Occupy's Predicament: The Moment and the Prospects for Movement - 10 - 2012. OCCUPIED STUDIES. "Not Part of the 99%"? You're Fooling Yourself. "I'm not part of the 99%. " That's the catch-phrase of a counter-protest that misunderstands the entire nature of the Occupy movement. Buying the lies that 99% activists are just a bunch of unemployed hippies looking for handouts, people like the following young student trumpet their work-ethics, and chide the rest of us for not being them.
Parodying the various signs held by Occupy demonstrators, this picture epitomizes a view that misses the entire point of the protests. "The 99%" does not refer to people who want handouts; it refers to the people who pay the larger share of taxes, work the longer amount of hours, do the harder degree of work, and yet continually have our pay, jobs, health, environment and economy endangered or destroyed by the other 1%. * Having her pay or job cut so that her CEO can get a pay raise. * Losing her job or the company she works for to a badly-played gamble by one or more of her bosses. * Any combination of the above. Occupy Movement (E7)
Authoritarian Neoliberalism, the Occupy Movements, and IPE. The Long and the Quick of Revolution. Author's note: I re-gave the lecture at the CSDS in Delhi on 14 December and the version that follows is slightly changed from the original. It’s an honour to be asked to give this Raymond Williams Annual lecture. And also the chance to write the foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of The Long Revolution, republished by Parthian.
It has given me the opportunity to renew and deepen Raymond’s influence on my thinking. Today I want to set out some of the arguments I am developing about the potentially revolutionary events of this year. It is work in progress, which I’m looking to you to test and can certainly improve. I’m going to focus on the Occupy movement, the most important example of which for me was the immense, peaceful take over of central Madrid from 15 May to 12 June, when it disbanded of its own decision. Spain itself has this month voted in the right-wing to power while what remains of the 15 May movement has lost popularity. Is the system in Britain invulnerable? Why now?
The Streets of 2012 - Naomi Wolf. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent? The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are likely to see much greater centralization of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. But we are also likely to see significant grassroots reaction. What we are witnessing in the drama of increasingly globalized protest and repression is the subplot that many cheerleaders for neoliberal globalization never addressed: the power of globalized capital to wreak havoc with the authority of democratically elected governments.
The UK has stringent internal-security legislation, but it never had a law like the United States Patriot Act. Much is at stake. Occupational hazards. They call it the Citadel of Hope because right now they haven't got a lot else to put in it. It is late January and the third national conference of the Occupy movement is being at a Salvation Army citadel in central Sheffield which has stood empty for 12 years. Before the Occupiers moved in, the floor was thick in pigeon droppings; now the bare brickwork is clean, and people from all over the world huddle in coats and blankets, crouched around a space heater under makeshift strip lights, sharing strategies for resisting police eviction and trying to work out what the hell to do next.
Four months after the start of the Occupy movement, which began in Manhattan's financial district and spread like a fever to hundreds of cities across the world, the press has begun to lose interest. There are no other journalists at the conference. On 18 January, the City of London Corporation won its high court action to evict the main London protest camp from the courtyard of St Paul's.
No going back. Year-End Occupy Round-Up: API Edition. (Photo by Brian Nguyen/The Aggie, courtesy of boingboing.net) There are occupations, and then there are preoccupations with occupations. Here in New York, a preoccupied, post-occupation holiday meant a quieter-than-usual General Assembly on Christmas eve, the prelude to a holiday of charity and prayers at Zuccotti Park (Liberty Square). December 26 was the movement’s rather anticlimactic 100-day anniversary, which for me called to mind traditional Asian commemorations of births -- this fledgling, too, of uncertain duration.
I am certain, though, that it’s no flash in the pan. Since September 17, small somethings have changed: nights are colder and the tents folded up; "99%" replaces talk of bootstraps and perfect meritocracy; and taxation means the rich can pay more. We are post-encampment, unsure of what to occupy, having control now of only our minds and speech. And so it is that a culture of occupation, an occupying mode is the crux of it, seeping into our very own Asian America.
