The Strategic Pincer. (a new operational model)

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Adbusters Blog

Tactical Briefing #36

The Strategic Pincer.

Adbusters , 23 Jul 2012

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• #occupymainstreet
• #occupywallstreeet
• Bank of America
• banks
• capitalism
• Robin Hood Tax

NICK WHALEN / KEN ILIO

Alright all you existential diggers and expectant souls out there,

Defying all cynicism, the passion on the streets keeps burning … with the crisis of capitalism intensifying people’s rage only grows, erupting in unexpected places like Quebec, Moscow, Mexico, Tel Aviv, Khartoum, Addis Ababa … meanwhile we keep learning new tricks in Madrid, Los Angeles, Greece, Palestine, Manhattan and Hong Kong.

The Zuccotti encampment model may have had its day, but the spirit of our movement lives on in the hearts and minds of hundreds of million of people around the world who know in their gut that the future does not compute.

Now a new operational model is emerging: the strategic pincer —> We attack the global financial system from above with big bang protests, uprisings and revolts —> concurrently we attack the global financial system from below with hundreds of daily move-your-money actions at the 35,000 branches of megabanks worldwide.

The Bank of America has 6,200 branches, Wells Fargo 6,600, JPMorgan Chase 5,500, Citigroup 1,300; Barclays has 4,700 branches in 50 countries, Deutsche Bank 3,100 in 72 countries, HSBC 7,200 in 85 and Goldman Sachs has over 70 offices worldwide … in front of these outposts of global capital we pitch our tents, bang our pots and pans, hold our credit card cut ups … we hand out pamphlets to the customers going in and out … we engage them in passionate conversation and convince them to move their money … we trigger a chain reaction and move $1-trillion away from the megabanks before yearend, changing global banking for good.

With our strategic pincer we beat the shit out of global capitalism over the next few months — metaphorically speaking of course — and then we escalate towards a series of global solutions: a Robin Hood Tax, pushing through a binding accord on climate change and launching hybrid Blue/Green Pirate political parties in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the UK, Japan …

Stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith … Capitalism is heaving and our movement has just begun.
for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org

What Integrity to the Occupy Movement Demands of Us

What Integrity to the Occupy Movement Demands of Us

by Joseph G. Ramsey / July 18th, 2012

That we work to defeat and to overthrow the rule of the 1% (and the 0.1%) over our lives, our society, and our world;

That we devote our lives to ending the oppression, domination, and exploitation of people both near and far;

That we defend what remains of public space and the public sector against neoliberal attempts to privatize or destroy it;

That we stand up for the freedom of speech and assembly, of dissent and public protest, as rights which no law-maker can revoke;

That we work for social equality: the radical redistribution of wealth, the transformation and/or abolition of oppressive institutions, the dismantling of unaccountable hierarchies, and the thorough democratization of society;

That we aspire towards egalitarianism in our own movement and in our own lives, seeking to build others up as equals, not to subordinate them as tools or inferiors;

That we seek to unite the many against the few, behind an inspiring vision of global human emancipation;

That we work to expose, to challenge, and to shut down wars abroad and militarism at home, along with the imperial and fascistic apparatus that makes them possible;

That we devote ourselves to exposing, and to resisting the ravages of a toxic ecocidal capitalism before it poisons the climate to the point of rendering wide swaths of our planet unlivable;

That we work to expose, oppose, and defeat racism, homophobia, sexism and other reactionary and oppressive ideologies and practices wherever they rear their ugly heads;

That we seek to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless across our world;

That we help to inspire courage, trust, and solidarity amongst those who have been beaten down by the current system, to turn our collective weakness into strength;

That we work to expose the farcical nature of our 1%-dominated, so-called “democracy,” even as we may utilize what is left of this state apparatus to tactically leverage the needs of our movement;

That we hold accountable those individuals and institutions that have produced and profited from the current crisis, at the expense of the people.

