Occupy Wall Street

[PIE-GUY]

http://www.relix.com/blogs/exposed/2011/10/24/pete-seeger-tao-seeger-and-arlo-guthrie-at-occupy-wall-street

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IPd_OkeVtI&feature=related

Pete Seeger is my hero - go to http://www.nobelprize4pete.org/ and sign the petition!!

[sls.stormyrider]

From Michael Moores

don't think it will happen, but if it does it will be pretty cool

P.S. I have challenged the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, to come on CNN this Tuesday night and debate the issues with me. We have not heard back, but I will show up nonetheless: Tuesday, 9:00 PM ET/6:00 PM PT, on Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN. I have asked that they allow in a live studio audience made up of those from the 99% and the Occupy Wall Street protestors. CNN has agreed. Mr. Blankfein, please show up and answer our questions.

[mbw]

From Michael Moores

don't think it will happen, but if it does it will be pretty cool

P.S. I have challenged the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, to come on CNN this Tuesday night and debate the issues with me. We have not heard back, but I will show up nonetheless: Tuesday, 9:00 PM ET/6:00 PM PT, on Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN. I have asked that they allow in a live studio audience made up of those from the 99% and the Occupy Wall Street protestors. CNN has agreed. Mr. Blankfein, please show up and answer our questions.

i doubt it too, but yes it would be great.
when one of these guys sacks up and agrees to debate him it usually doesn't end too well for them...

[rowjimmy]

I can't help but feel a little bad for Heston when I watch that...

Just a little.

[Hicks]

I can't help but feel a little bad for Heston when I watch that...

Just a little.

Yeah dude was pretty far gone by that point, I am a fan of Moore but that was pretty tasteless IMO.

[rowjimmy]

I can't help but feel a little bad for Heston when I watch that...

Just a little.

Yeah dude was pretty far gone by that point, I am a fan of Moore but that was pretty tasteless IMO.

Right.
Not to say that Heston didn't hold and/or represent some positions that I personally find distasteful, but that feels like Moore's lowest point.

[mbw]

I can't help but feel a little bad for Heston when I watch that...

Just a little.

Yeah dude was pretty far gone by that point, I am a fan of Moore but that was pretty tasteless IMO.

Right.
Not to say that Heston didn't hold and/or represent some positions that I personally find distasteful, but that feels like Moore's lowest point.

fuck that.  his alzheimers wasnt public knowledge, he was still the NRA spokesman, and he held a NRA convention near littleton shortly after the massacre.

[rowjimmy]

I can't help but feel a little bad for Heston when I watch that...

Just a little.

Yeah dude was pretty far gone by that point, I am a fan of Moore but that was pretty tasteless IMO.

Right.
Not to say that Heston didn't hold and/or represent some positions that I personally find distasteful, but that feels like Moore's lowest point.

fuck that.  his alzheimers wasnt public knowledge, he was still the NRA spokesman, and he held a NRA convention near littleton shortly after the massacre.

I'm conflicted.
It's hard to watch but certainly part of me is cool with burning the old man.

[runawayjimbo]

Drummers ruin everything. The n+1 and Daily Intel links below are also pretty interesting reads.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/10/wall-street-occupiers-fear-drummers-will-be-their-undoing/44085/

Wall Street Occupiers Fear Drummers Will Be Their Undoing

The most pervasive sound at Zuccotti Park, and one of the neighbors' biggest complaints, is that of a group of drummers pounding the skins, and organizers now fear their inability to rein in the constant drumming will kill what support they've gotten and move the park's owners to ask police to clear them out. The occupation reached a compromise at its General Assembly on Monday night, with the drummers agreeing to limit their playing to four hours a day (from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.), but it's not the first time the occupiers have reached an agreement on limiting the drumming, and the fear now is that neighbors, already skeptical of the camp's ability to regulate itself, will decide at Tuesday night's meeting of Community Board 1 that they can't put up with it any longer.

The Zuccotti encampment had passed a regulation on Oct. 13 to limit the drumming to two hours a day, but drummers ignored it. Some neighbors at a community board meeting last week expressed skepticism that the encampment could regulate its percussion section. As one "trusted friend and respected activist" explained to the literary magazine n+1, the community support is crucial to keeping police off the back of the encampment.

