Five years later, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupy built.

Occupy Didn’t Just “Change the Conversation.” It Laid the Foundation for a New Era of Radical Protest.

Five years later, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupy built.

By Jesse Myerson

 

OCTOBER ISSUE | September 17, 2016

FIVE YEARS AGO, on the morning of September 17th, 2011, the only continuous inhabitant of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park was a bronze statue of a businessman, seated permanently on a bench on the park’s west side.

That, of course, was before hundreds of demonstrators descended and built an encampment to protest the power of the 1%. By September 24th, when video of a New York City police officer pepper-spraying members of Occupy Wall Street garnered national attention, the newly rechristened Liberty Plaza Park had become home to a welcome booth, a kitchen, a childcare zone, an arts and culture area, medical and legal teams, a media-production center and a library.

These all emerged through improvisation, the active ingredient in Occupy. From its founders’ initial act to the proliferation of encampments nationwide, the movement unfolded mainly by way of intuition, experimentation, accident, luck and emergency.

That emergency intensified as police soon cracked down on the nascent movement, evicting encampment after encampment. In the blink of an eye, the state tore down most of Occupy’s visible achievements, leaving the public with the impression that it had failed to build anything lasting or useful.

And yet, five years later, Occupy is widely credited with making inequality a political priority—which, in turn, made possible the landmark presidential run of a 74-year-old socialist—as well as touching off a new era of raucous protest and civil disobedience.

If this seems like a big footprint for a failed movement, it’s worth looking more closely at what Occupiers built—and continue to build—that lived outside the parks. Occupy did indeed “change the conversation,” popularizing the “99%” formulation that reintroduced class into the political narrative. But just as significantly, it resulted in the construction of lasting movement infrastructure—communications networks, physical spaces available to organizers and models for training and analysis. While this kind of infrastructure is often overlooked or undervalued, it’s critical to a movement’s growth and lasting impact. Arriving on the scene at a low point of the American Left, Occupy scrambled to cobble together the structures that might have sustained it—but one of its most important legacies was that it gave subsequent movements something to build and improve upon.

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

When Occupy kicked off in 2011, it had little to draw from in terms of institutions, political parties, publications, communications networks or gathering spaces. The counter-globalization struggle of a dozen years prior, as well as the anti-war effort from the mid-2000s, had left behind bits and pieces of tools and support systems for social movements. Labor groups including the Communications Workers of America, the United Steelworkers and National Nurses United endorsed the movement, and a number of union locals and individual members stepped in to provide material support. But by and large, OWS lacked any of the infrastructure of a significant political Left to support it.

Without tools and spaces crucial for facilitating strategic movement building, Occupy never stood much of a chance of coalescing into a powerful political formation.

Still, the new movement was a welcome change from the anemic shows of protest and dissent many organizers had grown accustomed to in preceding years. Yotam Marom recalls that while he was involved in socialist organizing prior to Occupy, public demonstrations and activism had “always felt small, always felt scrawny, always felt like a sideshow. I would invite my friends to these actions and secretly hope they wouldn’t come, because it was a little embarrassing.”

Then, one day in Zuccotti Park, “the conditions were right, the right people were there at the right time, there was a little bit of magic dust and the shit just popped,” he says.

New people were arriving every hour. Often, they had never led anything; some had never done any activism. A well-functioning operation, says Marom, would have identified the natural leaders among them and ushered them through a process of leadership development. But no such process existed.

“We pretended we were a leaderless movement,” Marom laments. As a consequence, not only were new leaders developed by the sink-or-swim method, “the leaders who did emerge were not held accountable. It made us less collective and democratic, not more.”

The question of leadership continued to dog Occupy. But after the parks were emptied, this realization led Marom and a handful of other likeminded comrades to found the Wildfire Project, which has facilitated strategic planning, political education and leadership development with the leaders of a number of movements that emerged in Occupy’s wake.

Since the project launched in early 2013, Wildfire has worked with the Florida-based, youth-led black freedom organization the Dream Defenders, the Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network, anti-foreclosure organizers Occupy Our Homes, and several others, aiming to equip activists responding to a crisis with “the tools and skills to do that work in their day-to-day.”

Wildfire covers basic skills including public speaking and how to have one-on-one organizing conversations. But the group’s process also draws on many of the lessons learned by Occupiers—for example, not to suppress conflict. “In other strategic planning processes, the idea is to table the emotional/political/interpersonal stuff and to get to the ‘work,’” explains Marom. With Wildfire, on the other hand, “we actually dive head-first into conflict. We’re trying, as much as possible, to teach people to be in conflict in a generative way, as a way to get to being able to fight over strategy.”