That we reject all 1%-er attempts to scapegoat the vulnerable and to blame the victims for their oppression;

That we approach with suspicion and skepticism those representatives of existing 1% power structures that seek to co-opt our movement, even as we are constantly on the lookout for friends and allies in unexpected places;

That we put the greater good of the people and the movement ahead of our personal interests, even as we recognize that only through such a movement can our individual talents be fully realized, and vice versa;

That we keep our commitments and promises to one another;

That we are honest and accountable in our interactions whenever we are representing the movement;

That we work each day to help raise consciousness (inside and outside the movement) about the world situation–for this is a global struggle;

That we inform ourselves about the current dangers and crises facing our society and our planet, and that we seek to understand not only the news and the facts, but the fundamental forces driving the situation forward, and the future trajectories these forces imply;

That we seek to cultivate a tactical flexibility and creativity that can adapt to the shifting situation;

That we develop a long-term, nationally coordinated strategy for actually building the movement that we want to create, for actually achieving the changes we want to see;

That we cultivate an honest and humble self-critical attitude in evaluating the successes and failures, the strengths and weaknesses of our movement, its theories and its practices; that we are willing to alter our theories and practices in light of evidence and reflections we gather;

That we seek to become citizens of the world, not just of any single city or nation;

That we sink roots in our local communities, in our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, families, and other institutions, becoming attentive students of others’ lives, as well as supportive allies, and where appropriate, leaders of local struggles;

That we are kind and patient with one another in the movement, working to understand deeply even those with whom we disagree, knowing that those who may be wrong on nine issues may teach us something valuable concerning the tenth;

That we demonstrate courage as well as wisdom in the face of threats we face;

That we seek to cultivate the fullest humanity in ourselves and in others alike;

That we work creatively and tirelessly to bring into being a society that is worthy of human beings;

That we commit to the long haul, as the fight ahead is sure to be as extended as its outcome remains uncertain.

That we sustain one another in this great collective endeavor, cherishing each thinking, fighting spirit in these dark times.

Joseph G. Ramsey is a writer, scholar, critic, educator, and activist in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is co-editor of Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of marxist theory and practice, and a participant in the Kasama Project. He can be reached at: jgramsey@gmail.com. Read other articles by Joseph, or visit Joseph's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under Anti-war, Civil Liberties, Classism, Freedom of Speech, Occupy movement, Solidarity.

Capitalism in Crisis: In the end, the people in the streets will decide.

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Capitalism in Crisis

In the end, the people in the streets will decide.

Robert Hunziker , 12 Jul 2012

 

The streets of the world’s capital cities are war zones of hopelessness, but as people gather together, this despair transforms into a fierce determination, underlain by great expectations, like in 1848, when the only European-wide collapse of the status quo occurred in the Revolutions of 1848 also popularly known at the time as: The Spring of Nations. Similar to that challenge of authority over 150 years ago, as of today, an epic battle, an undeclared war, rages around the world, erupting every week in one capital city after another, challenging the legitimacy and credibility of capitalism. For example, July 9th, 2012, Qatif, Saudi Arabia, one of the country’s largest-ever demonstrations left two dead and 12 injured when security forces confronted street protestors after the shooting of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent anti-government activist and Shia cleric.

The Revolutions of 1848 ultimately involved 50 countries throughout Europe and Latin America. At the time, there was no coordination among dissenters, but widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership was infectious across borders and beyond ethnic differences. Citizens of the world wanted more participation in how their lives were determined, i.e., democracy. Tens of thousands lost their lives in a futile effort, a bloody affaire that ended as abruptly as it began, within one year, forever memorialized by the words of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French philosopher and economic theorist, 1809-1865), “We have been beaten and humiliated… scattered, imprisoned, disarmed and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands.”

Dissatisfaction with political leadership (and, by inference, the capitalist state) today is more ubiquitous than in 1848 because instantaneous communication knows no barriers. Furthermore, what is known is this: Capitalism has failed as an economic system for society at large. By disproportionately favoring an elite minority who have gamed their own system, thus, sealing their own fate, capitalism has become as pejorative a term today as aristocrat was in 1848. And, because history has demonstrated, time and again, that no socio-economic system is static, this brings to the forefront questions about the likely life cycle for modern-day capitalism. Is it an economic system that has outlived its usefulness? And, if so, then, where are the various impulses of dissent headed, pointed in what direction, if not capitalism? These are questions that would otherwise be deemed inappropriate, if not for the current state of world affaires, but the answers are yet to be formulated.

This grandiose worldwide dissatisfaction with the status quo is not business as usual like a normal business cycle, which ends with renewal of prosperity. No, by all appearances, this is a deep-seated disintegration of economic relationships, which have existed in a delicate balance of competing interests for 200 years.

