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Chris Hedges on the struggle to Occupy Wall Street.

Chris Hedges , 30 Sep 2011

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• #OCCUPYWALLSTREET
• Chris Hedges

Eric Lusion

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say "I am innocent" is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children's children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

This article originally appeared on truthdig. Chris Hedges has been at the Wall Street Occupation and gave an interview live from Freedom Plaza. Hedges’ latest book is a collection of his essays called The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. Check out OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

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With liberty and justice for all...

One of many signs placed on the ground at Zucotti Park, NYC, by Occupy Wall Street activists. (Photo by Lindsay Beyerstein.)

Web Only// Features » September 28, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: Creating Political Change?

The occupation of Zuccotti Park is an experiment in direct democracy.

BY Emily Manuel

America’s political classes would do well to listen to the grievances of those involved with Occupy Wall Street, for they undoubtedly represent a set of anxieties shared by a great deal of the population.

You wouldn’t know it from the news headlines in the United States, but for the past ten days hundreds of activists have been protesting 300 metres from the heart of Wall Street. On September 17th, activists converged in the heart of New York’s financial district, intent on occupying Wall Street. They were rebuffed by the police from that goal, and have instead began occupying the nearby Zuccotti Park, now renamed Liberty Plaza. The movement, called Occupy Wall Street, was sparked by the Canadian group Adbusters, and has captured the imagination of many on the Left hopeful for signs of an American version of the Arab Spring.

Yet much of the media have dismissed the Occupy Wall Street protests as out-of-touch hippies. In the New York Times, Ginia Bellaconte sneered at one protester “with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968.” She noted the protesters’ lack of a clear unifying demand, stating that “the group was clamoring for nothing in particular to happen right away.”

But this misunderstands the nature of the protest—the protest appears to be, in many ways, the right to a functioning democracy. With the nihilistic GOP-created debt ceiling crisis, the possible inability of the postal service to pay its bills, and another looming shutdown over a stand-off about disaster recovery funds, it is clear that there are indeed serious problems with the established American political process.

GlobalComment writer Anna Lekas Miller, on the scene in New York, told Tehran’s PressTV that Occupy Wall Street marks a disaffection from the American political system, a sense that it is impossible to create change within the two-party system:

I think there was a time that you could—speaking of FDR (President Roosevelt)—but right now you can’t because there has been a corporate takeover of politics.

You have something called ALEC—the American Legislative Exchange Council—where corporations literally will pay huge sums of money to get together with politicians, draft model legislation that is, then put across the US through state legislation, which is easier to pass than federal legislation.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that there is no limit on the amount of money corporations can spend on political campaigns. With the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, corporations with deep pockets have a far greater voice than ordinary citizens–as the political moves of the far-right Koch brothers in Wisconsin and elsewhere have shown. (See the October 2011 In These Times cover story by Joel Bleifuss, “Corporations Are Not People,” for more on the history of corporate personhood and the movements working to dismantle it.)

At the same time, as has been highlighted by the direct action group US Uncut, many corporations do not pay taxes at all. In 2010, the nation’s largest corporation General Electric, for instance, was paid a 3.2 billion benefit, incredibly making a profit from their taxes. Despite corporate personhood, corporations are far from responsible citizens of the country they do business in. No wonder protesters are chanting “pay your share” on Wall Street.

It is unsurprising therefore that some activists would seek to create an alternative to a corporate dominated democracy. Occupy Wall Street have been holding two “people’s assemblies” a day and intermittent marches, bypassing the media by providing their own livestream video and website, and spreading information by social media networks like Twitter. Nathan Schneider, editor of Waging Nonviolence, told Democracy Now! that “the core demand I think right now seems to be the right to organise, to have a political conversation in a public space. To show Wall Street, so to speak, what democracy looks like.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement has something in common with the Greek aganaktismenoi protest movements’ recent experiments in direct democracy. In July Costa Douzinas reported that in Syntagma Square in Athens,

Thousands of people come together daily in Syntagma to discuss the next steps. The parallels with the classical Athenian agora, which met a few hundred metres away, are striking. Aspiring speakers are given a number and called to the platform if that number is drawn, a reminder that many office-holders in classical Athens were selected by lots. The speakers stick to strict two-minute slots to allow as many as possible to contribute. The assembly is efficiently run without the usual heckling of public speaking. The topics range from organisational matters to new types of resistance and international solidarity, to alternatives to the catastrophically unjust measures. No issue is beyond proposal and disputation. In well-organised weekly debates, invited economists, lawyers and political philosophers present alternatives for tackling the crisis.

Despite this laudable methodology, and with a far greater attendance than that of Occupy Wall Street, the protesters in Syntagma have failed to create substantive change to the struggling Hellenic Republic.

It remains to be seen whether the new direct democracy will result in meaningful political change in the United States. The skeptical media coverage is correct on that score—without concrete political demands, it is difficult to imagine that happening right now.

But America’s political classes would do well to listen to the grievances of those involved with Occupy Wall Street, for they undoubtedly represent a set of anxieties shared by a great deal of the population. The corporate take-over of the American political process has not gone unnoticed, neither has the disparity between continued Wall Street profits and the cuts to the welfare state. As unemployment continues at high numbers, resentment surely stirs among those whose lives are slowly being drained at the expense of the corporate state.

Recently, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg warned that there would be riots in the streets if Washington does not create more jobs, warning of an American Arab Spring. He said, “we have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”

The NYPD certainly seems to see Occupy Wall Street as a threat, arresting over 80 people over the weekend. Videos uploaded to Youtube show officers apparently pepper spraying protesters, punching and dragging protesters. Alison Kilkenny at The Nation points out that this comes in the greater context of a suppression of Left wing activism in the United States, stating that “we know for a fact that the F.B.I. monitors activism groups, and this practice reached a frenzied level during the Bush administration years. These intimidation practices continue under President Obama in the form of raids.”