At the same time, Wildfire works to challenge the antipathy towards leadership that pervaded Occupy. “A lot of it has to do with fear of the enemy, with the resignation that we’re never going to win anyway,” says Marom. As a culture within the broader Left, he believes it’s “a barrier to building a powerful and strategic movement.”

THE NEW RULES FOR RADICALS

While Occupy’s decentralized model presented barriers, it also provided a powerful draw for those fed up with politics as usual.

In the run-up to Occupy, for example, Tammy Shapiro had been considering quitting organizing. Non-profits that operated according to a tailored political script, tightly controlling every aspect of a campaign’s messaging and development, seemed to be the only game in town.

“I was really repelled by the way funding and money controlled both Washington politics and the work of nonprofits,” recalls the former organizer for J Street U, a Jewish-American youth group that organizes against Israel’s Occupation. “I noticed that no matter what, wealthy donors had more of a voice than the grassroots.”

The initial success of Occupy Wall Street allowed Shapiro “to see the power of this different way of organizing,” she says. The occupation’s decentralized style, which left plenty of room for grassroots experimentation, provided a paradigm that made sense to her, and brought her back to the profession she’d been trying to leave.

She got involved in InterOccupy, a collective that facilitated communications between Occupy groups around the country. That consisted of various tools: websites, social media and online conference call technology that allowed Occupiers in different cities to simulate physical meeting space—dividing callers into discrete breakout groups, establishing a speakers queue and managing elections in which participants can dial to vote.

With this communication network in place, it was possible for InterOccupy to compile regular newsletters alerting recipients to challenges occupations were encountering, solutions they were devising, actions they were planning and so forth—all without assigning a hierarchy. It suggested to Shapiro “the potential of what decentralization could do.”

A year later, she saw an opportunity to put this model into action in a new way, even when many of her compatriots were pronouncing Occupy Wall Street dead. “There’s this latent network,” she remembers insisting at an October 2012 retreat in upstate New York where Occupiers discussed the state of the movement. “I don’t believe it’s dead.” That intuition was put to the test immediately: “We came back from Blue Mountain and the hurricane hit the next day.”

Occupy Sandy was the movement’s redemptive second act. Not only did it revive the networks that had formed a year earlier, its relative efficacy put to shame the haphazard efforts mounted by FEMA, the Red Cross and various other more traditional, hierarchical agencies that bungled the complicated relief effort. “Where FEMA Fell Short, Occupy Sandy Was There,” read a November 2012 New York Times headline.

“Occupy Sandy confirmed to me and a lot of other people in New York that we were doing things in a way that worked,” Shapiro says. “The way that we were organizing had a lot of potential to get real results.”

Still, trying to convey the potential of decentralization to people who had not been involved in Occupy Wall Street or Sandy proved difficult. “We had a basic intuitive understanding, but we didn’t have language, we didn’t have models,” notes Shapiro. “We didn’t have the Rules for Radicals for the networked social movement age.”

Without being able to clearly articulate Occupy’s organizing model, it would be hard to identify its weaknesses and improve them. Shapiro and some like-minded organizers formed the “think-make-and-do-tank” Movement Netlab (MNL) to change that.

Through one project, it has tried to detail the various roles participants take on in a mass, decentralized movement. For instances, a movement requires coaches, culture-makers, introducers and so on. Through another, it has charted the life cycle of a movement. MNL hypothesizes that movements are made up of distinct “moments:” First public anger grows over an ongoing crisis. Then, a trigger event incites a spontaneous mass response, which begins a “heroic” expansion phase and honeymoon period, when anything seems possible. When this ends, the movement goes through a painful contraction, and lastly through a period of reflection and evolution. Then the cycle begins again—with the difference that the movement, hopefully, has won some concrete gains and is even better prepared to take advantage of the next peak.

Shapiro and MNL’s work with the climate justice movement put into practice some of their hypotheses about how mass, decentralized movements can organize effectively for a common purpose. During the preparation for the 2014 People’s Climate March, for example, Shapiro built out a communications system that riffed off of InterOccupy’s structure, providing each of over 100 hubs (Labor for Climate, Arts for Climate, Yoga Teachers…) with a website, Facebook and Google group—“connected but separate online front doors.”

This allowed people to enter from a community that they felt deeply a part of, so they could bring their particular identities into the larger movement, rather than leaving them at the door. Moreover, it enabled groups who may sometimes be at odds—say, labor unions and anti-fracking groups—to organize autonomously for the march with messaging specific to their constituencies.