Every war has a catalyst, and the capitalists themselves have brought on this one by depriving the bourgeoisie and proletariat a fair share of the bounty on a worldwide basis in places like the United States, Indonesia, South Korea, Chile and throughout Europe. Now that capitalism is universal, the population of the world sees its effects in unison rather than individually by nation-state, but the problem is not capitalism per se. The problem is abuse of the capitalist system by capitalists. What is the evidence of this abuse?

The evidence is tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the streets chanting, sloganeering, “End the Oligarchy” in NYC, “Democracy Not Corporatization” in Paris “Fraude Pobreza” or “Fraud and Poverty” in Madrid, “Hands Off Our Pensions” in Athens, tens of thousands demonstrating in front of Indonesia’s presidential palace in Jakarta demanding a decent living wage, tens of thousands of students in Santiago protesting the profiteering in the state educational system, hundreds of Malaysian lawyers staging street protests opposed to governmental plans to ban street rallies, and uppermost in the consciousness of this worldwide sloganeering is a profound repugnance of corporate greed, or crony capitalism, and a deep-seated hostility towards the chicanery behind Wall Street/banking practices as well as the ‘perceived’ embezzlement of valuable nation-state resources by the wealthy elite via political influence and subterfuge within taxation policies that favor only the rich. We know this is true because the sloganeering and the placards held up high within the masses of tens of thousands of people tell this story for the whole world to see.

The elites of capitalism have only themselves to blame for igniting the flames of dissent… for bringing on the “perfect storm” of protests from Montreal-to-Beijing-to-Mumbai-to-Moscow-to-Paris-to-Santiago-to-NYC.

Seeing the truth of capitalism became much easier with the Granddaddy of All Financial Ineptitude and Corruption, the biggest-ever corporate heist, resulting in the 2007-08 worldwide financial meltdown, connecting huge dots for all to see, glaringly exposing the whole enchilada, other than the mystery of why nobody has gone to jail (Google: Coup of the Elites or The Elite Coup is Complete, June 26-27, 2012.) Arguably, this monumental debacle has served as the catalyst for capitalism’s boundless war. At the end of the day, this brutal take down of the entire world economy may be the demise of capitalism because it is breaking down the financial/economic system like never before. Otherwise, the final arbiters of financial order and stability, the world’s Central Bankers, would not be scrambling month-after-month, injecting trillions into banking liquidity, buying sovereign debt, propping up this monstrous on-going disaster, like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology, as soon as one head is lopped off, another two appears, as one country is poisoned by insolvency followed by another. And, it is the average taxpayer who supports, and pays for, the errors and malfeasance of the elite who profited so handsomely on the backs of innocent citizenry from Sydney westward to Fairbanks.

The Great Heist of 2007-08 is the culmination of corporate hubris, previewed a decade earlier, when Enron, a company with significant ties to George Bush’s political career and few tangible assets, learned how to ‘cook the books’ because of political liberalization (and contacts in the right places). The deregulation gospel allowed companies to operate in countries previously forbidden thus adding to the complexity of their operations, and they were able to use financial derivatives to manage risk and to obscure corrupted financial results. This is a continuing problem to this day. For example, JPMorgan Chase recently reported loses of $2 billion, but oops… no wait a minute, maybe it’s $30 billion. Even the bankers are not sure of their true gains or losses with the complexity of modern-day financial instruments. Isn’t it obvious that incalculable financial manias should not be part of commercial banking, the reservoirs of public savings? Unfortunately, these are only a portion of the games elites play with the public’s money. What is the hapless public to think when a former governor and a former U.S. Senator, a figure of public trust, like Jon Corzine of MF Global testifies before Congress, Dec. 2011, he does not know where the hundreds of millions of customer’s money in MF Global disappeared to… huh… he was the CEO?

One after another, whenever or wherever an opening occurs to ‘game the system’ the elite have jumped at the opportunity, including paid-for political influence to skew tax laws in favor of the rich at the expense of average taxpayers who shoulder the burden of a national debt that is overly inflated because of fancy tax laws the allow leading figureheads in society, like Mitt Romney, to pay a tax of only 15%, a lower rate than paid by his garbage collector.

