I'd tack this song to the end of yesterday's post extolling Herman Cain's exceptional cred to speak out against the victim mentality of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. But a slow and steady stream of rebuttals to the petty ...Hot Air » Top Picks Geraldo flees 'Occupy Wall St.' as protesters chant, 'Fox News lies ... By Andrew Jones In addition, this latest episode of Occupy Wall Street giving embarrassment to Fox News comes more than a week after protester Jesse LaGreca called out producer Griff Jenkins in a viral Youtube clip that the network chose not to air. WATCH: ...The Raw Story China: Support Occupy Wall Street Movement · Global Voices By Oiwan Lam Technology for Transparency Network - Tracking civic engagement technology worldwide · Ada Lovelace Day: Inspirational Women in Action. Ada Lovelace Day aims to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and ...Global Voices Remy: Occupy Wall Street Protest Song - Big Government By Reason TV As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads like a, well, financial contagion through global markets, intergalactic Internet sensation Remy and Reason.tv give the movement its anthem. Written and performed by Remy and produced by ...Big Government Occupy Wall St headed to Toledo ap-occupy-wall-street_20111010093453_JPG. A commuter gives a thumbs-up to Occupy Wall Streetprotestors as he passes through Zuccotti Park in the financial district in New York, Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011. Regular Photo Size. Local News ...Local | WUPW TV Occupy Wall Street: What OWS Wants | The Big Picture By Barry Ritholtz Occupy Wall Street! #occupywallst www.occupywallst.org www.nycga.net. The Big Picture Remy's Occupy Wall Street Protest Song - Hit & Run : Reason ... By Meredith Bragg As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads like a, well, financial contagion through global markets, intergalactic Internet sensation Remy and. Reason Magazine Full Feed 'Occupy Wall Street' Protest Hold Art Show At Former Headquarters ... By wcbsmark The show occupies space built in 1914 as the headquarters for JP Morgan, right across the streetfrom the New York Stock Exchange. CBS New York Occupy Wall Street is the Napster Party | Verum Serum By John Video: Economic Freedom Correlates with Other Societal Benefits; I'm stealing this from Erick Erickson at Red State. It's a very well produced video arguing for the benefits of “economic freedom” which I guess is another word for free-market ...Verum Serum RealClearMarkets - Occupy Wall Street: America's Road to Greece By Bill Frezza The chattering classes are peddling a new meme designed to control the narrative surrounding the arrested adolescents who've been camping out in lower Manhattan, raging against the machine. Earlier attempts at shaping the story tried to ...RealClearMarkets – Articles Occupy Wall Street: All Bite, No Apple - Opinion - PatriotPost.US By Debra Saunders As Occupy Wall Street activists clogged New York's Zuccotti Park protesting 'corporate greed' and Occupy SF hit San Francisco's Financial District on Wednesday protesting 'corporate greed,' the world learned that Steve Jobs, perhaps America's ...The Patriot Post Is Occupy Wall Street Our Triangle Moment? » New Deal 2.0 By Frank L. Cocozzelli Today's outrage has the potential to be another turning point in American politics. New Deal 2.0 Occupy Wall Street: #OccupyDenver Gains Momentum In Large Weekend Rally ... Huffington Post DenverPolice : THE RIGHT STUFF: "Occupy Wall St" marchers praise DPD. "They did a fantastic job of keeping people safe - they were clearly there to help" The momentum began Friday night when hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco stopped by the Occupy Denver camp ... See all stories on this topic » Occupy Wall Street Wins Support From Ben and Jerry's International Business Times Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream is scooping out support for the Occupy Wall Streetprotests currently taking place in New York and other cities around the country. In a statement, the company praised the non-violent protests against the American financial... See all stories on this topic »-International Business Times Occupy Wall Street and Global Inequality Forbes So why do critics of Occupy Wall Street divvy us up in this manner? I suspect it's to blur true class divisions in an effort to make single mothers working two jobs and trying to raise a kid look somehow prosperous – to compare their relative good ... See all stories on this topic » Iowa Police Arrest Occupy Wall Street