For all its militant-sounding rhetoric of occupation, Occupy Wall Street is unlikely to create revolutions—it is instead a utopian experiment at re-imagining the foundations of the democratic process. However, if the economic situation does not improve, and Republicans achieve the significant cuts to vital social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps that they have been pushing for, the United States will nevertheless indeed be on the brink of violence. A populace without jobs or social services is an angry, desperate one.

And if that happens, we should look to London for what happens when public resentment has no political voice. The UK riots that kicked off in Tottenham were preceded by an unsuccessful mass movement against the Cameron government’s austerity measures, but were themselves an anti-political, violent rampage of disaffection. It is hard not to wonder if the same will occur in the United States sooner or later, if the interests of the greater public continue to be sidelined for those of corporations.

Originally posted at Global Comment.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Emily Manuel is editor-in-chief of GlobalComment.com, a one-stop web magazine for readers who are looking for fresh, independent and eclectic commentaries written by writers from all over the world.

More information about Emily Manuel

Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right

Published on Thursday, September 29, 2011 by Dissent

Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right

by Mark Engler

#OccupyWallStreet protests are now well into their second week, and they are increasingly capturing the public spotlight. This is because, whatever limitations their occupation has, the protesters have done many things right.

I will admit that I was skeptical about the #OccupyWallStreet effort when it was getting started. My main concerns were the limited number of participants and the lack of coalition building. One of the things that was most exciting about the protests in Madison—and the global justice protests of old such as Seattle and A16—was that they brought together a wide range of constituencies, suggesting what a broad, inclusive progressive movement might look like. You had student activists and unaffiliated anarchists, sure; but you also had major institutional constituencies including the labor movement, environmentalists, faith-based organizations, and community groups. The solidarity was powerful. And, in the context of a broader coalition, the militancy, creativity, and artistic contributions of the autonomist factions made up for their lack of an organized membership base.

With #OccupyWallStreet the protest did not draw in any of the major institutional players on the left. Participants have come independently—mostly from anarchist and student activist circles—and turnout has been limited. Some of the higher estimates for the first day’s gathering suggest that a thousand people might have been there, and only a few hundred have been camping out.

That said, this relatively small group has been holding strong. As their message has gained traction—first in the alternative media, and then in mainstream news sources—they have drawn wider interest. On Tuesday night, Cornel West visited the occupied Zuccotti Park and spoke to an audience estimated at 2000. Rallies planned for later in the week will likely attract larger crowds. People will come because the occupation is now a hot story.

#OccupyWallStreet has accomplished a great deal in the past week and a half, with virtually no resources. The following are some of the things the participants have done that allowed what might have been a negligible and insignificant protest to achieve a remarkable level of success:

1. They chose the right target.

The #OccupyWallStreet protesters have been often criticized for not having clear demands. They endured a particularly annoying cheap shot from New York Times writer Ginia Bellafante, who (quoting a stockbroker sympathetically) resurrected the old canard that no one who uses an Apple computer can possibly say anything critical about capitalism. Such charges are as predictable as the tides. Media commentators love to condescend to protesters, and they endlessly recycle criticism of protests being naïve and unfocused.

I am among those who believe that the occupation would have benefited from having clearer demands at the outset—and that these would have been helpful in shaping the endgame that is to come. But protesters have largely overcome the lack of a particularly well-defined messaging strategy by doing something very important: choosing the right target.

Few institutions in our society are more in need of condemnation than the big banks and stockbrokers based where the critics are now camped. “Why are people protesting Wall Street?” For anyone who has lived through the recent economic collapse and the ongoing crises of foreclosure and unemployment, this question almost answers itself.

The protest’s initial call to action repeatedly stressed the need to get Wall Street money out of politics, demanding “Democracy not Corporatocracy.” Since then, many protesters have been emphasizing the idea that “We Are the 99 Percent” being screwed by the country’s wealthiest 1 percent. At Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes:

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power—in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions—is destroying financial security for everyone else?
....
So, yes, the people willing to engage in protests like these at the start may lack (or reject the need for) media strategies, organizational hierarchies, and messaging theories. But they’re among the very few people trying to channel widespread anger into activism rather than resignation, and thus deserve support and encouragement—and help—from anyone claiming to be sympathetic to their underlying message.

Notably, young protesters have been able to convey the idea that their generation, in particular, has been betrayed by our economy. This idea was picked up in remarkably hard-hitting commentary at MarketWatch.com, which reads like more like something you’d expect to find in the socialist press than on a business website:

[A]sk yourself how you might act if you were in school or fresh out of it or young and unemployed. What future has Wall Street, the heart and brain of our capitalist country, promised you? How does it feel to be the sons, daughters and grand kids of a “me” generation that’s run up the debt and run down the economy?

Unemployment is between 13% and 25% for people under 25. Student loans are defaulting at about 15% at a time when more young people have no alternative but to borrow to pay for school.

Meanwhile, Wall Street bonuses continue to be paid at close to all-time highs. Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS), took home $13.2 million last year, including a $3.2 million raise.

Such a message resonates with many, and protesters did something important to attract them:

2. They made a great poster.

I write this partially in jest. There is a joke among labor organizers that if you are spending all your time obsessing over the quality of your posters or handouts, rather than going out to actually talk to people, you are in big trouble.

In this case, however, there’s some truth to the idea that posters matter. When you’re not mobilizing an established organizational membership, but rather trying to capture the imagination of unaffiliated activists, protest planning is more akin to promoting a concert than staging a workplace strike. And if you’re doing that kind of promotion, how cool your call to arms is makes a difference.

