#OWS
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Return of the Disappeared
Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same. The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based.
By Hena Ashraf A piece written by Ayesha Kazmi, aka AmericanPaki, called “Why I am Not Protesting at Occupy” , has been making the rounds amongst my circle of friends and with people involved and curious about the Occupy movement. In her blog post Ayesha explains why she is not protesting at Occupy because she is at risk of being targeted by law enforcement agencies, because she is Muslim. I want to first acknowledge that I genuinely appreciate what Ayesha wrote and that she made her concerns public, because stories like Ayesha’s need to be told and heard. She has experienced questioning by the FBI, discrimination in her personal and professional life post 9/11, and raises very real points about how Muslims are targeted in this country at the hands of federal and local law enforcement. As for me, I am a visible Muslim woman of color.
Why I Am Protesting at Occupy | In Front and Center
Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California-Berkeley and present recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Butler gained public recognition in 1990 with the publication of her book "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," a now-seminal text in gender studies classrooms worldwide. Butler has since written numerous books on gender politics, antiwar politics, Judaism and 19th-century philosophy.
Bodies in Alliance: Gender Theorist Judith Butler on the Occupy and SlutWalk Movements | Truthout
Occupy Production: A Vision for Democracy at Work | Truthout
As the Occupy movement keeps developing, it seeks solutions for the economic and political dysfunctions it exposes and opposes. For many, the capitalist economic system itself is the basic problem. They want change to another system, but not to the traditional socialist alternative (e.g. USSR or China). That system, too, seems to require basic change. The common solution these activists propose is to change both systems' production arrangements from the ground up.
On May 15, 2011, young people occupied the squares of the cities in Spain. They called themselves Los Indignados - "the indignant". I met them in Madrid where I was attending the meeting of the scientific committee that advises the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
The lies of free market democracy
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN : We return now to the renowned Indian writer, global justice activist, Arundhati Roy. She has written many books, including The God of Small Things , which won the Booker Prize.
Arundhati Roy: Occupy Wall Street is "So Important Because It is in the Heart of Empire"
The Associated Press reports: "Atlanta police said one protester draped in an American flag inside Woodruff Park was arrested after refusing to leave by a Sunday night curfew, The 23-year-old woman in the park was warned three times in English and Spanish to leave before she was arrested, police spokesman Carlos Campos said. At the time, dozens more demonstrators chanting slogans like 'We're hungry! We're poor! What are you wasting our money for?' stood behind barricades surrounding the park, where police had warned they would enforce an 11 p.m. curfew."
Lone Protester Wrapped in Flag Makes Stand in Atlanta
The Globalisation of Protest
Joseph E. Stiglitz writes: "The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now become global - with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalisation and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can.
Fox Piven writes: "A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call'the poor' who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top 1%." By Frances Fox Piven, TomDispatch
FOCUS: The War Against the Poor
Educators use Occupy Movement to Empower Students, Defend Public Education
An unequal financial system contributing to poverty and joblessness is a focus of the Occupy movement, but little attention is paid to educators 2012-05-11 11:26:48 Transcript JAISAL NOOR, FREE SPEECH RADIO NEWS: Protests against unequal economic opportunity, at the heart of the Occupy movement, resonate deeply with many New Yorkers. New York State trails only behind DC in income disparity, according to the Census Bureau. Many of the hardest hit are people of color who are disproportionately affected by poverty, high unemployment, foreclosures, and deep cutbacks to public services.
Intro: "From Scott Olsen in Oakland to Sgt Shamar Thomas in New York, US veterans are filling the ranks of the Occupy movement." By Amy Goodman, Guardian UK 06 November 11 11-11-11 is not a variant of Herman Cain's much-touted 9-9-9 tax plan, but rather the date of this year's Veterans Day. This is especially relevant, as the US has now entered its second decade of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in the nation's history.