Occupy the US: Musings on Horizontal Decision-Making and Bureaucracy. | Marianne Maeckelbergh | The year 2011 has breathed new life into horizontal models of democratic decision-making. With the rise of the 15 May movement and the occupy movement horizontal decision-making became one of the key political structures for organising responses to the current global economic crisis. While this decision-making process has arguably never been as widely practiced as it is today, it has also never seemed as difficult and complicated as it does today. At its height there were 5,000 people at the general assemblies in Placa Catalunya in Barcelona and even more in Madrid.
It is no longer just activists trying to use and teach each other these decision-making processes but it is hundreds or thousands of people who have a far greater disparity in terms of backgrounds, starting assumptions, aims and discursive styles. This is incredibly good news, but it is not easy. Whirlwind History Horizontal decision-making was, of course, never invented as such. 1. 2. 3. 4. Mathematics has an Occupy moment. Instead of sitting passively by and allowing a dysfunctional system to detract from a culture, the participants in Occupy want to object, to reform the system, and if that doesn’t work, to build a new system.
And the crucial point is that they feel that they have the right (if not obligation) to do so. Moreover, they wish to construct a new paradigm built on democratic understanding of the shared goals of the system itself, rather than letting whomever is in power decide how things work and who benefits. I feel like there’s an analogy to be drawn between this process and what’s happening now in the fight between mathematicians and Elsevier, and for that matter the publishing world (as has been pointed out, Springer has the same issues as Elsevier, even though people like Springer a lot more). Why am I waxing so poetic over this struggle? I want to stop right there and examine that question, because it’s already quite loaded. Here’s a thought experiment I’d like you to do with me. What happens to the young and educated without a job?
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study led by the University of Oxford is looking at how young educated people who are unemployed become politicized in different ways - either through violent struggle or as reformers working for a more equal society. The project is one of the first to compare in depth the experiences across different countries of the young who are educated and yet unemployed. The project focuses on three countries particularly affected by youth unemployment: northern India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, but the findings will have wider global relevance.
Youth unemployment is now a critical problem across the world. It recently propelled uprisings in the Arab world, contributed to sectarian violence in India, and has now reached record highs in the UK. Dr. Craig Jeffrey is leading the extensive research project into the unemployed youth in a collaboration between Oxford and Edinburgh University, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Dr. Don’t Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself. Occupy the food system. Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy. The "99 percent" are awakening to the realization that their lives have fallen under corporate control as well.
Add up the jobs lost, the health benefits whittled away, and the unions busted, and the bill for Wall Street's self-centered greed is taking a toll. (Brennan Cavanaugh / Flickr)It's not the immigrants, the homeless, the unions, or the farmers that have looted the economy and driven us to the brink of another Great Depression. The public is catching on. Change can come only when you confront your oppressors directly on their turf. The people who are now forming a movement to occupy the food system agree with this sentiment too.
The United States: Inequality and the American Dream. Voting on 3 Quarks Daily’s Best Politics and Social Science Blog Writing Prize is Underway. Voting for the finalists in the third annual prize for “the best blog writing in politics & social science” at 3 Quarks Daily has started. Here are the nominees, and here is where to vote. Several friends of the blog are in the running, and if you read this site perhaps you are familiar with their work. 1. Corey Robin’s Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism is up for the award. I haven’t linked to this review of the book by Connor Kilpatrick. The first rule of debate: Never accept your opponent’s characterization of his own position. 2. Frase’s blog should be on your must-read list; his recent post on partisanship and ideology is equally good. 3.
Aaron’s Possible Futures post on Occupy Oakland is a great summary of themes he had been developing for a while at his site. 4. 5. What else is on the list that I should check out? Like this: Like Loading... Sarah Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street. P2P Foundation. Occupy Gives Hope to Struggling Americans This Thanksgiving. More than two and a half million Americans slipped into poverty this year bringing the total number of Americans in poverty to 46.2 million. There are millions more Americans near or in danger of going into poverty because they could lose their job, their home to bank foreclosure, or contract a disease or illness that leads to a medical bill they will be unable to pay.