#OccupyWallStreet has benefited from a series of great posters and promotional materials. Foremost among them is a lovely depiction of a ballerina dancing on top of Wall Street’s famous bull statue, created by the veteran leftist image-makers at Adbusters. The text below the bull reads simply: “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent.”

The poster hinted that the event would be exciting and creative and audacious. It suggested that culture jamming and dissident art would be part of the adventure. And it pointed to another thing the protesters did right:

3. They gave their action time to build.

Most protests take place for one afternoon and then are finished. Had #OccupyWallStreet done the same, it would already have been forgotten.

Instead, planners told participants to get ready to camp out. The event operated on the premise that challenging Wall Street would take a while, and that things would build with time. In fact, this is exactly what has happened. It took a few days for alternative press sources to catch on, but now the occupation is a leading story at outlets such as Democracy Now.

The extended timeframe for the protest has allowed for the drama of direct action to deepen, which is my next point about the protesters:

4. They created a good scenario for conflict.

By claiming space in Zuccotti Park (also known as Liberty Plaza), #OccupyWallStreet set up an action scenario that has effectively created suspense and generated interest over time.

Participants there have invoked Tahrir Square. On the one hand, the comparison is silly, but on the other hand, the fact that occupations of public space have taken on a new significance in the past year is another thing that made #OccupyWallStreet a good idea. If the authorities allow them to continue camping out in lower Manhattan, the protesters can claim victory for their experiment in “liberated space.” Of course, everyone expects that police will eventually swoop in and clear the park. But, contrary to what some people think, civil disobedients have long known that arrests do not work against the movement. Rather, they illustrate that participants are willing to make real sacrifices to speak out against Wall Street’s evils.

The fact that police have used undue force (in one now-famous incident, pepper spraying women who were already detained in a mesh police pen and clearly doing nothing to resist arrest) only reinforces this message.

When will the police finally come and clear out the occupation’s encampment? We don’t know. And the very question creates further suspense and allows the protest to continue gaining momentum.

5. They are using their momentum to escalate.

Lastly, but probably most importantly, the #OccupyWallStreet effort is using its success at garnering attention in the past week and a half to go even bigger. Their action is creating offshoots, with solidarity protests (#OccupyBoston, #OccupyLA) now gathering in many other cities. Protesters in Liberty Plaza are encouraging more participants to join them. And they are preparing more people to risk arrest or other police reprisal.

It might seem obvious that a protest movement would treat a successful event as an occasion to escalate. But, in fact, it is quite rare. More established organizations are almost invariably afraid to do so: afraid of legal repercussions, afraid of the resources it would require to sustain involvement, afraid of bad press or other negative outcomes. Such timidity is anathema to strategies of nonviolent direct action.

In this respect, the fact that #OccupyWallStreet has not relied on established progressive organizations ends up being a strength. Its independent participants are inspired by the increasing attention their critique of Wall Street is getting, and they are willing to make greater sacrifices now that their action has begun to capture the public imagination.

This can only be regarded as a positive development. For the more that people in this country are talking about why outraged citizens would set up camp in the capital of our nation’s financial sector, the better off we will be. #OccupyWallStreet protesters have gotten that much right.

© 2011 Dissent

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website http://www.DemocracyUprising.com

September 28, 2011 at 12:08:59

If Obama Doesn't Want to Lead the Revolution - Young People Will

By Thom Hartmann (about the author)

Thirty years ago - Ronald Reagan led a counter-revolution in America against the revolutions of the New Deal and the Great Society. It was a counter-revolution that ripped our economy from the hands of the middle class....and handed it off to the wealthiest corporate CEOs and Banksters in the world - letting America's oligarchs run the show.

Now - thirty years later - we know how that counter-revolution turned out - and the backlash - or revolution - against Reagan, and subsequent Presidents who carried on his principles, is underway. The Streets of lower Manhattan are buzzing today with America's next generation of leaders - young people in their twenties - who will inevitably determine the direction of this nation - but first - must wrestle back power from Reagan's oligarchs who work on Wall Street.

This is what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about - an economically and politically lost generation of Americans who - faced with unemployment and debt - have chosen to change the game rather than accept the status quo - to dismantle Reagan's revolution rather than find jobs within it. After all - what other choices do they have?

The poverty rate for young families under 30 years old is a staggering 37% - the highest ever recorded in the history of this nation. Student-loan debt topped credit-card debt for the first time ever this year - more than a trillion dollars - as more and more college graduates enter a a job market that doesn't have any jobs. The unemployment rate among 20 to 24 year olds today is nearly 15%. No jobs, no benefits, no life, no American Dream - the economic situation for today's young people can only be described as dire - and therefore many of them feel that they have two choices - live on the streets - or take to the streets.

These young men and women - most of whom were born during the Reagan presidecy - and have no recollection of him and his policies - were unable to protest the tax cuts he pushed for the rich that created the massive wealth inequality we see today. They were unable to protest the deregulation on Wall Street he and his counter-revolutionaries supported, which set the stage for the market collapse three years ago - and the crime of the century known as the Bush Bailout. They were unable to fight against the free trade policies that led to the outsourcing of good American jobs. They weren't of age to have a say in the direction of this nation 30 years ago or even 15 years ago - but they are today. And as the effects of all these disastrous policies are plaguing the first generation of American born in Reagan's United States - the long overdue protests have begun.

Reagan's chickens are coming home to roost. Bolstered by a viral video of a rogue police macing law-abiding women over the weekend - "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators are standing strong - and are spreading their message throughout the nation. Over the weekend - demonstrators in Los Angeles launched their own "Occupy Los Angeles" movement, and plan to take their camp to City Hall this weekend. Similar demonstrations are planned for Chicago - Denver - Detroit - Cleveland - Boston - Philadelphia - Seattle - Kansas City - Phoenix - and our nation's capital - Washington, DC. This is the start of something big - the start of a revolution.

