Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

lol clover i wonder if u might enjoy wiiiai's breakdowns of obama (& bush before him) SOTUs & pressers http://whateveritisimagainstit.blogspot.com/2013/05/obama-press-conference-and-so-i-make-no.html

notes

- foreclosed & threatened homeowners from around the us occupied the steps of the DOJ for the last two days, upon arrest/tazing/eviction they've moved on to occupying holder's old law firm (where lanny breuer now works) and are locking down right now: http://t.co/3vk5uGmZv9

- yesterday a few hundred workers at federal buildings went on a one-day walkout strike. friends of mine organizing for months to make that happen. big win for them, really fuckin proud. today a lot of those strikers are being barred from returning to work. info on how to help: http://bit.ly/11YrfiY

RT @our_dc: Quick Pita and Flamers manager said workers can come back tomorrow for their 11am shift! #goodjobsnation #unity #u1

New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street

That's from the New York Times

http://truth-out.org/video/item/16500-banks-win-big-as-regulators-refuse-to-rein-in-700-trillion-derivatives-market

A discussion of it from elsewhere

http://www.occupyhomesmn.org/hbor_victory?recruiter_id=67

After a year and a half of on-the-ground anti-foreclosure organizing with homeowners publicly standing up and fighting the banks' abuse, the Minnesota legislature passed the Homeowner Bill of Rights almost unanimously--61-1 in the Senate and 123-0 in the House. National analysts are calling this legislation the strongest Homeowner Bill of Rights in the country. This victory shows that the community pressure Occupy Homes MN has helped to build--from grassroots organizing to the hearing rooms at the Capitol--can force legislatures to take steps toward holding Wall Street accountable. This legislation does not solve the housing crisis, but it does enforce basic protections against some of the banks’ worst practices.

Chris Hedges: "Camden and Detroit succumbed first. You and I are next."

http://www.nationofchange.org/rise-or-die-1369144349

rumors of a thing at zuccotti this weekend

when i thought it was rumors/a joke i responded 'yeah what the hell'

now that i think its serious i'm realllly hoping its not actually happening

When I started seeing the reoccupy talk I was sort of jokingly down for it--"eh, what the hell?"--but I'm really struggling to see the point

"We will strike a blow against austerity and capitalism and ~the 1%~ by sitting in this park until we are painfully removed in 12 hours!"

"Then a series of follow up actions about the police response where the message of the original occupation gets lost! Then full communism!"

[homie suggests 'why don't we start shutting shit down? banks, bridges etc']

@hoosteen 1h
@p____ but that doesn't just *start* spontaneously, right? Like, that takes real comm orgz'ing, the kinda work we *oughta* be doing

@hoosteen 1h
@p_____ instead of spending energy and time and attention on reprising a song we all know the end of already

‏@hoosteen 53m
Agree. Doubt reoccupation will accomplish this RT @OccupyWallSt: @hoosteen What has changed? Nothing. Jail the bankers, reclaim our economy.

‏I guess what I'm getting at is that if "nothing has changed" since we took public space two years ago, what will change by doing it again?

Wasnt in the meetings, maybe @OccupyWallSt has secret strategy to use reoccupy to ignite something. Happened once. But again, w/same tactic?

Like why are we re-fetishizing Tents in A Park as if that Solves Capitalism? Is it still 2011? Have we learned literally nothing?

‏Obv all solidarity and love to folks taking action at Z Park tomorrow. I'm just wondering if there are better uses of our collective energy.

sry for tweeting

Splitter!!

amazing scenes in istanbul http://t.co/LidM7Gfh0S

maxberger Max Berger 51s
Reason I love New York no. 4221: Zuccotti Park is filled with Turkish people in solidarity with #OccupyGezi

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BLsURnrCYAEYq_Z.jpg

also essex antifa stood the fuck up today

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BLsBu9vCQAECrky.jpg

EDL tried to march and essex antifa blockaded them for 5 hours

friend of mine was in Turkey for work, got out this morning

will stop by Liberty Sq if i have time

<3

two friends of mine just got back from turkey like last week

lol assad just asked turkish pm to resign over "brutal crackdown on protesters"

trollface.jpg

an anarchist football fan club has captured a riot control vehicle in turkey

https://twitter.com/DirenGezi/status/340589774467383296/photo/1

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/06/occupy-taksim-police-against-protesters-in-istanbul.html damn, some good writing here

yeah thanks, that's great

these are the dudes that stole the riot van lol

They had come up with a new slogan: “Give us 100 gas masks, we’ll take the park.” I asked Ayhan Gÿner, one of Çarsi’s senior members, what he had to say to New Yorker readers. “Çarsi is the last barricade. Çarsi keeps alive the hopes of the people in the resistance of Gezi Park,” he told me. “This resistance has inspired the leaders of Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe”—rival Istanbul soccer clubs—“to come together. Damn American imperialism to hell.” Fifteen minutes later, I got another text: “Pepper gas is the Besiktas fan’s perfume. Nobody can intimidate us”; and, shortly after that, “We are the soldiers not of the imam, but of Mustafa Kemal” (referring to Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish Republic).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BLsiYBMCEAAeOXE.jpg

right in the feels

http://pastebin.com/1XzsfqeP

­I saw people with bloody hands tearing out the sidewalks and trying to build barricade so that the howling and water-blowing siege tanks wouldn’t pass through and run over people…and all this done within minutes collaboratively…A huge barricade was built by people who were coughing and puking as their tears were dropping on the pavement stones they were ripping off the ground…

melodramatic but harrowing

so. this is happening.