It is always the average person, the average taxpayer who shoulders the burden whenever corporate malfeasance surfaces to trash national economies, as in Europe today where public employee and general worker benefits have been crucified by austerity measures (dictated by the IMF, World Bank, and EU) to heal battered national treasuries as if an epidemic of old, like the Black Death, swept across the countryside, ravaging lives. It is no wonder people of all stripes, like doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, and teachers take to the streets. They are being sacrificed on an altar of corporate malfeasance and corruption whilst accumulation of wealth is seen as an exclusive club reserved for only those who are already rich, similar to Louis XVI’s reign in 18th century France.
The world is getting a taste of history, of what it was like in the late 18th century, a few years before the French Revolution burst lose, beheading one aristocrat after another, as quickly as they could gather them up, simply because they were rich… but there were obviously deeper meanings behind this slaughter. For example, France’s national treasury was empty as a result of empire building and foreign wars, and this was aggravated by nasty disagreement over reform of the taxation system, which was grossly inequitable, leading to paralysis, and an agrarian crisis with food shortages, an ambitious bourgeoisie allied with aggrieved peasants and wage-earners influenced by enlightenment ideals, and years of pent-up resentment of a dying seigniorial system.

In the end, it was the people in the streets of Paris that served as the spark that led to outright rebellion and death at the hand of dreadful black-hooded executioners in the public square, the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine was most active during the “Reign of Terror”, in the summer of 1794, when, in a single month, more than 1,300 people (over 40 daily) were executed.
The lesson of history, which bewilderingly continues to repeat itself, is: The people in the streets ultimately determine the fate of incorrigible governments that are embedded with unscrupulous sources of financial power. These scenarios never end on a sanguine note but often times end in a sanguinary manner.

Robert Hunziker earned an MA in economic history at DePaul University. He lives in Los Angeles.

Open Letter to San Francisco Bohemian Club

by Peter Phillips / July 7th, 2012

July 4, 2012
Mr. Robert J. Boesch
President San Francisco Bohemian Club
624 Taylor Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Dear Mr. Boesch,

Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored has joined a coalition of some twenty-five social justice organizations and occupy groups to protest the San Francisco Bohemian Club’s practices at your annual summer encampments.

We are holding an Occupy Bohemian Grove protest in Monte Rio on July 14, 2012. For publicity and information on this event see:

http://www.occupybohemiangrove.com/
 
Occupy groups from five cities are involved in protesting your annual summer encampment of the rich and powerful 1%. Given that it takes $588,000 in assets to be in the top 1% of the world richest people, we believe that a significant portion of your members fit this category.

Our group has attended the planning meetings for this protest, and want to inform you about the days events and make some policy recommendations for the Club to consider.

The Occupy Bohemian Grove coalition is planning a four hour public assembly from noon to 4:00 on July 14. During that time there will be speakers, music and a creation of care ceremony in opposition to your cremation of care and private talks by policy elites at the Grove. KPFA radio will broadcast live from Monte Rio, No Lies Radio will video feed the proceedings on the internet, and Russia Today TV will be filming and interviewing activists.

We are not planning or promoting civil disobedience or trespassing on Grove property as part of the protest. We are not organizing a march on the Grove, as has been done in the past. Some curious participants may walk up the Bohemian Highway to see your gates.

Recommendations to the San Francisco Bohemian Club in a time of Occupy the 1%.

Whereas:

The 2,000 acre retreat, now privately held near Monte Rio, California, is in part an ancient old growth redwood forest with trees over one thousand years of age and;

The San Francisco Bohemian Club continues to exclude women from membership and;

Significant public leaders in the world give private keynote addresses (chats) on a daily basis on important policy issues, and;

The private happenings inside the summer retreat boundaries face continuing unproven rumors regarding nefarious behaviors and insider deals made by powerful elites.

We Recommend that:

1. The Bohemian Grove recognize the rights of humankind to enjoy a fair share of the common heritage of the ancient redwood forest by opening the Grove to tours on a regular basis when club members are not assembled—

2. The Bohemian Club begin a policy of admitting women and arranging the Grove to accommodate both genders—

3. The lakeside chats and other addresses by key policy officials be made public on-line and transcripts prepared and published—

4. The Cremation of Care ceremony be transformed into a building of unity of care in the world and the ceremony be made public on-line—

5. The Bohemian Club set up an on-line live feed from the main stage and field circle, as events are occurring.

We strongly believe in full transparency of public figures giving lectures to a select few men and we believe that the privacy of your events is unnecessary in a time of increasingly inequality between the 1% and the 99%.

We think that the San Francisco Bohemian Club can demonstrate a belief in an open transparent democratic society by simply changing a few of your historical policies. As symbolic representatives of the top 1% in the world, it is time for you to exercise a responsibility to help build a fair sharing of the world’s resources starting with your own Club.