Occupy and the hostile media. OPINION Every progressive movement in U.S. history was portrayed negatively by mainstream media at the time it was happening. It's no surprise that the media portray the Occupy Wall Street movement in the same light. During the Montgomery bus boycott, mainstream media outlets interviewed black folks who were against it and talked about how the boycott was misguided and hurt the local economy. The day after the boycott started, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a story featuring the manager of the bus lines saying that bus drivers were being shot at and rocks were being thrown at them. During the rest of the civil rights movement, protesters who were fire-hosed and otherwise brutalized were called "violent protesters" in the mainstream media, which again featured interviews with people saying that the protests were wrongheaded. During the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the mainstream media portrayed protesters as out of touch, violent, and dirty. Boots Riley is a musician and activist.
The Occupations in winter. By Lambert Strether. Cross-posted from Corrente. From the Barcalounger: Snow happens. So some Occupations are in hunker down mode right now (“We’re waiting for warmer weather”; “Until Spring weather arrives the new GA schedule will be as follows”; which explains why #OccupySupplyFund supplies winter gear.) The dark happens, too. And although some see Occupy as an aerial canopy of leaping bright fire, I prefer to see Occupy as a species of rhizome: A mass of roots (radix) growing slowly and irresistibly, indeed invasively, and scaling horizontally by sending out runners everywhere.
But then, I garden; learning to grow food is my personal hedging strategy. Here’s the state of play this winter, which, readers, you will doubtless amplify or correct: Beginning last spring, Occupy started and spread in the ancient cities surrounding the Mediterranean basin: Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madrid, Rome, among many others; Alexandria, Manama, Barcelona. An Oakland Occupier had a similar experience: 1. 2. To camp or not to camp? That is Occupy’s question. Occupy Tampa has had a rough life. Born on a “Day of Rage” that drew 1,000 people to Tampa, Fla.’s downtown on Oct. 6, it put down roots three days later on a public sidewalk bordering Curtis Hixon Park. It soon blossomed into a community of more than 100 residents adorned with tents, medics, media, kitchen and library on a concrete patch less than 10 feet wide.
From day one, the Tampa police were a fixture in their lives. “They would come by at 6 a.m. to wake us up, and again in the afternoon to make us move our belongings off the sidewalk,” says Samantha Bowden, a 23-year-old senior at the University of South Florida. The occupiers taped off a 6-foot section of the sidewalk for egress and say the city conceded it had the right to a 24-hour presence, but the police were intent on retarding the occupation’s development by wielding a code against leaving articles on the sidewalk.
“A social experiment” The conflict between the organizing and the camp has cropped up in many occupations. Occupy Economics. Occupy Wall Street has thrown off many sparks. A little one landed in academic economics. On November 2, a group of Harvard students walked out on Greg Mankiw’s intro economics course – according to the professor himself “about 5 to 10 percent of the class stood up and quietly left.” Later that day, the Harvard Political Review posted an open letter the dissenters had written to Mankiw: We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement.
Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice. In April 1973, most of an audience walked out on Paul Samuelson.
It turned out to be a foreshock. What are the prospects? What is to be done? Occupy the Classroom? - Dani Rodrik. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space CAMBRIDGE – Early last month, a group of students staged a walkout in Harvard’s popular introductory economics course, Economics 10, taught by my colleague Greg Mankiw. Their complaint: the course propagates conservative ideology in the guise of economic science and helps perpetuate social inequality.
