Occupy Wall Street

For a somewhat inside baseball look at OWS, I've found that this guy has a good blog:

http://charliedavis.blogspot.com/2011/11/occupy-action-committee.html

The specific blog entry I linked describes quasi successful attempts by Democratic insiders to co-opt DC's Occupy movement and also calls by more pure-hearted folk for more transparency. For anyone interested in the thoughts of a person within the movement who isn't someone chosen purposefully because s/he is a weirdo, this guy seems to be a good resource.

Here's an interview with David Graeber about the beginning of OWS:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-in-miniature/2011/08/25/gIQAXVg7HL_blog.html

This is a long thread, so I'm not sure if either of these things have been posted in this thread.

There are a lot of sources of information on OWS that come straight from the horse's mouth. Anyone who wants information that isn't filtered through corporate media should get themselves a twitter account, do some searches for the #OWS hash tag and follow whoever seems interesting. These folks aren't all supporters and many are members of the movement who are also capable of criticizing the movement using more than just right-wing talking points.

 

Time Magazine's Person of the Year -- The Protester



From the Arab Spring to Operation Wall Street

http://www.time.com/time/person-of-the-year/2011/

 

how odd. what do you make of that?

personally, i see it as (a) repressive tolerance in action. the system deals with dissent by accepting it's premises. corrupt and dysfunctional? ok, we are corrupt and disfunctional. but you are a signifier, a generality, no-one in particular located nowhere in particular doing nothing in particular beyond adding predicates to images of what is and (b) maybe a prank, but a strange one and (c) a terrible piece of graphic design. but it's also an indication of the impact the occupation has had on the rickety dominant media---which has, a la time mag, latched onto it as an image so as to position itself as somehow outside the dominant corporate order that it serves enough to maintain independent credibility across a period of crisis and/or change the outcomes of which are not yet obvious at all.

what's clear is that these movements have accomplished some things, particularly (in the states) at a symbolic level. but the work is still beginning. like neil stephenson said not long ago, you're not going to dislodge the dominant economic order on facebook.

since the us-based televised infotainment system arrived in cairo as 25 jan was exploding, stuck around for a few days to get cool teevee images and left again and in the process seemingly reduced tahrir square to an image, something that just kind of happened because that's how things self-correct in the world and it's all just like that so don't worry so much and certainly don't do anything....a corrective:

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/599/from-the-blogosphere-to-the-street_the-role-of-soc

the movements that are condensed around the tactic of occupation are more than the tactic. there's a lot going on. strangely, the only thing that gets a whole lot of press is the evictions. maybe that's why time thought it ok to memorialize "the protestor" as if this whole messy affair is over.

it's just starting.

 

The four runner-ups are interesting choices.

Ai Weiwei - A Chinese photographer, architect and dissident (I'd never heard of him before reading the article)
William McRaven - The commander of the operation that captured and killed Osama Bin Laden
Kate Middleton - A bit of celebrity fluff
Paul Ryan - This year's congressional poster boy for the same old right wing bullshit.

I'd say Time got it right on this one.

The article on Paul Ryan is an hilarious read. Non-satirical satire at its best.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/time-magazine-person-of-the-year-2011-alternative

i still find the fact of this to be peculiar.
repressive tolerance: the system deals with dissent by accepting its premises. marcuse outlined a whole theory of it in the one-dimensional man.

doubly peculiar given that among the main issues raised across this year of political actions is the various levels of complicity on the part of the mainstream press is selling us the neo-liberal nonsense that explains ows and the other movements more broadly...and in marginalizing protests from the left to this point...now, suddenly, the same press is noticing....

but still having trouble assimilating. which is good. but it's hard to say: on the one hand, political action reduced to a stream of symbols is political action subjected to the mechanism of repressive tolerance. on the other hand, it is certainly an indication of the communicative success to the movements to now (in the states anyway) that this has happened---piggybacking on tunisia and egypt, dovetailing with the far more problematic action in libya---but more directly into the occupation-style movement that is still happening in many many countries---particularly chile (where the central issue is education---but we dont hear so much about chile)....if the occupation is working (as it is) an ambiguous inside/outside frontier with respect to conventional politics, this time thing isn't so bad. but it's also not real significant. just an indicator of cultural penetration, and of the fragmentation of the hold that conservativeland once had as the ideological lingua franca, the baseline of american political monocropping.

 

meant to post this yesterday

six months supply of occupy!

 

Hope it gets reinvigorated this summer.

 

that makes one of us. i'm of the opinion that if it really was as important as they were making it out to be, it wouldn't have been such a fad. i thought about the idea that maybe the lizardmen in the WTO controlled the media so that OWS wouldn't get any attention and thus it petered out, but if OWS stayed as big of a deal as it originally was, then the media coverage would follow.

 

Occupy Sandy gift registries makes it just a 'click' away to give online to victims of hurricane - NY Daily News
--- merged: Nov 7, 2012 at 5:43 PM ---
occupy is alive and going through stages of identity angst , focus, infighting, re-grouping, unbranding,
more infighting , ideological purity finger pointing, etc.

movement/ activist stuff is like that.

the national guard dropped off supplies for Occupy Sandy Relief | InterOccupy Hub the other day.
some folks started freaking out at first cuz of the military garb.
fears were calmed after a bit of communication.

i have to look back through some archived citizen - journo streams to find the one where i saw it happen live.

Occupy Sandy Comes to the Rockaways : The New Yorker