This is the revolution that they - and even older Americans - hoped for when Barack Obama pledged to "fundamentally change the United States and the world" when he was elected President in 2008. But so far - this pledge has been unfulfilled. Turns out - Barack Obama was not that much of a revolutionary. But ultimately - it was never about him - it was about us - and in particular it was about the young people - because all revolutions - even Reagan's - don't originate from one man - they originate from the people - from the bottom up. From Jefferson to Lincoln - and from FDR to Reagan - these men who presided over great changes in America didn't create revolutions - they simply seized control of a nation pregnant with revolution and oversaw the transformation - and in some cases guided it. If President Obama discovers his inner revolutionary and steps forward with that voice and message and behavior, he'll get re-elected - and then he will have to carry forward with a revolution.

On the other hand, if President Obama doesn't want to be a revolutionary - if he doesn't want to take on the banksters - if he doesn't take on and actually reverse Reagan's counter-revolution - that's fine - because the young people assembled in Manhattan - and all over the nation - will.

It's already started...

ACTIVISM & VISION

AlterNet / By Arun Gupta

The Revolution Begins at Home: A Clarion Call to Join the Wall Street Protests

We all need to go down and join the occupation -- and not just by "liking" it on Facebook, signing a petition or retweeting protest photos.

September 27, 2011 |

Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

What is occurring on Wall Street right now is truly remarkable. For over 10 days, in the sanctum of the great cathedral of global capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.

They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations, from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.

While the Wall Street occupation is growing, it needs an all-out commitment from everyone who cheered the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, said "We are all Wisconsin," and stood in solidarity with the Greeks and the Spaniards. This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or health care, or thinks they have no future.

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. Perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street -- whether that's 5,000, 10,000 or 50,000 -- will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and for realizing a society based on human needs, not hedge fund profits.

After all, who would have imagined a year ago that Tunisians and Egyptians would oust their dictators?

At Liberty Park, the nerve center of the occupation, more than 500 people gather every day to debate, discuss and organize what to do about our failed system that has allowed the 400 richest Americans at the top to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom.

It's astonishing that this self-organized festival of democracy has sprouted on the turf of the masters of the universe, the men who play the tune that both political parties and the media dance to. The New York Police Department, which has deployed hundreds of officers at a time to surround and intimidate protesters, is capable of arresting everyone and clearing Liberty Plaza in minutes. But they haven't, which is also astonishing.

That's because assaulting peaceful crowds in a public square demanding real democracy -- economic and not just political -- would remind the world of the brittle autocrats who brutalized their people demanding justice before they were swept away by the Arab Spring. And the state violence has already backfired. After police attacked a Saturday afternoon march that started from Liberty Park the crowds only got bigger and media interest grew.

The Wall Street occupation has already succeeded in revealing the bankruptcy of the dominant powers -- the economic, the political, media and security forces. They have nothing positive to offer humanity, not that they ever did for the Global South, but now their quest for endless profits means deepening the misery with a thousand austerity cuts.

Even their solutions are cruel jokes. They tell us that the "Buffett Rule" would spread the pain by asking the penthouse set to sacrifice a tin of caviar, which is what the proposed tax increase would amount to. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to sacrifice health care, food, education, housing, jobs and perhaps our lives to sate the ferocious appetite of capital.

That's why more and more people are joining the Wall Street occupation. They can tell you about their homes being foreclosed upon, months of grinding unemployment or minimum-wage dead-end jobs, staggering student debt loads, or trying to live without decent health care. It's a whole generation of Americans with no prospects, but who are told to believe in a system that can only offer them "Dancing With the Stars" and pepper spray to the face.

Yet against every description of a generation derided as narcissistic, apathetic and hopeless they are staking a claim to a better future for all of us.

That's why we all need to join in. Not just by "liking" it on Facebook, signing a petition at Change.org or retweeting protest photos, but by going down to the occupation itself.

There is great potential here. Sure, it's a far cry from Tahrir Square or even Wisconsin. But there is the nucleus of a revolt that could shake America's power structure as much as the Arab world has been upended.

Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.

To be fair, the scene in Liberty Plaza seems messy and chaotic. But it's also a laboratory of possibility, and that's the beauty of democracy. As opposed to our monoculture world, where political life is flipping a lever every four years, social life is being a consumer and economic life is being a timid cog, the Wall Street occupation is creating a polyculture of ideas, expression and art.

Yet while many people support the occupation, they hesitate to fully join in and are quick to offer criticism. It's clear that the biggest obstacles to building a powerful movement are not the police or capital -- it's our own cynicism and despair.

Perhaps their views were colored by the New York Times article deriding protestors for wishing to "pantomime progressivism" and "Gunning for Wall Street with faulty aim." Many of the criticisms boil down to "a lack of clear messaging."

But what's wrong with that? A fully formed movement is not going to spring from the ground. It has to be created. And who can say what exactly needs to be done? We are not talking about ousting a dictator; though some say we want to oust the dictatorship of capital.

There are plenty of sophisticated ideas out there: end corporate personhood; institute a "Tobin Tax" on stock purchases and currency trading; nationalize banks; socialize medicine; fully fund government jobs and genuine Keynesian stimulus; lift restrictions on labor organizing; allow cities to turn foreclosed homes into public housing; build a green energy infrastructure.

But how can we get broad agreement on any of these? If the protesters came into the square with a pre-determined set of demands it would have only limited their potential. They would have either been dismissed as pie in the sky -- such as socialized medicine or nationalize banks -- or if they went for weak demands such as the Buffett Rule their efforts would immediately be absorbed by a failed political system, thus undermining the movement.