REOCCUPY TONIGHT! Calling all DC occupiers! Calling all curious souls! There will be a group doing a reoccupy of McPherson Square TONIGHT, starting about 9 PM. Yes, rumors are true! Bring your sleeping bag, but no tents. Bring food and water. Bring your passion and your love of justice! Bring your desire to change the world!

We're not sure how this will go but we can't stay indoors anymore while the streets and homes of Turkey fill with tear gas, while the super-rich get richer, while poor people and people of color continue to be thrown needlessly into the criminal injustice system and get foreclosed on, while Monsanto and agribusiness poison our food supply, while indigenous peoples continue to be marginalized and stolen from, while police shoot/taze/kill at will, while the LGBTQ community gets beaten, while our government turns a blind eye, while our politicians let lobbyists buy them off, while some try to turn back the clock on womens rights, while a greedy corporation continues to build the Keystone XL pipeline section by section... while those who are in power destroy our world. We will be idle no more!

Come stand up and stand for something! And have one heck of a good time doing it :)

ahh the 1%

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=82008106392

http://25.media.tumblr.com/cb7661693463d07a3263cf110ce01dec/tumblr_mnbyx7sr4Q1r76rfro1_500.jpg

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/10569_10151634450456100_681119959_n.jpg

Wednesday, June 5, 2013, outside a clothing store, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, Méric Clément, France, a young trade unionist, 18 years of age and an anti-fascist activist was beaten to death by fascists. Arriving in Brest for his studies at Political Science, he has been subjected to extreme right-wing violence that has grown in recent months. He died of his injuries, in the night, at the Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière. All our thoughts are with his family and loved ones to whom we express our solidarity.

memorial at the french embassy in dc at 11 tomorrow

saw this on the WaPo site today :((

fucking hell, that's so immensely foreign to my experience that it's hard to even believe.

black vs red will never die tho

:(

fucking shit

Antifa.

;_;

(the breaking story is why I posted the antifa gym, I was sort of too upset for words but thinking of Malcolm Harris's line "I'm less worried about Unifying The Left than I am about how few of us can throw a punch."

We used to have AFA but they are long gone at this point. Antifa are around but in the UK at least I guess militant anti-fascism got complacent while the far right were in a slump and the most visible anti-fascist group nowadays is Unite Against Fascism which is basically the SWP and they were the ones who kicked out the ANL for confronting the NF in the first place.

Not that any of that is really relevant to me, I'm not much of a fighter.

His name was Clément Méric fwiw. Clément is a first name.

Thx

Red and Anarchist Skinheads (RASH)

yall remember the tinley park 5? this is a roundup of american antifa action in support of or inspired by them. pretty good.

http://tinleypark.patch.com/groups/police-and-fire/p/tinley-park-5-becomes-symbol-for-groups-across-the-country

very recent pbs (i think) doc attracted a lot of attention

oh nvrmnd i have that wrong

putin--

He also mentioned Occupy Wall Street, comparing it to the Russian political opposition and apparently drawing parallels between the New York city police who cleared “Occupy” protesters from Zucotti Park and Russia’s own crackdown on the opposition. “At a certain point we saw the police cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street activists. I won’t call the actions of police appropriate or inappropriate,” he said. “If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That’s the way it’s done in the U.S., and that’s the way it’s done in Russia.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/13/vladimir-putin-defends-the-u-s-on-spying-programs-drones-and-occupy-wall-street/

about to interview essex antifa. been looking forward to this one.

it's on right now: http://server3.whiterosesociety.org:8000/ProgressiveDC

so i'm half considering starting a general radical thread that likely only i would read cause i can't make the case that this is 'occupy'-related at all at this point, but i thought this was strange and interesting. I was Googling for some Anti-Racist Action imagery to make a joke on FB (lol) when i stumbled across this article which:

1) is on planet.infowars.com, a whole terrifying daily kos-style community of far right blogs built on infowars.com
2) discusses Jeremy Hammond & his brother ~from the far right~, when i'm most accustomed to hearing jeremy's name after the word "free"
3) is sort of funny to read until you get to the sole comment

http://planet.infowars.com/offbeat/meet-the-shaggy-smelly-mindless-horror-the-ara-anti-racist-action-attacks-david-irving

don't know where to throw this idea down. kinda combines generation limbo + nytimes quiddities + economy->shitbin + etc threads. i'm browsing The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun and came across this. From 1337!