This letter has been publicly released. We trust you will take our recommendations seriously.

Sincerely,

Peter Phillips

President Media Freedom Foundation

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization. Read other articles by Peter, or visit Peter's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2012 at 5:59am and is filed under Activism, Classism, Occupy movement.

Occupy Will Be Back

Chris Hedges' Columns

Occupy Will Be Back

Posted on Jun 18, 2012

Photo by Paul Weiksel, Rights reserved

By Chris Hedges

In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial. 

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the “left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.

The engine of all protest movements rests, finally, not in the hands of the protesters but the ruling class. If the ruling class responds rationally to the grievances and injustices that drive people into the streets, as it did during the New Deal, if it institutes jobs programs for the poor and the young, a prolongation of unemployment benefits (which hundreds of thousands of Americans have just lost), improved Medicare for all, infrastructure projects, a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, and a forgiveness of student debt, then a mass movement can be diluted. Under a rational ruling class, one that responds to the demands of the citizenry, the energy in the street can be channeled back into the mainstream. But once the system calcifies as a servant of the interests of the corporate elites, as has happened in the United States, formal political power thwarts justice rather than advances it. 

Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over. 

“We had a very powerful first six months,” Kevin Zeese, one of the original organizers of the Occupy encampment in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., said when I reached him by phone. “We impacted the debate. We impacted policy. We showed people they are not alone. We exposed the unfair economy and our dysfunctional government. We showed people they could have an impact. We showed people they could have power. We let the genie out of the bottle. No one will put it back in.”

The physical eradication of the encampments and efforts by the corporate state to disrupt the movement through surveillance, entrapment, intimidation and infiltration have knocked many off balance. That was the intent. But there continue to be important pockets of resistance. These enclaves will provide fertile ground and direction once mass protests return. It is imperative that, no matter how dispirited we may become, we resist being lured into the dead game of electoral politics.

“The recent election in Wisconsin shows why Occupy should stay out of the elections,” Zeese said. “Many of the people who organized the Wisconsin occupation of the Capitol building became involved in the recall. First, they spent a lot of time and money collecting more than 1 million signatures. Second, they got involved in the primary where the Democrats picked someone who was not very supportive of union rights and who lost to [Gov. Scott] Walker just a couple of years ago. Third, the general election effort was corrupted by billionaire dollars. They lost. Occupy got involved in politics. What did they get? What would they have gotten if they won? They would have gotten a weak, corporate Democrat who in a couple of years would be hated. That would have undermined their credibility and demobilized their movement. Now, they have to restart their resistance movement. 


“Would it not have been better if those who organized the occupation of the Capitol continued to organize an independent, mass resistance movement?” Zeese asked. “They already had strong organization in Madison, and in Dane County as well as nearby counties. They could have developed a Montreal-like movement of mass protest that stopped the function of government and built people power. Every time Walker pushed something extreme they could have been out in the streets and in the Legislature disrupting it. They could have organized general and targeted strikes. They would have built their strength. And by the time Walker faced re-election he would have been easily defeated.

“Elections are something that Occupy needs to continue to avoid,” Zeese said. “The Obama-Romney debate is not a discussion of the concerns of the American people. Obama sometimes uses Occupy language, but he puts forth virtually no job creation, nothing to end the wealth divide and no real tax reform. On tax reform, the Buffett rule—that the secretary should pay the same tax rate as the boss—is totally insufficient. We should be debating whether to go back to the Eisenhower tax rates of 91 percent, the Nixon tax rate of 70 percent or the Reagan tax rate of 50 percent for the top income earners—not whether secretaries and CEOs should be taxed at the same rate!”  

The Occupy movement is not finally about occupying. It is, as Zeese points out, about shifting power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. It is a tactic. And tactics evolve and change. The freedom rides, the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, the marches in Birmingham and the Montgomery bus boycott were tactics used in the civil rights movement. And just as the civil rights movement often borrowed tactics used by the old Communist Party, which long fought segregation in the South, the Occupy movement, as Zeese points out, draws on earlier protests against global trade agreements and the worldwide protests over the invasion of Iraq. Each was, like the Occupy movement, a global response. And this is a global movement.