That's why the building of the movement has to go hand in hand with common struggle, debate and radical democracy. It's how we will create genuine solutions that have legitimacy. And that is what is occurring down at Wall Street.

Now, there are endless objections one can make. But if we focus on the possibilities, and shed our despair, our hesitancy and our cynicism, and collectively come to Wall Street with critical thinking, ideas and solidarity we can change the world.

How many times in your life do you get a chance to watch history unfold, to actively participate in building a better society, to come together with thousands of people where genuine democracy is the reality and not a fantasy?

For too long our minds have been chained by fear, by division, by impotence. The one thing the elite fear most is a great awakening. That day is here. Together we can seize it.

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper.

September 25, 2011 at 23:43:38

Inside Occupy Wall Street

By Danny Schechter (about the author)



An NYPD officer looks with scrutiny at the photographer taking his picture
during the Occupy Wall Street protests, 09/24/11. (photo: Peter Harris)

Before you read on, watch this: a video from the base camp of the #OccupyWallStreet protest that is now in its seventh day. It's called "Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution." (The video was produced by Martyna Starosta and her friend Iva.)

These are the faces of a wannabe revolution, more than a protest but not yet quite a major Movement. The spirit is infectious, perhaps because of the sincerity of the participants and their obvious commitment to their ideals.

Occupy Wall Street is more than a protest; it is as much an exercise in building a leaderless, bottom-up resistance community with a more democratic approach to challenging the system where everyone is encouraged to have a say.

But saying that also leads to a conflict between my emotional identification with the kids that have rallied in this small park/public space on Liberty Street to exercise some liberty, with a despairing analysis that wishes this enterprise well but harbors deep doubts about its staying power and impact.

This privately-owned park, devastated by debris on 9/11 and then rebuilt by a real estate magnate who named it after himself, is also a place that is under 24-hour surveillance from a hostile New York City Police Department which has put up a fence on one side of the park, brought down a spy tower from Times Square to track the participants from on high, and sprinkled infiltrators into the crowd.

By the time I left, late on Saturday afternoon, the police had arrested 70 people who had joined a march that went from Wall Street to Union Square, New York's traditional gathering place for political rallies for nearly l00 years.

You can watch it all on a live stream.

In many ways this is a 2011-style protest modeled after Tahrir Square in Cairo. It is non-violent, organized around what's called a "General Assembly" where the community meets daily to debate its political direction and discuss how it sees itself. There are no formal leaders or spokespeople, no written-down political agenda and no shared demands. They focus on using social media. Twitter is their megaphone.

They have no sound system. When participants want to make an announcement, they yell "Mic Check," which is repeated by the whole crowd. They also repeat the announcement a few words at a time so everyone can hear it.

This bottom-up anarchist sensibility and ideology conflicts with the mass mobilizations of old where an organization issues a call and a coalition of groups carries it out.

I ran into some of yesterday's movement leaders: Leslie Cagan, who ran United for Peace and Justice and organized the massive anti-Iraq War protests and marches in New York and Washington before and after. She was as intrigued as I was about this gathering of the committed. She found the focus a bit vague, but seemed willing to give it a chance to grow and learn by making its own mistakes.

Other 60s activists like Aron Kay, known as the "pie man" for all the famous and infamous people he pied in the face to protest their crimes and misdemeanors -- including Andy Warhol for dining with the Shah of Iran -- was also showing his solidarity by turning up and squatting in the park.

Lower Manhattan on a Saturday is usually a Mosque-less Mecca for tourists visiting Ground Zero, a crime scene if there ever was one. It is a symbol of a national failure to defend this country as well.

It's also the place where the 911 Truth Movement shares its findings weekly with visitors about what "really happened."

Just a few blocks away is another crime scene: Wall Street, which symbolizes an ongoing economic failure. In this past week, access has been limited, and in this free country of ours protestors could not parade in front of the NY Stock Exchange, another privately-run financial institution. That led Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog to opine, "I'm beginning to wonder whether the right to assemble is effectively dead in the US."

Many banks like Chase doubled their security forces and put up fences to protect themselves from the people the NY media hve labeled "kids and ageing hippies."

The panic in the exchange is mirrored in the insecurity in the streets where surveillance cameras, private police forces and NY cops defend the bastions of privilege.

The police went on the offensive Saturday with mass arrests of activists. Scott Galindez filed this report on Reader Supported News, "While the live feeds were up I witnessed a very powerful arrest of a law student whose parents were recently evicted from their home. He dropped to his knees and gave an impassioned plea for the American people to wake up! There are reports of police kettling protesters with a big orange net, at least five maced, and police using tasers."

There were also reports of the use of mace, tear gas and pepper spray which hit two old women. We are so used to these storm-trooper tactics that most expect them. There had been fewer arrests last week, although the police seem to now have identified key organizers and are singling them out.

On Saturday, police gave out a notice saying that it is now illegal to sleep in the park. They then put up a sign on a park wall. I watched a member of the police command, a "white shirt" named Timoney, march into the park and gruffly order the communications team that spends most of its time tweeting out the latest news to take down some large umbrellas the activists were using to protect their computers from rain.

The police consider these "structures" and prohibit them. Earlier in the week, they arrested people for using tarps to protect their gear. (They don't see the irony in that term given the way the TARP law bailed out the banksters.)

Many of the people in the park believe the end may be coming with the police eager to end what they see as a Woodstock on Wall Street, complete with topless teens and long-haired militants. This assemblage clearly affects their macho Identity as upholders of law and order as they define it. They probably agree with the right-wing Red State website that calls the protesters a "menagerie."

I wouldn't rule out mass arrests once a provocation, theirs or the protesters', provides the pretext.

