Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

i like it

i've just been reminded of the weird and funny final days of ODC, where a group of guys decided to go on 'sleep strike' until the 'no sleeping in parks' enforcement was lifted

"i think maybe there's something lacking here guys, strategically"

what are we talking about?

oh wait, when i loaded the page it hid the last 20+ posts. so confused.

lol

hmmm

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/09/owss-rolling-jubilee-refuses-to-explain-what-theyve-done-with-590000-despite-promises-of-full-transparency.html

well that's unfortunate.

eh, article is overwritten and sensationalistic. buries the lede about the communications and what's forthcoming.

full transparency never means 'everything, as it happens'.

not saying everything is great or not, but yeah nov is 'around the corner' from late sept, and the article is stupid to pretend otherwise.

agree. even so, it's being run up the flagpole by insurrectionists clowns yelling 'SEE WE SHOULD HAVE BURNED THE MONEY'

reminds me of the old R.A.W. gag with one group working to undermine the economy by burning all the money and causing deflation, and another working to counterfeit it and undermine the economy by causing inflation.

http://strikedebt.org/an-update-on-the-rolling-jubilee-2/

We have reviewed the September 23 Naked Capitalism blog post by Susan Webber (who writes under the pseudonym Yves Smith) and frankly are dismayed by the apparent effort to discredit one of the most practical, potentially high-impact, constructive initiatives to have emerged from the Occupy movement.

The Rolling Jubilee Fund has a perfectly standard and unremarkable structure for its corporate governance. What is remarkable is the transparency that has been demonstrated. Minutes of board meetings as well as The Rolling Jubilee Fund financial policies have been posted on the website. Details of debt buys and purchase agreements are also available for download directly from the website. The names of the individual board members are in boldface. The Fund’s decision to engage in a structured roll-out is based upon legal and public relations considerations that have been fully vetted.

The Board has a horizontal structure, in keeping with the non-hierarchical principles of the Occupy movement. No actions are taken, nor are any funds expended, without the approval of the Board. The Rolling Jubilee Fund board members consult with the Rolling Jubilee Working Group, which in turn works closely with the OWS Strike Debt collective. As a result of its completely voluntary transparency, The Rolling Jubilee Fund has welcomed the scrutiny of the entire blogosphere.

Yves Smith recently posted a critique of the Rolling Jubilee operations on her website, Naked Capitalism. When we developed our financial policy we sought to follow best practices and looked to some of the most respected nonprofits as examples. Smith raises some concerns about our Financial and Control Policies. Smith says that “individual board members have the power to spend significant amounts of Rolling Jubilee funds and make binding commitments,” which is simply not true. She also implies that board members can bind Rolling Jubilee to contracts that the entire board hasn’t approved. That’s not true either. The entire board of directors of Rolling Jubilee has always approved and will continue to approve all expenses and all contracts before they are signed. No board member has authority to approve an expense, write a check, or enter into a contract on his or her own authority without board approval, and no board member ever has. Given that many organizations authorize their executive director to sign all checks (even those over $10,000) without requiring a second officer to also countersign the check, our check signature policies are actually conservative. However, it is important to note that our controls are even tighter than the information on our website suggests, because only two board members are authorized on the Fund’s bank account. To reiterate: board members simply do not have the power to unilaterally spend Rolling Jubilee’s money. Nobody writes a check or spends money, even for a dollar, without the input and approval of the entire group.

In addition to this internal oversight we have an independent professional bookkeeper who volunteers her services and have hired a third-party CPA to produce quarterly reports and thorough audits. Please know that our legal and accounting teams have assisted us in developing our organizational structure and continue to advise us every step of the way. We are always open to adapting and improving our system.

hahahahahaha

http://betabeat.com/2013/09/googler-wants-to-kickstart-a-nonviolent-occupy-wall-street-militia/

hahahahahaha

for the benefit of those who don't click through, this is the creator of @OccupyWallSt & occupywallst.org (also now a Google employee) proposing fundraising for body armor & paychecks for a rapid response direct action team that could physically withstand assaults by the NYPD

when other members of the team that run @OccupyWallSt argued with her about the idea, she locked them out of the account

i entertained an idea along these lines at one point, mainly inspired by the likes of Tute Bianche, and bandied it around with friends for a few minutes before they rightfully punched all kinds of holes in it

it's so naive that it'd sort of be cute if it wasn't stupidly dangerous with the potential to put well meaning people in jail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanti_Sena These folks too. I think a trained non-violent presence could be useful at protests, but I don't know enough about the context there to begin to imagine how one could function.