Reason and tradition make it clear that (the age of) forty years means the end of the increase of an individual's powers and growth. When a man has reached the age of forty, nature stops growing for a while, then starts to decline. It should be known that the same is the case with sedentary culture in civilization, because there is a limit that cannot be overstepped. When luxury and prosperity come to civilized people, it naturally causes them to follow the ways of sedentary culture and adopt its customs. As one knows, sedentary culture is the adoption of diversified luxuries, the cultivation of the things that go with them, and addiction to the crafts that give elegance to all the various kinds of (luxury), such as the crafts of cooking, dressmaking, building, and (making) carpets, vessels, and all other parts of (domestic) economy. For the elegant execution of all these things, there exist many crafts not needed in desert life with its lack of elegance. When elegance in (domestic) economy has reached the limit, it is followed by subservience to desires. From all these customs, the human soul receives a multiple coloring that undermines its religion and worldly (well-being). (It cannot preserve) its religion, because it has now been firmly colored by customs (of luxury), and it is difficult to discard such coloring. (It cannot preserve) its worldly (well-being), because the customs (of luxury) demand a great many things and (entail) many requirements for which (a man's) income is not sufficient.

So this lays out an idea i've mulled over for a bit. Something like: the upper-middle class is a powerful force because of its breadth and wealth. bc lower classes, though much broader, have a meager portion of wealth they are thus not as powerful (hold that thought). it seems like the economic benefits of civilization are helmed by the upper-middle class and the lower classes are being ripped from that particular notion of civilization and left to fend for themselves.

that said, i remember getting into an argument way upthread about the idea for a sort-of pop-up community center in an abandoned building and how that would require a lot of work on the part of those without access to the powerful. also, i went swimming recently at the local watering hole and there were bags of empty beer cans everywhere. this is a preserved natural area so my friends and i were upset over how careless people are. i mentioned that it'd be nice for civic resources to be put to use here or even a corp of volunteers for cleanup. my friends groaned and said simply that people should just be good. fair enough.

these two ideas-that those without wealth are removed from the benefits of civilization and that people should really just be good-are disconnected. it takes work to bridge that gap. occupy was great bc it used the current economic structure as kindling to start a new one. i'm thinking of people in dead-end jobs sending in pizza orders for people who are working on reorganizing an economic dynamic. also, iphones. it defined a process for change that could actually work. Ibn Khaldun had a similar idea for the upending of civilizations: the seeds of collapse are sown within the civilization itself (as per the above quote), allowing peripheral 'barbarians' to take over and sow their own cultural ideas for elitism that then end up destroying them.

so what can be done to get people to discuss how to change things instead of constantly hammering on the why and what? and what mode of economic organization is self-sustaining and not dependent on class structure and continuous growth of resource extraction so that being poor can be a fulfilling way of life?

/coffee rant

so what can be done to get people to discuss /how/ to change things instead of constantly hammering on the /why/ and /what/? and what mode of economic organization is self-sustaining and not dependent on class structure and continuous growth of resource extraction so that being poor can be a fulfilling way of life?
--shaane

There's a lot of work being done in these questions at small local levels, which is really the only level where it makes sense to begin. The problem is that the work that is being done--building cooperative work institutions, building community power through neighborhood/tenant organizing--can sometimes be insular and subcultural to an alienating degree. Our real challenge, I think, is creating an organizing culture that lays bare the radicalism and feminism and anti-oppressive class analysis while maintaining space for people to come in who might not have MDC patches on their jackets or Huey Newton posters on their walls.

Conversely, radicalizing local groups with local grievances to consider the wider context of political economy is also a challenge that needs tackling. So there are lots of different directions from which we can come at these problems. The biggest mistake we've made, and that we're always at risk of making again, is believing that we have to start from scratch and reinvent the heel again. There are older, smarter people who've been doing this slow hard work for a long time, and our task is to find our place with them, bring our energy and new ideas, and hopefully move us all forward.

also fuck everyone who say 'lol u protest with iphones'

i mean look here's the deal and i would deeply dig it if people approached me on this later

capitalism as we have built it sucks

it benefits a minimal handful, and provides subsistence for a swath, while the rest of use in the equation, whether we make it national or international, suffer to varying degrees.

is this worth it? matt yglegisas is cool with 1k+ people dying in a factory in order to make sure he gets cheap sweaters. are you ok with that? is the math harder than that? don't ask me if """""""""""""stalin""""""""""" did it better. i'm asking you if the sons of keynes did any better than what we as humans believe ought to be possible given the world we inhabit together. and if he did, terrific--what might we do better? how might we do it? if he didn't--why oughtn't we do yet more?

like why the fuck don't we believe in something more than a system that insists on the slitting of throats