Will the Occupy Wall Street collectives be able to continue to occupy a zone that has been occupied for years by the greedsters of the finance world?

More importantly, will the issues they are trying to draw attention to, however symbolically, be taken up by others?

Will it take more cracked heads, or even a police killing, to move New Yorkers to support a campaign to rein in Wall Street?

Where are the unions and New York's progressive democrats and organizations? Why aren't they in the streets?

Why don't they realize that economic justice issues are essential to transforming this oligarch-driven country?

I have been calling for years for more protests on Wall Street to put the issues of Wall Street crime on the agenda. But with media barely covering this "occupation," with the activists being denigrated for their youth and inexperience, will this one have the impact I was hoping for?

It seems unlikely.

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET: A Call for Reninforcements

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET: A Call for Reninforcements

Dan Nguyen

Hey jammers,

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET is happening right now at Liberty Plaza!

It started last Saturday, when 5,000 Americans descended on to the financial district of Lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk towards the "financial Gomorrah" of the nation. They vowed to "occupy Wall Street" and to "bring justice to the bankers", but the New York police thwarted their efforts, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints. Undeterred, protesters walked laps around the area before holding a people's assembly and setting up a semi-permanent protest encampment in a park on Liberty Street, a stone's throw from Wall Street and a block from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Three hundred spent the night, several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day and as we write this, the encampment is digging in for a long-term stay. #OCCUPYWALLSTREET has been established in Zuccotti Park, which has now been renamed Liberty Plaza. With Liberty Plaza liberated, and acting as a base in the financial district, the indignados have been sending out raiding parties to nearby Wall Street and beyond.

Bravo to those courageous souls in the encampment on New York's Liberty Street. Every night that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET continues will escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.

Now, it is crucial for everyone from all over the world to flock to the encampment. Call in to work sick, invite your friends and hop on a bus or plane to New York City.

We need you at Liberty Plaza!

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

occupywallstreet.org / occupywallst.org / nycga.net / Reddit

PS. The media is finally buzzing about #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. There have been reports at Democracy Now!, MSNBC, CNN, WSJ, NYT, El Pais and elsewhere.

---

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AlterNet.org

"Occupy Wall Street" Today in NYC: A "Day of Rage" Kicking Off Our Own Arab Spring?

Later today, activists will file downtown and set up tarps, tents and sleeping bags to being an "occupation" of Wall Street in protest of the financial and corporate hegemony. Their specific demand is for free and fair elections, ending big contributions and demanding that one citizen be allowed to contribute a dollar.

But more generally, the aim of the protests is to demonstrate a "Tahrir Square in the West"--to show the powers that be that Americans are as stalwart and unyielding in their pursuits of justice as citizens who are taking part in the "Arab Spring."

Here's the latest update from Adbusters, an organizer of today's events:

Saturday's occupation begins at noon in Bowling Green Park. The first people's assembly will start at 3 p.m. at One Chase Manhattan Plaza and continue until our one demand is agreed upon by all. Check out the full schedule of events.

A leaked bulletin from the New York Police Department reveals that they expect at least 5,000, and maybe even 20,000 people to swarm Wall Street tomorrow. That just might be enough for us to pull this off!

A telephone support line has been set up by occupywallst.org. For directions or help call (877) 881-3020 to speak with a local activist. For legal advice, or to report an arrest, call the National Lawyers Guild at (212) 679-6018.

This should be an exciting movement to follow. To follow the protests in real time, check out the Twitter hashtags#usdor, #sept17, or #occupywallstreet.

globalrevolution on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Controversy and Confusion Over the Latest WikiLeaks Revelations

AlterNet.org


AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe

Controversy and Confusion Over the Latest WikiLeaks Revelations: 8 Things You Really Need to Know

The latest WikiLeaks release comes with a bunch of accusations and confusion.

September 9, 2011 |

WikiLeaks has become a symbol of resistance to total government and corporate control over information and by extension, our lives.

Yet it often seems lately that the drama surrounding the organization is given more coverage than its actual revelations. Aside from founder Julian Assange's ongoing battle to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape and sexual assault charges, there's growing conflict with the leaks organization's former media partners over unredacted documents, arguments in the press about the proper way to handle sensitive information, and of course the ongoing concern of many for the treatment in prison of alleged leaker Bradley Manning.

After the recent exposure of all 251,287 diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks possessed in their original forms, with names of sources and sensitive information intact, the swirl of controversy has all but overshadowed the value of the information itself. Still, WikiLeaks continues to shape the public debate over war, diplomacy, US power, secrecy, information technology, and the role of journalism.

We've got eight things you need to know to be up-to-date on the latest with WikiLeaks.

1. Unredacted documents released

While working with the Guardian newspaper to release selected leaked documents, WikiLeaks briefly placed an encrypted file containing its entire cache of documents on a shared server and gave the password to reporters collaborating on the release. When Guardian editor David Leigh's book about WikiLeaks came out, he published the password to the encrypted file, apparently unaware that the file had been copied and was circulating on the Web--and that the password still worked. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks decided that since the information was already available, they'd release the full cache of diplomatic cables given to the site. WikiLeaks, after querying its Twitter followers, published a searchable database containing all 251,287 cables. While it's been described as “an astonishingly comprehensive, publicly available, fully searchable and free archive of US diplomacy covering every corner of the globe,” the archive contains the full, unredacted versions of the cables—including names and descriptions of sources, including whistleblowers and human rights activists.