OCCUPYING ELECTORAL POLITICS

Winnie Wong, who had also been involved in Occupy Sandy, had another idea of how to put decentralized networks to work. She had seen how adept they had proven at providing relief to hurricane victims, and found herself wondering how they might fare at waging explicit politics.

“I wanted to do something much more strategic and tactical around Occupying the whole of the Democratic Party, which I believe to be complicit in all of these really harmful policies.”

That led to People for Bernie, which memorably coined the catchphrase “Feel the Bern.” “We organize like a working group,” says Wong of the 8 to 10 core members. “We give each other permission to act autonomously on behalf of the collective.” When disagreements arise (“They very rarely do,” she maintains) about whether something is appropriate to post, they are resolved with deliberate haste in a group Facebook chat. “I credit Occupy with teaching me de-escalation.”

The group actually launched in 2014 as “Ready for Warren.” Its mission involved “building electoral power for people who identify with the core issues and the core messaging that came out of Occupy Wall Street,” says Wong. “We made Elizabeth Warren the figurehead of the 99%.” It wasn’t long before prominent liberal organizations signed onto the call (ultimately unheeded) for Warren to challenge Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary.

In April 2015, Wong says, “We were the first to pivot to Bernie Sanders, long before the other groups endorsed him.” People for Bernie originated with an open letter bearing the names of a number of organizers from Zuccotti Park and other Occupations, who signed on in support of Sanders, as individual occupiers. (Disclosure: the author is a signatory.)

Simultaneously, the group launched a website and, approximating the structure favored by Tammy Shapiro and InterOccupy, more than fifty “...For Bernie” Facebook groups and Twitter accounts, “which basically became the formation of a large, decentralized tent for people across the country to get under.”

“We gave away all the passwords to so many constituencies,” Wong says. “We knew that we couldn’t be the people responsible for creating the messaging, we needed the people to create the messaging. We needed people to talk about their issues.”

While there are no plans to change the floating signifier from “Bernie” to something else just yet, there is some room for that to happen. “It was never about electing Bernie Sanders,” says Wong. “It was about creating a movement.”

Most importantly, the network People for Bernie has assembled remains ready for re-activation when the right moment hits.

OCCUPYING FOR ABOLITION

This summer, a new wave of encampments swept the nation. From Decolonize LA to Chicago’s Freedom Square to New York’s Abolition Square, activists once again built ongoing protest sites, this time to call to for an end to racist policing and mass incarceration.

These protests emerged directly out of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in some cases cited the encampments set up during 2014 protests in Ferguson as immediate inspiration. But infrastructure built in the wake of Occupy also provided important support.

The planning meetings for Abolition Square, located just blocks from Zuccotti Park, took place at the May Day Space, housed in an Episcopal church in northern Bushwick, Brooklyn. The collective directing the project is largely made up of Occupiers who remember all too well how the movement flagged when it lacked a permanent home. Previously, it inhabited a much larger space, elsewhere in Bushwick, which hosted grassroots activist and movement group meetings, forums, parties and more.

“Our mission is to facilitate space for social justice organizing groups,” says Sandra Nurse, an Occupy veteran and member of the May Day collective. “It’s specifically built for groups to feel welcome at any time of the day, as needed.” With May Day, groups doing vital organizing don’t have to resort to meeting rooms at the odd hours of their convenience, or public spaces where police can surveil and harass members.

Five years ago, Occupy Chicago suffered keenly from a lack of space—mass arrests prevented a permanent encampment from ever being established. Chicago’s Freedom Square thus managed to do what Occupy Chicago did not: occupy. Organizers with the #LetUsBreathe collective transformed what was once an unkempt vacant lot on the city’s west side for 41 days, setting up tents across from an alleged police black site at Homan Square. In addition to calling for the site to be shut down, #LetUsBreathe envisioned Freedom Square as a space that “imagines a world without police” and as a “community block party.” Organizers have since ended their occupation and turned the space over to the surrounding community.

One of the key organizational differences between Occupy and Black Lives Matter, believes Shapiro, is that the latter has been intentionally inclusive of pillar organizations with formal leadership structures. In doing so BLM has largely avoided the fetishization of leaderless-ness that had so frustrated Yotam Marom in Zuccotti Park—a fetish that only developed, says Shapiro, “because we didn’t have the kind of framework that we’ve been working out at MNL.”

“You need a lot of distributed leadership in a decentralized network, but there’s still leadership,” she says.

This and other lessons have brought the Left to a very different place than it was in five years ago. “The biggest gain from [Occupy] was the sense of possibility that people took from that moment. We had never had any expectation that we would be big or powerful, and that has catastrophic consequences,” says Yotam Marom. Now, organizers “actually believe that a movement is possible, and it changes everything about the way they work.” 