At this point we have lost the support of allies in the Community Board and the state senator and city electeds who have been fighting the city to stave off our eviction, get us toilets, etc. On Tuesday there is a Community Board vote, which will be packed with media cameras and community members with real grievances. We have sadly demonstrated to them that we are unable to collectively 1) keep our space and surrounding areas clean and sanitary, 2) keep the park safe, 3) deal with internal conflict and enforce the Good Neighbor Policy that was passed by the General Assembly.

The city backed off a plan to clear protesters out of the park earlier this month, in part because the protesters had the support of local politicians and the community. If they lose that, Zuccotti Park owner Brookfield Office Properties would have far less political opposition to asking the police to clear the protesters out. The problem is, the drummers don't necessarily go along with the general assembly. "This may have been because the drummers did not attend the GA and therefore did not know a consensus had been reached. This sucks for the drummers," one organizer said at last week's community board meeting, according to Firedog Lake. A thread on the group's organizing website nycga.net calls the drummers "poisonous," and from the description n+1's source gave of one disruptive individual, that's pretty apt in some cases:

Unfortunately there is one individual who is NOT a drummer but who claims to speak for the drummers who has been a deeply disruptive force, attacking the drumming rep during the GA and derailing his proposal, and disrupting the community board meeting, as well as the OWS community relations meeting. She has also created strife and divisions within the POC caucus, calling many members who are not 'on her side' "Uncle Tom", "the 1%", "Barbie" "not Palestinian enough" "Wall Street politicians" "not black enough" "sell-outs", etc. People have been documenting her disruptions, and her campaign of misinformation, and instigations. She also has a documented history online of defamatory, divisive and disruptive behavior within the LGBT (esp. transgender) communities. Her disruptions have made it hard to have constructive conversations and productive resolutions to conflicts in a variety of forums in the past several days.

The drummers have already injected some conflict into the occupation as their working group, Pulse, requested money for new drums after a vandal destroyed some last week, and was denied. They see themselves as a really important part of the movement, as one drummer told Daily Intel last week: "Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive," drummer Shane Engelerdt said. They also bring in cash, about $150 to $300 a day, of which the occupation organizers take half. "One certainly does not want to see drumming be what brings Occupy Wall Street to an end," wrote Firedoglake's Kevin Goszstola in his account of last week's community board meeting. But if drummers don't knock it off once in a while, it very easily could.

[sls.stormyrider]

when I saw the 1st line of your post (before I saw the quote), I thought it was a dig at me.

[runawayjimbo]

when I saw the 1st line of your post (before I saw the quote), I thought it was a dig at me.

sls, we may not agree on everything, but I thoroughly enjoy your comments. Besides, as a cardiologist, I never would have pegged you for a drummer. Keys or guitar maybe; something that requires a little more precision. :wink:

Meanwhile, more trouble on the Occupy front.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-26/occupy-wall-street-oakland/50922286/1

Police, protesters clash in Atlanta, Oakland

ATLANTA (AP) – With helicopters hovering overhead, police moved into a downtown Atlanta park early Wednesday and arrested about 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters who had been camped there for about two weeks.

Like in many other cities, protesters had been camping in Woodruff Park to rally against what they see as corporate greed and a wide range of other economic issues.

Before police moved in, protesters were warned a couple of times about midnight to vacate the park or risk arrest.

Inside the park, the warnings were drowned out by drumbeats and chants of "Our park!"

Organizers had instructed participants to be peaceful if arrests came, and most were. Many gathered in the center of the park, locking arms, and sang "We Shall Overcome," until police led them out, one-by-one to waiting buses. Some were dragged out while others left on foot, handcuffed with plastic ties.

Police included SWAT teams in riot gear, dozens of officers on motorcycles and several on horseback. By about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday the park was mostly cleared of protesters.

...

In Oakland, Calif., the scene was tense early Wednesday as a crowd of hundreds of protesters dwindled to just a few dozen at the site of several clashes between authorities and supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement a night earlier.

Police in riot gear stood watch only a few yards away from a group of stalwart demonstrators in the aftermath of skirmishes in front of City Hall that resulted in five volleys of tear gas from police, in blasts that seemed to intensify with each round, over a roughly three-hour stretch of evening scuffles.

The conflict began much earlier in the day when police dismantled an encampment of Occupy Wall Street protesters that had dominated a plaza across the street from the government building for more than two weeks.

Police fired tear gas and beanbag rounds, clearing out the makeshift city in less than an hour.

Hours after nightfall Tuesday evening, protesters had gathered at a downtown library and began marching toward City Hall in an attempt to re-establish a presence in the area of the disbanded camp.