Glenn Greenwald wrote:

“This incident is unfortunate in the extreme for multiple reasons: it's possible that diplomatic sources identified in the cables (including whistleblowers and human rights activists) will be harmed; this will be used by enemies of transparency and WikiLeaks to disparage both and even fuel efforts to prosecute the group; it implicates a newspaper, the Guardian, that generally produces very good and responsible journalism; it likely increases political pressure to impose more severe punishment on Bradley Manning if he's found guilty of having leaked these cables; and it will completely obscure the already-ignored, important revelations of serious wrongdoing from these documents. It's a disaster from every angle.”

WikiLeaks head Assange claimed that it was necessary to release the information because “We had a case where every intelligence agency has the material and the people who are mentioned do not have the material … So you have a race between the bad guys and the good guys and it was necessary for us to stand on the side of the good guys.”

Obviously Assange considers himself one of the good guys, but the exposure of activists and confidential sources around the world could have serious consequences for those named, as Greenwald pointed out, and also make other whistleblowers less inclined to go to WikiLeaks with their secrets.

[Again, if revealing the "truth" causes collateral damage, there's something wrong with the system. We're using systemic faults to perpetuate the lie. ~Bear]

2. New revelations

Though many of the WikiLeaks cable trove had been previously released with names redacted, and the controversy over their release threatened to overshadow the information within them, there were a few new revelations worth noting.

Greenwald pointed out “[O]ne of the newly released cables reveals that Israel, according to what it told the U.S., attacked what it claims were Hamas members in Gaza with drones, and accidentally killed 16 people inside a mosque during prayer time.”

There's also a cable confirming that troops, in 2006, carried out a house raid on the home of an Iraqi farmer, handcuffing all the residents of the house before shooting them all in the head. They included children aged 5, 3, and 5 months, the farmer's 74-year-old mother, and visiting relatives. The cable, from Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, to Condoleeza Rice, also reveals that a US airstrike was then called in on the house, presumably to destroy evidence, but “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

Salon's Justin Elliott reports on another cable, one expressing concern over Microsoft's relationship with deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali:

“In a September 2006 cable flagged by ZDNet, an official at the embassy in Tunis expressed reservations about a deal that provided 'for Microsoft investment in training, research, and development, but also commits the GOT [Government of Tunisia] to using licensed Microsoft software.' The basic concern was that the software giant would be helping Ben Ali's regime oppress Tunisians more effectively.”

On WikiLeaks' own site, it catalogues 30 new revelations, including that China's nuclear safety is at risk due to outdated technology, and that Wal-Mart has unions in China but not in the US. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has children, including former child soldiers, working for $1 or $2 a day in the mines and the government is looking the other way, and "Guyana is well on its way to narco-statehood."

One cable describes “institutionalised discrimination and the denial of public services” to Israel's Bedouin citizens, even though they "continue to serve voluntarily in the IDF and otherwise support the state, media commentators and Israeli politicians often refer to the threat of a second ’intifada’ coming from the Negev Bedouin."

And the New York Times reported in detail on the complications coming from the Chinese cables, none of which are super-secret, but which, the Times writes, “could lead to serious consequences for Chinese academics, students and others who talked frankly to American officials, and who are identified, either by name or by precise description, in cables dealing with analyses of Chinese positions.”

3. War with the press?

The release of the unredacted cables drew an angry response from WikiLeaks' former media partners, the Guardian, Le Monde, the New York Times, El Pais, and Der Spiegel. While WikiLeaks would post the cables on its own site, reporters at the media partners carefully pored through the cables and wrote articles explaining the most important (to them) facts within.

The partners released a statement that said in part "we deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the un-redacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk," and they argued "the decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone."

This last bit because Assange posted a commentary on the WikiLeaks site announcing that he had “commenced pre-litigation action" against the Guardian. Yet WikiLeaks, the Guardian noted, has threatened them with lawsuits before and none of them have come to pass.

Assange blames David Leigh and the Guardian for forcing his hand by releasing the password to the file cache; Leigh denies this, pointing out that he was told the password would be temporary and that the files should not have been so easily available.

Whomever is most to blame for the release of the unredacted cables, it seems likely that media organizations will be less interested in working with Assange and WikiLeaks in the future.

4. Fallout with former members of WikiLeaks

In addition to threatening suit against the Guardian, Assange has also threatened a lawsuit against Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former lieutenant to Assange at WikiLeaks before his departure (on bad terms) to found a competitor site, OpenLeaks (which Greenwald notes has so far yet to produce any leaks of its own). Assange claims that Domscheit-Berg was the one responsible for spreading the name and location of the file containing the unredacted cables around the Web.

Robert X. Cringely at InfoWorld, in analyzing responsibility for the revelations, wrote:

“If you want to tell the world what an irresponsible egomaniac Assange has been, that's fine -- but you don't do it by being an equally irresponsible egomaniac. The marriage of the stupidly leaked password with the location of the file it applies to comes down to a spat between two ego-driven radicals. Gee, that's one we all haven't heard before.”

But that's not the only casualty of the fight between Assange and Domscheit-Berg. According to the BBC, Domscheit-Berg had in his possession several documents leaked to WikiLeaks, including a copy of the complete US no-fly list—which he has supposedly “shredded” to avoid compromising sources.

5. Bank of America documents destroyed

One of the most anticipated revelations from WikiLeaks may never come out, now. Along with the no-fly list, Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed five gigabytes of data about Bank of America. I wrote recently:

“Bank of America might be breathing a sigh of relief this week, as a breakaway WikiLeaks member told Der Speigel that he had destroyed five gigabytes of information from the troubled bank. Daniel Domscheit-Berg claimed that he destroyed the data in order to make sure the sources would not be exposed. Julian Assange claimed this winter to have damning information on the big bank, but held out on releasing it.

But just the threat alone was enough to send BoA to web security firm HBGary—or so we found out when hacker collective Anonymous broke into HBGary's files and found a file containing a plan to take down WikiLeaks, including attacks aimed at reporters and bloggers like Glenn Greenwald.”