Do We Really Need a Third Party?

Do We Really Need a Third Party?

by Robert P. Abele / September 12th, 2016

The frustration that prompted the “Bernie or Bust” movement is not just about economic stagnation. Rather, it is more basic, more institutional-centered, than that. From the viewpoint of progressives, there is in addition a frustration with the once liberal, now neoliberal political philosophy and its supporters, many of whom hold political office. This includes the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. For many voters from the left, liberals have become institutional custodians: they are, to use a Marxist term, “bourgeois liberals,” or, as Chomsky refers to them, the “liberal intelligentsia,” whose primary task is to protect institutional processes, structures, and interests, over all other norms and goals. Those who have taken it as their task to tend to institutional mandates and goals seek to marginalize and minimize all ideas coming from outside the institution by delegitimizing them in comparison with the goals and procedures of institutional structures, and using those structures to slow them down and/or send them to institutional black holes. These institutional guardians learn to minimize or lose the ideals they begin with, by submitting them to institutional processes whereby their moral values are streamlined, trimmed, and changed in their function, form, and normative ends. In this essay, “institution” means “government,” but it could apply to any institution, such as academia, the media, Democratic Party, or business.

Such bourgeois liberals are opposed by the visionaries, who frequently today self-reference as “progressives. They are the challengers to institutional prerogatives and functions, who are aware that institutional curators do not understand the language of morality, but rather comprehend pragmatism over values, the protection of the institutions of which they are a part, and even self-interest within the confines of the institution.

An excellent example of this dialectic can be seen in the heated debate that occurred between former Congressman Barney Frank and Cornel West, on the July 26 edition of the show “Real Time with Bill Maher.” While West argued that the issues that confront us, such as climate change and deep inequality, require revolutionary and immediate change, Frank argued that such a vision not only did not cohere with an institutional arrangement (i.e. American government) that prefers “slow as you go” and “institutional change only” [my summary phrases, not quotations from Frank], but that institutional procedures regarding specific issues were the only way to make changes in people’s lives. Mr. Frank even devalued Jill Stein’s candidacy for President on the basis of her lack of making institutionally-approved changes in her political career! Even more, Frank’s listing of Democratic—and specifically Bill Clinton—programs that were successful for citizens ignored that they were moderate gains at best, and clearly offset by Democrat—and Clinton—programs that were at odds with equality and improvement for all. For just one example, the Clinton demolition of the welfare system kept their institutional (corporate) masters happy and kept Bill in office, while completely betraying the interests of a large segment of the populace. Other examples abound.

A bit to the political right of these “institutional liberals” are institutional conservatives such as the Karl Rove type. The difference between Karl Rove’s conservativism and a liberal, with regard to institution-caretaking and power distribution, is that Rove seeks to determine and present people “their” vision for their activism (through propaganda), thus “allowing” the political leaders to “follow” by “capitulating to the will of the people” and thus manipulating the system through its current configurations and structures in order to obtain the ends of power sought by the propagandists to begin with. Liberals within the system advocate for and seek to “allow the system to work,” while simultaneously eschewing the vision of the activists pushing for deep systemic changes, and also to a degree using propaganda to slow the people’s push for change so that it doesn’t leave the control of the institutional wardens—i.e. liberal defenders of institutional processes and prerogatives see to it that the people don’t “get out of the control” of the system’s defenders. This was clearly seen in the tensions between the Sanders and Clinton supporters during the Democratic Convention.

Contrary to the Party liberals who currently control the DNC, progressives seek to consolidate the vision of the people outside of the system (i.e. the “grassroots”) into an overall mandate for systemic change itself, the vision of which cannot be comprehended and bound by systemic and institutional concerns. This is where the value and role of a third party comes into play: to unify progressive voices into a whole both by analysis of institutional problems and by designing and promoting activist programs intended to change institutional abuses and lethargy regarding moral values, especially values of human dignity and equality.

One appropriate method of such institutional analysis is to point out those (factual) institutional structures which lead to or entail contradictions in practice or in the stated ends of the institution. This is the empirical, and specifically the Marxist or socialist model of analysis.

The other method is normative: to point out that the intrinsic or adopted structural procedures are at cross-purposes with the principle of the primacy of human good or dignity by engaging in immoral ends and/or means. I maintain that the more comprehensive analysis is the normative approach, since we are, from rudimentary perceptual cognition to abstract thinking, normative beings, and because no analysis is complete, even in empirical method, without presupposing certain norms to be legitimate and assumed for analysis purposes (e.g. “equality” in socialism; “contradiction” in Marxist analysis, etc.). Hence, institutional structures and practices which violate essentially normative conditions, concomitantly violate our humanity to the degree that they ignore or eschew distinctly normative concerns. In essence, Sanders’ resonance with voters struck this normative chord with issues such as “equality,” “breaking up the big banks,” and “breaking down the power of Wall Street.”

