VersoBooks.com. The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long.
It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.
The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Maybe you’re better off not holding hands and singing We Shall Overcome. By Francesca Polletta Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport wade into the debate over the role of the Internet in contemporary social movements with a provocative claim: the Internet is ushering in a new repertoire of protest.
In this repertoire, mobilizations are sporadic rather than deep-rooted and enduring. Protests flare up, gather huge numbers to the cause, and then fade away—sometimes to reemerge, other times not. More people participate than in earlier repertoires, and they do so for diverse reasons: because they care passionately about the cause or because they’re mildly concerned; because they believe that protest will be effective or because they just want to express themselves. Targets are diverse and issues are too. What makes this picture so compelling is not only that it is grounded in extensive and meticulous data on activists’ use of new digital media, but also that it builds on three decades of social movement theory and research.
[i] Bakardjieva, M. 2009. Like this: How Elite Media Strategies Marginalize the Occupy Movement. I took the decision by Foreign Affairs to report on the Occupy Wall Street protests as a sign that the movement was having some success.
Not surprisingly, however, this favorite journal of foreign policy pundits offers “expert” commentary that reinforces a theme that has dominated corporate media coverage of the OWS movement. Rory McVeigh’s online essay, “How Occupy Wall Street Works” presents a highly misleading image of OWS protests that reinforces the mainstream media representation of most left-wing political protests as disorganized, violence-prone mobs. Despite the writer’s scholarly credentials, the account neglects a large body of relevant research. Despite popular and media images, extensive research documents the fact that mass movements are by and large nonviolent in nature. Some, such as the Indian Nationalist movement and the U.S. No Confidence. On Monday, November 28, 2011 the academic Senate at the University of California, Berkeley met to consider resolutions condemning the most recent episode of police violence on campus.
As is now well known, militarized police units were unleashed on the Berkeley campus on November 9th to preemptively smash any student-led attempts to erect tents in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The police viciously attacked faculty and students alike with batons. The batons damaged organs and broke bones. Faculty and students were unarmed; the police alone were armed and, not coincidentally, uninjured.
The leaders of the university defended these beatings on the grounds that they were necessary to ensure that the “health and public safety” of the community would be maintained. Some Berkeley faculty attempted to close the gap between image and deed and actually hold the leaders of the campus responsible. The Vice Chancellor of the Berkeley campus spoke next.