While Bank of America continues to struggle, it appears that at least it doesn't have to worry about its dirty laundry being aired in public.

6. Bradley Manning update

This week, the Council of Europe, an international organization the BBC describes as Europe's “human rights watchdog,” released a report expressing support for accused leaker Bradley Manning. The report called Manning a “whistleblower,” and thanked the Army soldier for helping to expose human rights violations, including the targeting of civilians.

Manning remains in Fort Leavenworth awaiting trial for leaking the cables and a shocking video of a helicopter attack in Iraq. In July, Wired magazine released the full chat logs purported to be between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the government informant who turned Manning in, that will no doubt be important at trial.

In addition, the logs reveal personal information: Manning appears to tell Lamo about being transgender. (Emily Manuel speculated on this topic for AlterNet earlier this summer.)

7. Julian Assange update

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains on house arrest—or rather, mansion arrest—in the UK as he continues to fight extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual assault and rape.

There's also the possibility that he could be extradited to the US to face charges over the leaking of the documents; and over the release of the unredacted documents, he could also face charges in his home country of Australia. Among the unredacted names in the 251,287 cables is one belonging to a senior Australian Security Intelligence Organization officer—revealing that name is a crime.

A decision on his extradition appeal should come next month.

Meanwhile, Assange is the personal target of much of the anger at WikiLeaks from its former press partners, and others in the press don't seem to think very highly of the self-styled radical. Robert X. Cringely wrote, “Assange may think himself as some kind of master spy, but he's less James Bond and more Maxwell Smart.”

8. Is WikiLeaks done?

"Our promise to sources is [still] that we will protect them and we will publish, and we will publish with impact, and I think it is clear to everyone that we kept our promise," Assange said in a speech to a Berlin technology trade show.

But is that actually true?

The Sydney Morning Herald noted:

“[N]early a year after critical software was removed by Domscheit-Berg and another WikiLeaks defector, WikiLeaks' confidential submission mechanism remains out of action. Assange says the facility will be up and running soon and that WikiLeaks has more startling information in its secure servers, but this remains to be seen.”

The paper also pointed out that public interest in the WikiLeaks cables seemed to wane. The initial shock over the first video and then the first cables has led to fatigue; now, there is more interest in how the unredacted cables came to be published than in their contents.

Mary-Beth Snow noted back in 2010 the added value even Assange knew his media partners brought:

“The release of the documents to the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel was thus a canny move, but one that factored in its own obsolescence. Last year, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that 'you’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.'"

And now that Assange seems to have burned bridges with his media partners and published all the information he has, if Domscheit-Berg has destroyed the Bank of America documents and other leaked files, what's the next step for WikiLeaks?

“Will anyone want to play with WikiLeaks again?” asked Mathew J. Schwartz at InformationWeek. The Sydney Morning Herald's piece is titled “Nothing left to leak?”

And Cringely pointed out:

“As independent media withers up and blows away, we are increasingly at the mercy of megacorps for our information. Independent, untouchable, unimpeachable sources for secrets those in power don't want you to know could fill the gap left by the death of investigative journalism. That was the idea, anyway. The reality turns out to be slightly different.”

Truly independent media face an uphill battle as they try to expose the secrets of massive corporations and powerful governments. The odds are stacked against the public's access to information. Even with WikiLeaks' exposure of secrets, we can see that little has changed politically. Is it time for a more proactive type of hacktivism, such as those practiced by Anonymous and Lulzsec, or will WikiLeaks come back with even more provocative revelations?

Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @seasonothebitch.

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET in Four Days

• 

Adbusters Blog

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET in Four Days

What will happen this Saturday when thousands of us descend on Lower Manhattan and start walking toward Wall Street?

Adbusters , 13 Sep 2011

• #OCCUPYWALLSTREET

See more posters at occupywallstreet.org

Hey you jammers, dreamers, patriots and revolutionaries out there,

What will happen this Saturday when thousands of us descend on Lower Manhattan and start walking towards Wall Street?

If the police try to stop us, how will we respond?

This is what happened in Madrid last month when the Spanish government tried to stop people from gathering in the Puerta del Sol, site of the people's encampment:

"All day long, 300 police officers kept the square hermetically sealed off, even closing the Sol metro station – one of the largest and most important in the city … When the protesters realized they couldn't take the square, they quickly dissolved into a dozen side-streets and regrouped on a number of key locations … For hours now, protesters have been blocking all the main traffic arteries in the city center … Tens of thousands of indignados have brought Madrid to a complete standstill in a spontaneous and defiant bid to reclaim Puerta del Sol … The mass protest is now reported to be headed back towards Sol for a second time, in another attempt to take back the square."
– Jérôme E. Roos

If the police block us temporarily from occupying Wall Street, then let's turn all of lower Manhattan into our Tahrir Square. Let's sing our songs in the lobby of Goldman Sachs and in Chase Manhattan Plaza; let's wave our signs outside the SEC and the Federal Reserve; let's convene our people's assemblies around the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green … and if need be, let's set up our encampments in nearby Battery Park and other places until we're ready to walk into Wall Street again …

Anything can and will happen this Saturday. That's the beauty of it! Ultimately, the only thing that matters in how many of us turn up eager to be a part of a spontaneous creative swarm and determined to bring the financial fraudsters to justice.

Bring signs, flowers, food and a revolutionary mood … and a commitment to absolute nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

PS.

The S17 meme is rumbling all over the world now … Milan, Madrid, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Santander, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and now Algeria and Israel are all on board! Could this be the beginning of a new global economic order?

occupywallstreet.org // occupywallst.org // Reddit // Facebook