The students were part of a growing chorus of protest against modern economics as it is taught in the world’s leading academic institutions. Economics has always had its critics, of course, but the financial crisis and its aftermath have given them fresh ammunition, seeming to validate long-standing charges against the profession’s unrealistic assumptions, reification of markets, and disregard for social concerns. Mankiw, for his part, found the protesting students “poorly informed.” Consider the global financial crisis. In my book The Globalization Paradox, I contemplate the following thought experiment. The Trouble with Principles: Or, How to Not Lose Friends and Alienate People When Learning Economics (#OccupyWallStreet, #OWS) By Jake Romero, an economics student at Portland State University. You can reach him at jvc613 (at) gmail.com Economics has always been something of a battleground, but in November a group of about seventy Harvard students opened a new front in the ongoing hostilities: its introductory pedagogy.
In solidarity with the Occupy movement, the students staged a walkout of their principles course to protest what they called its “inherent bias.” In his rebuttal in the New York Times, Greg Mankiw countered that his teaching is careful to avoid policy conclusions and that its subject matter falls squarely within the current mainstream of the discipline. Firstly, one needn’t make explicit policy prescriptions to reproduce, in generation after generation of students, the fetishization of “free markets” that has been eroding civil society worldwide.
Generations of the world’s business people and public policy makers have been nursed on such courses. Ten Principles of Responsible Economics. Occupy Economics?: A Report Back from the Nerdiest Protest I’ve ever been to. « Ph.D. Octopus. By Peter I just got back from Chicago, where, along with attending the American Historical Association, I participated in a series of protests held by Occupy Chicago, along with CACHE (Coalition Against Corporatization of Higher Education) that targeted the American Economics Association (AEA). Its not everyday that the worlds of street protests and academic conferences blend so well. But then again, part of the point was to “puncture the bubble,” that academic economists live in. The protesters gave out “alternative” awards for Most Conflict of Interests (Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard), Intellectual Narrowness (Harvard’s Greg Mankiw), and top prize, the “Toxic Waste of Space Award” (Harvard/Obama administration’s Larry Summers). Other than a brief yelling match that one protester got in with a professor, the tone was light and fun.
It just so happens the protests came at a time of particularly hot debate about the ideology of the economics profession. Like this: Like Loading... David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words. In the final lines of his introduction to Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber writes that “[f]or a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions.” And as he put it in a guest post over at Savage Minds: The aim of the book was to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate…[T]he credit crisis —and near collapse of the global economy in 2008—afforded the perfect opportunity. In the wake of the disaster, it was as if suddenly, everyone wanted to start asking big questions again. Even The Economist, that bastion of neoliberal orthodoxy, was running cover headlines like “Capitalism: Was It A Good Idea?”
(my italics) It’s a hard book to review, though, because it’s doing several irreducibly different things at once (which I’ll try to lay out in as logical a fashion as I can manage). Now, the long version. David Graeber Speaking in Conversation with Andrej Grubacic : jaime omar yassin. David Graeber | The History of Debt at Occupy Onwards | NYC | 17 Dec 2012. Slavoj Zizek on Occupy Wall Street: a moving speech. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, spoke at Zuccotti Park, where the historic Occupy Wall Street events are currently unfolding. He spoke Saturday, October 8, 2011.
Filmed by Chris Spannos. Length 18 min. 39 sec. This beautiful speech is well worth listening to, or reading, as the transcript is below. Watch the video: Slavoj Zizek: “We Are The Awakening” – Occupy Wall Street Talk from The New Significance on Vimeo. Transcript of Slavoj Zizek: “They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. We are not destroying anything. In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel.
So what are we doing here? There is a danger. Remember. We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. What do we perceive today as possible? Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. Neoliberalism and OWS. This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.” The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World.
And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. This is Matt’s point. We can now, if we like, refight old battles. How did we get here? perspectives...
Roots...? What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber. The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street. Suppressing the protests... Occupy Movement Banner Project. Society Must Be Defended From Rats. CHART: Thanks To The 99 Percent Movement, Media Finally Covering Jobs Crisis And Marginalizing Deficit Hysteria. Global Wealth Distribution. Inside the 1% In a 325-Page SEC Letter, Occupy's Finance Gurus Take on Wall Street Lobbyists.