They were met by police officers in riot gear. Several small skirmishes broke out and officers cleared the area by firing tear gas.

...

[rowjimmy]

The guy on the ground is Iraq war vet and member of Veterans For Peace, Scott Olsen.
He's in the hospital with a fractured skull.

[sls.stormyrider]

So your brother's bound and gagged
And they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to chicago just to sing   
In a land that's known as freedom how can such a thing be fair
won't you please come to chicago for the help that we can bring

We can change the world rearrange the world
It's dying - to get better

Politicians sit yourselves down, there's nothing for you here
won't you please come to chicago for a ride
don't ask jack to help you `cause he'll turn the other ear
won't you please come to chicago or else join the other side

We can change the world rearrange the world
it's dying - if you believe in justice
dying - and if you believe in freedom
dying - let a man live his own life
dying - rules and regulations, who needs them open up the door

Somehow people must be free I hope the day comes soon
won't you please come to chicago show your face
From the bottom of the ocean to the mountains of the moon   
won't you please come to chicago no one else can take your place

We can change the world rearrange the world
It's dying - if you believe in justice
dying - and if you believe in freedom
dying - let a man live his own life
dying - rules and regulations, who needs them open up the door

[runawayjimbo]

Interesting read on the origins of OWS and the ideas of the guy who effectively started it.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/david-graeber-the-antileader-of-occupy-wall-street-10262011.html

David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street
How the anthropologist, activist, and anarchist helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement

David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He's also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.

It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn't widely known. But he has been one of the group's most articulate voices, able to frame the movement's welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment. "We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt," Graeber wrote in a Sept. 25 editorial published online by the Guardian. "Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?"

...

A "general assembly" means something specific and special to an anarchist. In a way, it's the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies. A "GA" is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are made—not by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands. It can be an arduous process. One of the things Occupy Wall Street has done is introduce the GA to a wider audience, along with the distinctive sign language participants use to raise questions or express support, disapproval, or outright opposition.

When Graeber and his friends showed up on Aug. 2, however, they found out that the event wasn't, in fact, a general assembly, but a traditional rally, to be followed by a short meeting and a march to Wall Street to deliver a set of predetermined demands ("A massive public-private jobs program" was one, "An end to oppression and war!" was another). In anarchist argot, the event was being run by "verticals"—top-down organizations—rather than "horizontals" such as Graeber and his friends. Sagri and Graeber felt they'd been had, and they were angry.

What happened next sounds like an anarchist parable. Along with Kohso, the two recruited several other people disgruntled with the proceedings, then walked to the south end of the park and began to hold their own GA, getting down to the business of planning the Sept. 17 occupation. The original dozen or so people gradually swelled, despite the efforts of the event's planners to bring them back to the rally. The tug of war lasted until late in the evening, but eventually all of the 50 or so people remaining at Bowling Green had joined the insurgent general assembly.

"The groups that were organizing the rally, they also came along," recalls Kohso. "Then everyone stayed very, very late to organize what committees we needed."

While there were weeks of planning yet to go, the important battle had been won. The show would be run by horizontals, and the choices that would follow—the decision not to have leaders or even designated police liaisons, the daily GAs and myriad working-group meetings that still form the heart of the protests in Zuccotti Park—all flowed from that.

For Graeber the next month and a half was a carousel of meetings. There were the weekly GAs, the first held near the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City, the rest in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. He facilitated some of them and spent much of the rest of his time in working group meetings in people's apartments. (On Aug. 14 he tweeted, "I am so exhausted. My first driving lesson ... then had to facilitate an assembly in Tompkins Square Park for like three hours.") He organized legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance. The group endlessly discussed what demands to make, or whether to have demands at all—a question that months later remains unresolved.

In the Sept. 10 general assembly the group picked the target for their occupation: One Chase Manhattan Plaza. They also picked several backups. So when the police fenced off Chase Plaza the night before the occupation was scheduled to start, the occupiers were prepared. On Sept. 17, barely an hour before the scheduled 3 p.m. start time, the word went out to go to Zuccotti Park instead, and 2,000 people converged on the now famous patch of stone flooring, low benches, and trees. It was a fortunate choice: Zuccotti is a privately owned park, so the city doesn't have the right to remove the protesters. Graeber helped facilitate the GA that night in which they decided to camp out in the park rather than immediately march on Wall Street. Three days later, when he flew to Austin, the protests were still little more than a local New York story.

...

[Hicks]