Americans have made it a habit of taking time every Thanksgiving (and Christmas) to appreciate how lucky they are despite how poor or worse off they might be this year. This avoids having to show empathy toward Americans, who are struggling and have become victims of economic, political and social structures of America. Thankfulness is about you as an individual, not we who are all in this together and should be sharing in each other’s struggle so we can become a country that does not have so many millions of Americans in poverty. A portion of the population can be thank for the Occupy movement this year.
#OWS. United States District Judge Jed S. Rakoff is already kind of a hero to me, given that he’s the guy who rejected a “do not admit wrongdoing” settlement between Citigroup and the SEC over mortgage-backed securities fraud because, according to Rakoff, the proposed settlement was “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest.” More recently Rakoff has written a fine essay in the New York Review of Books entitled The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted? Which I will summarize below but is well worth your time to read. Rakoff’s essay First Rakoff made the point that if there was no intentional fraud we should not scapegoat people and put them to jail. But on the other hand, if there was intentional fraud, then it’s a reflection on a dysfunctional justice system that nobody has gone to jail.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has focused on explaining why nobody has gone to jail in spite of the existence of fraud. Comments. Chart of the Day: LATAM doing it right in the Middle. Great and expansive front-page WSJ feature from 15th. Disappointing to the anti-globalization crowd, but it's been very, very good to LATAM, decreasing its poor and increasing its middle class in a steady fashion since Cold War's end. A realistic snapshot: The expanding middle is benefiting from a strong period of economic growth—fueled by high commodity prices in many countries—along with more aggressive social programs with a decided focus on education.But the advances are still tenuous, and the possibility of a global recession haunts the prospects of los emergentes—the emerging ones—as marketers call the newly minted middle-class members.
Protecting what's gone on there is such a huge - even worldwide - responsibility. Ditto for Africa. We don't do it out of anything but common sense. This is the opportunity we piss away with our insane "war on drugs. " The world is booming and all we see is fear. Data Reveals That “Occupying” Twitter Trending Topics is Harder Than it Looks! While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has been gaining momentum, growing in terms of visibility, media coverage and sheer numbers of participants, it has had a difficult time “occupying” the Twitter trending topics (TTs) list. #OccupyWallStreet, the movement’s dominant hashtag, has never once hit the New York TTs list. Similarly, #OccupyBoston has trended all across the world, but never in Boston, which only saw the phrases ‘Dewey Sq’ and ‘Dewey Square’ trend. Some point the blame at Twitter for censoring content, yet what seems to be happening is purely algorithmic.
There’s often more than meets the eye when it comes to algorithmically generated TTs. In this post we dissect some of the dynamics at play, looking at all OWS related terms that have trended on Twitter since the start of the movement, their volume of appearance in tweets, and the times and locations they’ve trended. What’s in a Trend? Censorship? Interesting. #OccupyWallStreet – A closer look Competing for Attention. The Robin Hood Tax: Occupy Movement now Marching Straight Off the Globalist Cliff. It was inevitable that a movement which has struggled to agree on a manifesto, would in the end, do the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they are demonstrating against to begin with.
Instead of achieving freedom from Central Bank debt enslavement, naive Occupiers appear to have taken the bait, pulling the mob towards endorsing a global taxation system, and one to be administered…by a brand new global government body. As the Occupy Movement sets its sights on the upcoming G20 Summit in France on November 3-4, its globalist handlers behind the scenes have succeeded in carefully directing its crowds towards the Holy Grail of all socialist super-states - the celebrity supported, trendy “Robin Hood Tax”, also known as a Tobin Tax, a financial transaction tax levied on all transactions involving shares, bonds and derivatives. Or so the plan goes… ROBIN HOOD TAX: Utopian idea, taxing rich and taxing carbon – will not work.
Reuters reported Monday: OWS losing the plot. Here's the Risk: "Occupy" ends up doing the bidding of the global elite. History shows us it is easy for ‘grassroots’ campaigns to become co-opted by the very interests they are fighting against. A 21st-century grassroots movement faces many pitfalls. This was as true back in 1968 as it is today.