We live in a period of history the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul calls an interregnum, a period when we are enveloped in what he calls “a vacuum of economic thought,” a period when the reigning ideology, although it no longer corresponds to reality, has yet to be replaced with ideas that respond to the crisis engendered by the collapse of globalization. And the formulation of ideas, which are always at first the purview of a small, marginalized minority, is one of the fundamental tasks of the movement. It is as important to think about how we will live and to begin to reconfigure our lives as it is to resist. 

Occupy has organized some significant actions, including the May Day protests, the NATO protest in Chicago, an Occupy G8 summit and G-8 protests in Thurmont and Frederick, Md. There are a number of ongoing actions—Occupy Our Homes, Occupy Faith, Occupy the Criminal Justice System, Occupy University, the Occupy Caravan—that protect the embers of revolt. Last week when Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, testified before a U.S. Senate committee, he was confronted by Occupy protesters, including Deborah Harris, who lost her home in a JPMorgan foreclosure. But you will hear little if anything about these actions on cable television or in The Washington Post. Such acts of resistance get covered almost entirely in the alternative media, such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Occupy Page of The Real News.

“Our job is to build pockets of resistance so that when the flash point arrives, people will have a place to go,” Zeese said. “Our job is to stand for transformation, shifting power from concentrated wealth to the people. As long as we keep annunciating and fighting for this, whether we are talking about health care, finance, empire, housing, we will succeed.

“We will only accomplish this by becoming a mass movement,” he said. “It will not work if we become a fringe movement. Mass movements have to be diverse. If you build a movement around one ethnic group, or one class group, it is easier for the power structure and the police to figure out what we will do next. With diversity you get creativity of tactics. And creativity of tactics is critical to our success. With diversity you bring to the movement different histories, different ideas, different identities, different experiences and different forms of nonviolent tactics.

“The object is to shift people from the power structure to our side, whether it is media, business, youth, labor or police,” he went on. “We must break the enforcement structure. In the book ‘Why Civil Resistance Works,’ a review of resistance efforts over the last 100 years, breaking the enforcement structure, which almost always comes through nonviolent civil disobedience, increases your chances of success by 60 percent. We need to divide the police. This is critical. And only a mass movement that is nonviolent and diverse, that draws on all segments of society, has any hope of achieving this. If we can build that, we can win.”

The Occupy #NATGAT ~ Searching for new tactics and strategies

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Adbusters Blog

The Occupy #NATGAT

Searching for new tactics and strategies

Adbusters , 03 Jul 2012

Zachary Bell

Occupiers from across the nation are in Philadelphia for the Occupy National Gathering (#NATGAT), several days of workshops and direct actions culminating on July 4th. “I hope we can have some real dialogue about what’s next for Occupy. New tactics and strategies,” says occupier Jeff Rae, who has been active in the movement since September 17 in Zuccotti.
Yesterday Philadelphia occupier Zachary Bell wrote:

Chris Hedges addressed the crowd of Occupiers. Hedges described the state of political America, including the death of the radical class, the “monstrosity of faux liberals like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama,” and the marginalization of structural critique in political discourse. He addressed Occupy’s future, articulating Occupy’s immediate goal “to reverse the corporate coup d’état and put the power back in the hands of people.” Hedges opined that the black bloc”s tactics are destructive because it plays into the hands “of those who want to destroy us” by demonizing Occupy in the mind of the public. But he remained hopeful and urged patience, citing his experience in movements that took time to build: “this is the dress rehearsal for the end of the corporate state.”

Read Zachary’s full report from Day 1 and Day 2 of the #NATGAT at occupyphillymedia.org.

National Gathering, July 1

Submitted by ZacharyABell on Mon, 07/02/2012 - 09:50

The second day of the Occupy National Gathering began with some sense of stability, with Franklin Square set as the permanent location for workshops and the Friends Center’s parking lot as the permanent sleeping area. However, the day of speakers and skill-shares precipitated an evening of arrests, with 25-30 reportedly taken into custody. (Footage of the arrests: Protesters Kettled and Arrested at Occupy National Gathering)

National Gathering, July 2

Submitted by ZacharyABell on Tue, 07/03/2012 - 12:57

The third day of the Occupy National Gathering was full of energy and good conversation. Speaker Amadon DellErba from Spritualution discussed the importance of ending all “isms,” Gina McGill from Alabama promoted the ideas in Beyond Plutocracy, and Matt Taibbi exposed bank collusion. Captain Ray Lewis declined to speak in the group because of the many side conversations, but made himself available for any individual conversation throughout the afternoon.