Protestors in Des Moines Patch.com By BA Morelli Unlike in Iowa City, Police clamped down with arrests as Occupy Wall Street spread to Des Moines on Sunday. Some 400 protestors had gathered earlier in the day on the Statehouse lawn, but by the end of the night dozens were reportedly ... See all stories on this topic » WATCH: Yom Kippur at Occupy Wall Street Ha'aretz As sundown approached on Friday, a crowd of approximately 700 people gathered on the New York plaza for Kol Nidre prayers; similar services were held at Occupy Wall Street camps in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston. By The Forward Tags: Jewish World ... See all stories on this topic »-Ha'aretz Occupy Wall Street's 'Human Microphone': Insanely Brilliant...Or Just Insane? Mediaite by Nando Di Fino | 9:46 am, October 10th, 2011 In a sea of people taking video with hand-held HD cams and accessing the web with their smartphones, the Occupy Wall Street movement has managed a surprisingly old-school, almost primal, atmosphere.... See all stories on this topic »-Mediaite National poet releases video tribute to Occupy Wall Street movement MLive.com By On-the-Town staff Activist & Poet, Apollo Poetry, has released the anticipated video "March On", a tribute inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Apollo is also the Public Spokesperson for Occupy Phoenix and has taken an active role in ... See all stories on this topic »-MLive.com Occupy Wall Street Protests: Where Does the Coalition Stand as Week 4 Begins? International Business Times By Joseph Lazzaro, US Editor | October 10, 2011 11:29 AM EDT The nation is four weeks in to theOccupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, and many Americans are probably wondering, "What are the protests all about?" and "What do they mean? ... Wall Street Occupiers Need Kindness of Strangers to Stay Clean Bloomberg While Occupy Wall Street's members have refrained from defining leadership roles, they've created groups to attend to almost every need. Members of a sanitation crew wander, brooms in hand and mopping the stone ground. Volunteers at the comfort station ... See all stories on this topic » What Occupy Wall Street is All About Wall Street Pit As the 'Occupy Wall Street' “mob”* strengthens, the question is what is their main message – especially as a lot of groups piggy back. Grayson was on Real Time with Bill Maher and probably explains the main thrust better than I've seen in a lot of ... See all stories on this topic » Kids and clergy join 'Occupy Wall Street' Gant Daily New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Occupy Wall Street entered its 24th day on Monday and has garnered support from kids and spiritual leaders. On Sunday, Occupy Wall Streeters paraded around a golden calf, an effigy of the famous Wall Street bull, ... See all stories on this topic » ESPN, Occupy Wall Street, and Hank Williams Jr. Greeley Gazette Recently the freeloading campers demanding Marxism on Wall Street were joined by the hate-peddling actress, Susan Sarandon, and a group of others including Alec Baldwin, Rosanne Barr, and, of course, Michael Moore. Instead of the mainstream media ... See all stories on this topic » The 'agent provocateur' who infiltrated Occupy Wall Street The Week Magazine Conservative journalist Patrick Howley tried to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement Saturday, and caused unnecessary violence in the process, according to critics. Photo: The American Spectator SEE ALL 8 PHOTOS The Smithsonian's National Air and ... See all stories on this topic » 'Occupy Wall Street' Protests Enter 4th Week; 'Anonymous' Threatens NYSE Website CBS New York A YouTube video, purportedly by the hacker collective known as “Anonymous,” threatened to wipe out the NYSE website today. A message on a YouTube video suggests that the entirety of the the hacker collective does not support the attempt to disable the ... See all stories on this topic » Bill Cohan Likens Wall Street Protests to a Street Fair Washington Post Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- William Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist and Bloomberg Television contributing editor, talks about the so-called Occupy Wall Street protests and the impact on the political environment. Cohan speaks with Matt Miller on Bloomberg ... See all stories on this topic » Van Jones Praises 'Non-Violent' Arab Spring – 'We Should Have An American Autumn' NewsBusters (blog) “But let's change the conversation and get more voices in,” said Jones, who is a fellow at CAP and used the occasion to promote