It could be infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, or co-opted by a major party. As the state continues to creep further into our lives, activists can expect that it will use all its resources – not just the violent reaction seen in New York overnight, but also its agents, informants and surveillance packages – in its effort to monitor both sides of any serious social debate. The sudden emergence of America’s Tea Party movement in 2007 is a good example. Arguably, the Occupy Wall Street movement has already drifted into the shadow of the Democratic party – with a number of Democratic establishment figures from the top down endorsing it. Alongside this is the threat of being infiltrated. Freedom House is another of Soros’s Open Society partners. Who invented the iPhone: The public and common origin of private innovation.
Excerpted from Gar Alperovitz: “Take an obvious example: Many of the advances that have propelled our high-tech economy in recent decades grew directly out of research programs financed and, often, collaboratively developed, by the federal government and paid for by the taxpayer. The Internet, to take the most well-known example, began as a government defense project, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), in the 1960s. Today’s vast software industry rests on a foundation of computer language and operating hardware developed, in large part, with public support.
The Bill Gateses of the world might still be working with vacuum tubes and punch cards were it not for critical research and technology programs created or financed by the federal government. But taxpayer-financed government programs (including, of course, public education) are only the tip of the iceberg. And here we are not talking rhetoric, we are talking the stuff of Nobel prizes. A Post-Growth Economy FAQ. ‘I don’t want to live in an economy where everything is the same, where progress is halted and human creativity is stifled’, is a common response to post-growth theories.
I agree absolutely – I wouldn’t wish to live in that kind of economy either. The new economy doesn’t hit the pause button on progress, innovation, science, creativity, culture or change, and neither does it go backwards. It just sets some new parameters, and will therefore deliver a different kind of change. Instead of bigger, we’ll have to develop better; qualitative change rather than quantitative. We may not consume as much, but our lives may well improve in all kinds of other ways – more leisure time, greater involvement in the arts and in local democracy, better health, and a cleaner environment.
This is where the term ‘steady state economy’ is a little awkward, as it sounds static and immobile. Without growth, won’t the poor be abandoned to their poverty? Will ending growth create massive unemployment? Where does Money come From (1): The consequences of a privately-created money system. “Ben Dyson was next up saying he had “a huge amount of information in the next hour”. He started from the beginning pointing out that money is not taught at school. He got to asking himself, “where is all this money coming from?” One day, in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the spine of a book caught his eye.
It was “The Grip of Death” by Mike Rowbotham. Thinking it must be a crime thriller that had been misfiled, “the librarian in me”, made him reach up to take it off the shelf. He then realised the subtitle, “A study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics”. He was hooked, and the rest is history. He said there were 3 Key Questions that needed answers: Who creates money? 1. He said, “We have a fully privatised money system” but few people are aware of that fact (except the 200 plus who were crammed into the theatre!) 2. Ben explained that cash in the UK economy is £57 billion, whereas there is £2,200 billion in digital money. 3. Juliet Schor talks on the plenitude of the commons economy at #OccupyWallStreet. #OccupyMap. Insight: The Wall Street disconnect. Occupy divides over whether to make demands - US news - Life. NEW YORK — As the "Occupy Wall Street" protest enters its third month, members are wrestling with an issue as old as the Athenians who first hatched the idea of democracy around 500 B.C.: Should we issue a set of demands and, if so, what should they be?
The debate has taken on new meaning with this week’s removal of the protest camp at Zuccotti Park. Some in the flagship occupation in the heart of America’s financial sector believe the police action provided them with the perfect moment to put forward specific demands and build support among the so-called “99 percent” of Americans outside the economic elite.
Occupy protesters march on NYC, nationwide But opponents argue that not making demands will strengthen the “Occupy” cause by keeping all options on the table, including the sort of systematic changes that they believe are needed to address the economic inequalities that are at the core of their anger. Story: 'Shut down Wall Street! ' Homeowner taps 'Occupy' protest to avoid foreclosure. Global protests: is 2011 a year that will change the world? | World news.
1% vs 99% Philosophy.