Therefore, realpolitik is the model of action inside the institution itself as well as between institutions, but it is outside of it that the main source of moral limitations to institutions originates, in the women and men who have not compromised nor surrendered their voice of conscience to the sources and means of institutional power by “following institutional processes and procedures,” thus maintaining the status quo, while only tinkering around the edges of the institution from within and in crafting appearances of movement forward, all the while maintaining the same processes and values called forth by the institutional dictates that necessitated the moral push from the outside to begin with.

If the people “outside” fail to set moral limits and pressure institutional members with those limits, the institution will deepen its corruption and its power over its people, by succumbing to whatever forces exist that can and will fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the moral limits from outside (usually power and wealth).

Those within the institution who do have any conscience, limit and nuance its voice when they become players in and thus components of institutional structures, processes, and mandates. Hence, the ongoing need for a unified external moral voice, not yet another (“third”) party seeking to get into an institutional system that will ultimately either force the party and its members into significant moral compromise or destroy the morality of the party that propelled them into the institution to begin with. The trail of justice is littered with the corpses of those who, with full moral conscience, entered into the institution to attempt to change it.

Thus, while in this election cycle a third party choice would seem to be an obvious need, it should seek to represent not a genuine alternative for taking the reins of institutional power, but rather should serve as a statement of a unified moral vote against the status quo; a message to those within the institutional halls that they are not safe in their comfortable roles as institutional tenders and servicers if they do not heed the distinctly moral voice of the outsiders, the citizens.

If the institution continues to fail to listen to the clear moral voice of the people outside it, then the casus belli for revolt against it has already been clearly and directly given to the people. But as argued here, the revolt will not succeed by sticking a third party into a corrupt institution, but by using the third party to push those in the institution to listen to the voice of institutional change, or be removed. It threatens the neoliberals with political extinction in the face of the threat of human extinction from climate change, and from the immoral policies of neoliberal and Republican economic and social elitism. It tells the world that the people are prepared to “go it alone” and to take on the institution more directly if need be in the process, in order to preserve and protect humanity and to bring about a more equitable society in the face of the extreme imbalances we see today, both in the world and in the halls of institutional power. This is the duty of the citizens of any republic, and third parties can help citizens perform those duties by uniting their voices.

So, yes, we need a third party, but not to play the role that people frequently think. Rather, the role of a third party will be to alter the breadth, role, function, and process of the institution itself, to force those who service the institution to serve instead, or primarily, the people they pretend to serve, but to whom they perform that service minimally or not at all. Such change never comes from those within the institution itself. So, most importantly, the surest way to end a third party revolution is to put the party into an institution whose power is already absolute and whose corruption is complete. A third party’s function is rather to lead the way to an overturning and revamping of power structures that is far overdue. This is not something a simple movement within an institutional party could or would accomplish. Revolutions are not done from within a system, and are not done in one election season, nor under the leadership of those whose primary allegiance is to their institutional position and party. Such leaders surrender to the institution quickly, as we have seen with both Obama and Sanders. Change can only come through a people unified in their vision, yet with the knowledge that they are not only outsiders to the system, but also know that the degree to which institutional parties and corruption are entrenched in the system imply proportionally the amount of time it will take to batter down the institutional walls in order to open its doors to the people. Third parties lead the way in this by helping everyone to get their hands on the battering ram of the moral vision of human dignity and equality that will bring fear to the entrenched parties and their corrupt bosses, as their secured institutional walls and doors begin to quake from the force of the people.

If change is what people want, third parties are the only way to get it, and the winning attitude is not to expect to put third party people in office. When people like Barney Frank and others, especially Democrats, say of Jill Stein “but she can’t win,” they are expressing the fact that they have already capitulated to the institutional system as it is. The right attitude is that “win or not, we’re demanding change, and we’re not leaving until we get it.” That is the attitude of those who participate in third parties. That is the attitude that over time cannot lose.

Dr. Robert Abele (www.spotlightonfreedom.com) holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, in California in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of four books, including A User's Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, and The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, along with numerous articles. His new book, Reason and Justice, is forthcoming (2018). Read other articles by Robert P..

This article was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2016 at 6:25pm and is filed under "Third" Party, Democrats, Elections, Right Wing Jerks.