“I got cancer and I decided, ‘Okay, I can’t do this whole being a homeless couch surfing activist anymore,” she said. “I gotta get a job. I gotta sell out. So I figured I might as well sell out to the one corporation I don’t hate and that’s Google. I believe that even though they operate within a capitalist system, they still do the most good throughout the world. I respect Google and I’m not just trying to fuck it up from the inside, I don’t believe in that.”

google does the most good throughout the world

Dicey ‏@DiceyTroop 11h

@jackolas @PoweredByCats Well, in the s17 thread she makes super clear tht she wants either to run it as a 501c4 or pay via bitcoin "dark $"
Details
Dicey ‏@DiceyTroop 11h

@jackolas @PoweredByCats She states that it would be expressly hierarchical like any military and under her control.
Details
Jack ‏@jackolas 11h

@jackolas @PoweredByCats This idea is about handing Justine the money to build a personal army.
Details
Dicey ‏@DiceyTroop 11h

@jackolas @PoweredByCats
This idea is about hiring a group of people to engage in confrontations with the police. With bounties. That's the meat of this idea.
Details
Dicey ‏@DiceyTroop 11h

@jackolas @PoweredByCats She says she intends to pay payroll taxes and believes that will satisfy any state concerns about this operation.
Details
Dicey ‏@DiceyTroop 11h

@DiceyTroop @jackolas Also Justine explicitly says militia will NOT have an ideology. So they're her personal soldiers of fortune. Fucked.
Details
Brett G ‏@PoweredByCats 3h

@DiceyTroop @jackolas What happens when Golden Dawn decides to pay them higher stipends?

all the soldiers will be wearing google glass

goog throughout the world

DEVO's world vision becomes more imaginable every day

the person who says 'we'll just wear padding and gas masks, no nightsticks or pepper spray will do any good' has never stood at the front of the line where those items come into play

all that having been said fuck betabeat putting ~"transgender anarchist"~ in scare quotes

air quotes, w/e

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/46192.html

officially grossed out atm

ahahah Graeber, Kramer, Savanarola.

list still needs david berger, doug henwood, doctors of the racist masculinist medical-industrial complex, manarchists, richard rorty, and "dudebros" to really round it out

henwood jumped in on graeber's side on twitter

Got news this week that my radio show is getting honored with an Activist Award from the Washington Peace Center--they typically award people doing really effective work in communities or doing stellar service to the activist universe in DC, so it's really humbling company to be in, I'm very stoked.

congradulations hoos!

is that the same one there's an ilx thread about?

creativity & mental illness

nah, this is "voices of the 99%"--the 'creativity & mental illness' show kinda grew out of me feeling like vof99 was taking up all my creative energy without any payoff, so this award is sort of the ideal payoff.

here are some of our irregularly updated archives

and thx!

congratulations!

deserved honors, hoos!

don't know if this has been discussed yet but bravo!

http://rollingjubilee.org/

yurrp, high lifted applauding hands

hoos i dunno a better thread for this -- did you see this "Informant" documentary, and what did you think? I'm just watching now, and its sort of a wild creepy character study.

somehow i find the fantasies and self-justifications of delusional self-serving inveterate liars continually fascinating

i haven't seen the movie, but i read the book by darby's cofounder at common ground in new orleans, have sparred with Darby a little on twitter, and know folks in austin who Knew Him When. i still don't feel like i'm inside his head at all--do you feel like you 'get him' having seen the flick?

lol I hadn't heard anything about this film, but read "delusional self-serving inveterate liars" and thought "this must be about ol' br@nd0n d@rby"

I dunno if I feel qualified to say i 'get him' since its a mess of unbelievable stories and other people telling other stories and even then its just one film so how can i trust it.

But it at least presents one 'theory' of the guy that makes sense, which is that he just wants to feel important and heroic and doesn't care about the 'truth' of that validation or where it comes from, so he'll say whatever makes him feel the most badass person in the room, and if people don't keep giving him that validation he'll turn on them viciously.

that does line up p well with my sense of the guy

'don't carry a sign about the volcker rule,' they said
'no one will know what it means' they said

"They've cited [Occupy the SEC's] suggestions 284 times in the final rule, and in a lot of those contexts they agreed with us, and a lot of the time they disagreed with us. They're not going to say that Occupy said this and we're going to follow it, but we are pretty comforted that they followed at least some of our suggestions. [For comparison, the rule cites the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association 599 times, Americans for Financial Reform 179 times, and Senator Jeff Merkley 176 times. - ed. note]"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/11/the-volcker-rule-cites-the-occupy-movement-284-times/

that's awesome

From the WSJ letters column:

Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

i did not speak up because i was not danielle steel

i was more thinking french revolution