his American Dream movement, a left-wing political organization run by the liberal group MoveOn.org Civic Action, ... See all stories on this topic » Progressive magazine editor says young worker unemployment at "60-year high" PolitiFact Supporters include the left-leaning political advocacy group MoveOn.org and Russ Feingold, the former Democratic US senator from Wisconsin, who said "accountability for corporate greed is long overdue." As part of what is being billed as an ... See all stories on this topic » Video Feature: Wallace Shawn, renowned actor, author, playwright and thinker, tells Laura Flanders why he cares about Occupy Wall St: "I don't know about other people but I only have one life, and I don't want to live it in a sewer of injustice." Enough said. Richard D. Wolff, Video Report: “Richard Wolff speaks to Occupy Wall Street’s Open Forum on Tuesday, October 4, 2011. Speaking in Liberty Square near Wall Street without microphones, Wolff focuses on the economic crisis and the problem of capitalism as a system as they relate to the new social movement being achieved by Occupy Wall Street and all those inspired by it across the country.” Wendell Potter, News Analysis: “The lobbyists for U.S. health insurers surely have to be feeling a little uneasy knowing that thousands of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who have been marching and protesting in Washington as well as New York and other cities might target them in the days ahead. After all, the headquarters of the insurers’ biggest lobbying and PR group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., is just blocks away from Freedom Plaza.” Kevin Zeese, Op-Ed: “We decided to dance until the police came for us. We danced and our unity grew stronger. Margaret Flowers and I went up on the stage and danced before a massive replica of the Constitution “We the People in order to form a more perfect union” . . . we went to the stage so we could watch for police action. As the permit holders we felt a responsibility to everyone there. We wanted to warn them if we saw the police coming.” Special Coverage: As we enter Day 23 of the Wall Street Occupation the movement begin to pick up steam across the country. Thousands of activists have descended on Wall Street since this past weekend as part of the #OccupyWallStreet protest organized by several action groups. What follows is a live video stream and live Twitter feed of this event. Special Coverage: This month of October 2011 marks the eleventh year of our country’s longest war in Afghanistan and the onset of the 2012 US federal budget, which provides unlimited funds for war and corporate greed, while withholding funds for basic human needs. On October 6th, a protest assembled at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. with the goal of “nonviolently resisting the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza to demand that America's resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.” Lee Fang, News Analysis: “The campaign the marginalize and destroy the growing 99 Percent Movement is in full swing, with many in the media attempting to smear the people participating in the ‘occupation’ protests across the country. However, several of the so-called journalists deriding, and in some cases sabotaging the movement, have paychecks thanks to a billionaire whose business practices have been scorned as among the worst of the financial elite.” What the Lamestream Media has Missed: Occupy Wall Street Is a Memo To Obama And The EstablishmentContrary To What One Might Think; This Is Not A Good Move, But A move To Marginalize The DC Efforts And Reduce Them To There Usually Non-Confrontational Political Theater. Park Police Extend Demonstration Permit To Occupy D.C. GroupFour-Month Extension On Permit For Freedom PlazaWASHINGTON (AP) Anti-war and anti-corporate greed protesters have accepted an offer by U.S. Park Police in the nation's capital to extend by four months their permit to demonstrate. The protesters have spent the past four days camping in the Washington's Freedom Plaza near the White House. October 2011/Stop the Machine has scheduled other marches and rally's throughout the week. Its permit had been set to expire on Monday and organizers said they had planned to stay put anyway. The group began camping in Freedom Plaza on Thursday, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan on Friday. But those passionate about a variety of causes came to camp out with complaints about issues ranging from health care to home |
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