The Revolution of Consciousness

The Huffington Post

THE BLOG

The Revolution of Consciousness

 07/10/2014 01:05 pm ET | Updated Sep 09, 2014

Marianne Williamson

There is a revolution occurring in the world today, but it is not fought with armies and it does not aim to kill. It is a revolution of consciousness.

This revolution is to the 21st century what the Scientific Revolution was to the 20th. The Scientific Revolution revealed objective, discernable laws of external phenomena and applied those laws to the material world. The Consciousness Revolution reveals objective, discernable laws of internal phenomena and applies them to the world as well. 

The Scientific Revolution improved the state of humanity in many ways, but it also fostered a worldview neither ultimately helpful nor deeply humane. That worldview is mechanistic and rationalistic, without the slightest bow to the primacy of consciousness. Yet consciousness supplies moral vision and ethical purpose, without which all the science in the world won’t keep us from destroying ourselves or the planet on which we live.

Gone with irony and deep sigh any lingering hope that science will cure all the ills of the world. Certainly science has improved and continues to improve the world in significant, even stunning ways. But despite all its amazing gifts, science cannot give us what we most need now. It cannot save us from ourselves. Science can lead to the cure of a physical ailment, but it is not just a physical ailment that needs healing. Humanity’s core problem is not material but spiritual. It is our insanity — our inhumanity toward each other — from which we need to be delivered, in order to save us from the self-destruction on which we seem so bent. 

Science itself is placed at the behest of human purposes. It can be used for good and it can be used for evil. Of itself, it is neutral and thus amoral. It should not therefore be our god. It’s time to end our strict obeisance to its dictates that the laws of the material world are fixed and unalterable, unchanged by the powers of consciousness. The old Newtonian model of world as machine has in fact given way to the realization that the universe is not a big machine, so much as it is, in the words of British physicist James Jeans, “a big thought.” Science itself has begun to recognize the power of the mind, but not so a lot of the world it has mesmerized over the last hundred years.

We need to heal our thinking, in order to heal our world.

The Law of Cause and Effect holds true on every level of reality. Thought is the level of Cause and material manifestation is the level of Effect. Change only on the level of effect is not fundamental change it at all, yet change on the level of cause changes everything. That is why a revolution in consciousness is our greatest hope for the future of the world. 

What is the Revolution of Consciousness, in a nutshell? Like all great movements in human history, it is based on a single insight: in this case, that we are not separate from one another. We are not material beings limited to the physical body, but beings of consciousness limited by nothing. Like waves in the ocean or sunbeams to the sun, there is actually nowhere where one of us stops and another one starts. On the level of bodies, we’re all separate of course. But on the level of consciousness, we are one.

What that means, of course, is that what I do to you, I do to myself. That makes the Golden Rule very, very good advice. Do unto others what you would have others do unto you — because they will, or someone else will.

In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly.” That understanding is not metaphor or symbol; it’s a description of an ultimate Reality shoved from our awareness by an obsolete scientific worldview. To reclaim that understanding is not blind but visionary. King was not just a movement leader but also a spiritual one, proclaiming that the human condition would not fundamentally change until our hearts were changed. Until that change occurs within us, every time we cut off the head of a monster three more will take its place.

Anything we do to anyone else will ultimately come back at us, whether as individuals or as nations. Once we know that, we cannot un-know it. It changes everything, including our hearts. How can we not change how we see each other, once we realize that we are each other? 

In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” The revolution of consciousness paves the way for the peaceful evolution of the human race. The alternative to that evolution is catastrophic and impenetrable darkness. 

Any species, if its behavior becomes maladaptive for its own survival, either mutates or goes extinct. What arrogance it would be to believe that that applies to every species but our own. In fact, humanity’s behavior is in fact maladaptive for our own survival: we fight too much with too many weapons of mass destruction existing on the planet, and are actively destroying our own habitat. Our choice is clear: we will either mutate or we will die.

The mind does not want to hear this, but the heart rejoices in it. The dictates of science aren’t so sure about it, but the dictates of consciousness are clear. Humanity doesn’t need to make another machine; it needs to make another choice. We need to consider the possibility of another way, another option, another path for the human race to follow...one in which we do not bow before the laws of science, but rather bow before the laws of love. The mind will no longer be our master, but our servant. Science will no longer be a false god, but a truer help. And humanity will evolve, peace at last will come to earth, and war will be no more.

Marianne Williamson is a best-selling author and lecturer www.marianne.com

Anonymous – Ideas Are Social Evolution

There’s an entire universe of people out there, countless others spreading ideas of a positive future.

You might call them dreamers, or crazy. You might say that what they are doing is never gonna work, and that we are doomed to fall back to our primal instincts. Ladies and Gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, I am here to tell you differently.

I know, we live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast. The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by the seductive mirage of blind profit and intellectual property. But it needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform.

This is social evolution! And it’s not up to governments, it’s not up to corporations, it’s not up to lawyers… it’s up to us!

We are the children of a thousand generations of this human race. We have come this far not to be subjected to imperialism, conflicts, and deprivation. We are meant for something great. I am here to tell you that with the right mind and motivation, we can achieve anything. We have the technology to feed everyone on earth. We can escape the prison of working for survival. And we can find a balance with nature. We can do all this and much, but only if we want to.

And now, go do something amazing.

Anonymous – Ideas Are Social Evolution

Oligarchy is the new Fascism

Oligarchy is the new Fascism

By MinistryOfTruth  

Thursday Sep 15, 2011 · 3:57 PM EDT

When the super rich can break laws and face zero consequences because they have bribed the politicians and law enforces then we don't have a Democracy under the rule of law. We have an oligarchy for the super rich and a fake rigged democracy.

Through a legalized system of bribery, politicians receive bribes from wealthy donors in return for writing the laws to their liking, and then those politicians are rewarded with high paying jobs when they retire. To not call this bribery is a lie, but in a system based on lies, lying is a necessity.

They lie us into wars for profit.

They lies us into believing that our founding fathers wanted a free market, when in fact our founding fathers believed so much in a regulated marketplace with clearly defined rules and regulations that they put it in the constitution, which is that peace of paper Conservative fascists wave at you when they are taking your Democracy away from you.

And yes, I am going to call "conservatives" fascists in this post, because the people who cheer the death of their fellow citizens aren't good Americans. They aren't good Christians either. If you hate the poor and wish death upon the sick, you aren't a Christian, you're a Roman. If you believe in torture and the death sentence I don't understand how you reconcile the torture and death penalty imposed upon Jesus, but more importantly to my point, if you believe in small democracy and a limited democracy that subservient to the wealthy and business interests alone, you don't believe in democracy, you believe in Oligarchy.

But what is Oligarchy other than fascism with a different name?

The idea of "Free Markets" is a direct assault on the central idea behind Democracy. The idea that Democracy via Government has no place in Governing the commerce conducted within the state is a method of thwarting democracy. If one wealthy Oligarch can have his will over the combined will of millions of his fellow citizens than he is not their peer, he is their King.

We have an Oligarchy in America, that can not be disputed. There are billionaires who control multi-billion dollar industries who exert enormous wealth and power, and they are the bribe makers, they are the men who bribe our law makers and law enforcers to subvert our democracy to their interests, and not only have they succeeded, but they have declared a silent, coded all out war on the heart of American Democracy itself.

Coded language such "economic freedom" means the freedom of the rich to do as they please and the freedom for the victims of their robbery to die in the streets. "Social Justice" can only become the enemy of economic freedom when the basis of that economic freedom is fraudulent, that is why the bribe taking lawmakers hate "Social Justice", because social justice means an end to the "Economic Freedom" to commit their fraud and do as they please.

What conservative fascists call "Socialism" is anything that stands in the way of their undemocratic "Free Markets". Duckspeak was the word used by George Orwell in 1984 to describe the dumbing down of language into a incomprehensible system of relaying talking points to the brain that fitted perfectly within party approved discussion. When I hear conservative fascists speak the same talking points ad verbatim in a mishmosh of disconnected lunacy, Duckspeak is what I am hearing.

...What was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck". Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

http://www.orwelltoday.com/...

Words like tyranny, spending, taxes, regulation, socialism and many others have been rendered meaningless over decades of conservative fascist propaganda in an effort to make the basic use and methods of democracy seem evil. This distracts from the fraud and exploitation inherit in "Free Markets" and the bribery of lawmakers and law enforcers that allows the fraud to exist. Every single conspiracy theory has one thread in common, the Government is evil. Never is the conspiracy a conspiracy of greed or wealth, it is never evil corporations or billionaires, it is always evil governments and faceless government bureaucrats or specific lawmakers who won't be bribed or aren't doing exactly what the bribe making Oligarchy demands.

The idea of small government and limited government is an attack on Democracy. Any use of Democracy that conservative fascists who have been bribed or duped disapprove of becomes an act of tyranny to them, and the acts of conservative fascists are always painted by the Oligarch propaganda media as a just an honorable act of rebellion. The fascist are always the victims in their own minds, they are the persecuted always, even if while they are taking your democratic rights away from you and feeding you to the fraudulent Oligarchs who manipulate the free markets.

In a fraud based economy the game is rigged in favor of the lawless. The super rich who profit from this fraud use their profits to bribe our law makers and law enforcers.

In a bribe based system of representative Democracy, the game is rigged in favor of the bribe takers. The bribe takers who profit from this fraud use their power to aid and abet the fraudulent super rich.

And at the end of the game both the super rich and the bribed lawmakers and law enforcers get richer and more powerful while everyone else in our society is screwed.

We used to have a system in America where some persons were considered to be the outright property of other people, and were exploited as such. Now we have a system where the property of one man is considered to have all the same rights as a person. In an unfettered, unregulated free market, that property is a king that never dies and you are all his slaves unless you are one of the owners of that property, and then you are of the economic royalty and everyone else who is not of that select economic royalty is a peasant. Free markets is the new slavery to a corporate personhood, never ending war is the new pathway to peace, and Oligarchy is the new fascism.

Now prove me wrong. Talk me down. The floor is yours.

Armory of the Revolution

Bernie, We Will Follow You Anywhere. Except to Hillary.

Roland Vincent / April 22, 2016

Bernie Sanders may be the most important political figure since Abraham Lincoln, even if he is not elected president, even if he doesn’t become the Democratic nominee.

Bernie Sanders has ignited a political revolution. It will continue long after Sanders is dead and buried and will reshape the American political landscape for decades to come.

One has only to see Sanders’ popularity and support among young voters to appreciate how profoundly he will impact the country. Voters under thirty embrace Bernie in astounding numbers. Upwards of 80% of those young people support him. As they move into positions of influence and authority in society, the Democratic party as we know it cannot continue to exist.

Hillary Clinton is the last stand for Wall Street Democrats. She and the political hacks and opportunist whores who have controlled the party for the past 50 years are toast in a very few election cycles.

The Millennials are taking over the party, the country, society.

The knee jerk fear of socialism does not affect them. The siren call of greed falls on deaf ears. Social justice and equality are not campaign slogans to them. Our young people are not impressed by incremental improvements in society. They are unwilling to allow their values and beliefs to be sacrificed on an altar of political expediency.

They believe they are entitled to a government that works for everyone. They do not see their futures served by the status quo or gradualism.

Those young people are the future of the Democratic party. And that future will be significantly delayed if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

Bernie and his legions are fighting the status quo, the corrupt political system that auctions off legislation and governmental policies to the highest bidder. The system which makes officeholders more responsive to special interests and major donors than they are to the people who elect them.

Bernie and his team may believe that they must support Hillary if he does not defeat her for the nomination. He has certainly said he would. He may believe that he will be able to shape the future of the party and influence her policies as president. That is certainly the usual practice. All the good Democrats rally around the nominee and present a unified front to the electorate.

The problem with such an approach this year is that Bernie has exposed the political status quo for the fraud that it is. Bernie has raised issues that cannot be addressed by Hillary, as Hillary is the poster child for the very problems Bernie is describing.

Bernie may rationalize the problems away with concerns that the Republicans are so much worse than is Hillary, but that argument will not be persuasive to many who support Sanders.

I will stand with Bernie for as long as he fights to be our president. I will support him in his quest for the Democratic nomination. I would encourage him to continue on through November as an independent or third party candidate. I urge him to turn his campaign organization into a long term shepherd and advocate of the political revolution he has started.

I beg him not to fold. To not endorse Clinton. To not embrace the corrupt system he has been fighting.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the revolution stops dead in its tracks.

If Sanders endorses Clinton he will undo much of what he has accomplished.

He will almost certainly rip the hearts out of those who have come to love, respect, and admire him.

The revolution will be put on hold until such time as we can take back the Democratic party, possibly four or eight years from now.

And those years will continue to yield dead American troops, seniors without housing, students with crushing debt, families without healthcare, American jobs being outsourced, Wall Street running amok, industry lobbyists and alums in her administration, billions dumped into Israel’s coffers, arms sales to the world, neocon foreign policies reminiscent of W and Dick Cheney. And on. And on.

If Bernie does embrace Hillary, many of his troops will not.

Bernie, we love you.

But we won’t follow you into the enemy’s camp.

Your place in history has yet to be decided.

You can be a Democratic has-been. Or you can be the most important political figure since Abraham Lincoln.

Personally, I think you are Lincoln-esque.

Author’s Notes:

• I am unaware of any other blog with the Armory’s mission of radicalizing the animal movement. I certainly hope I am not alone, and that there are similar sentiments being expressed by comrades unknown to me.

If you know of other blogs dedicated to animal rights and the defeat of capitalism, please comment with a link.

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