Declassified: US Government Colluded With Big Banks to Monitor, Disrupt Occupy Protesters as ‘Criminal Threats’
According to recently released documents, the federal government monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement from its very inception, internally referring to it as a potential criminal and terrorist threat despite acknowledging the movement’s explicit rejection of violent forms of protest. …
… Occupy America seeks to present facts objectively, but not neutrally. We prefer to take the perspective that favors the interests of working Americans, rather than mainstream newspapers, which often report from the perspective of upper-middle class urban consumers who, it is supposed, play the stock market and have complex finances. …
Punk is notorious for its loud music, aggressive attitude, and safety-pinned style. Less well known is the radical value system that has emerged hand in hand with the sound and aesthetic. Since the 1970s, punks have built their music, fashion, and lifestyles around core values of social justice, creative freedom, community integrity, fiercely democratic politics and do-it-yourself ingenuity. From journalism to psychology, graphic design to alternative fuel, bodybuilding to the Occupy movement, these interviews show just some of the ways that punk values continue to shape mainstream American life.
This morning the workers at ceramics factory Fabrica Sin Patrones (FaSinPat) in Neuquén were officially granted the rights over the factory 11 years after they occupied it.
FaSinPat has a cooperative structure where all workers are paid the same wages and all decisions go through an assembly where each worker’s vote has the same weight. A special assembly was called today to discuss and celebrate the expropriation of former owners Zanón. …
ON Wednesday night, as a fierce northeaster bore down on the weather-beaten Rockaways, the relief groups with a noticeable presence on the battered Queens peninsula were these: the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Police and Sanitation Departments — and Occupy Sandy, a do-it-yourself outfit recently established by Occupy Wall Street. …
… The flagpole had become a meeting place for Hurricane Sandy volunteers, and earlier Thursday, it served as a rallying center for people in the hurricane-battered neighborhood to request food, clothing and other necessities. Reed said he learned some elderly people had been stuck on higher floors of their buildings without power or running water, marooned by elevators that weren’t working.
“Since then we’ve been walking up and down stairs, providing care packages of food and flashlights and bottled water,” Reed said.
Reed and others have been volunteering in Red Hook since Sandy hit, mostly organized via “Occupy Sandy,” a now burgeoning offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, websites like Recovers.org, a social hub for organizing volunteers online, and word of mouth. …
The main thing is to end dependence on motor vehicles. Anything else is at best inadequate; at worst it exacerbates the problem. All the little incremental efficiencies touted on every street corner will not begin to add up to the proportions of the ecological problem facing us. Most of them would actually reinforce the very mechanisms that have allowed an oligopolizing industry to cultivate so widespread and thoroughgoing a dependence on its products. …
… “The Occupy movement just lit a spark.” Noam Chomsky spoke of its historical significance as creating something that never existed before and bringing marginalized discourse to the center. At Zuccotti Park, with a library and kitchen, a cooperative community arose with open spaces for sharing and mutual support. …
… In reality, of course, no political movement springs “from nothing.” Indeed, both of them have roots in the same man. Fifty-five years earlier that fall, the Tea Party movement’s direct ancestors met in Indianapolis to launch their first bid to rally citizens against the “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” occupying the White House, Dwight Eisenhower. But when their beloved anti-communist Barry Goldwater was buried in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party moved swiftly to officially renounce the “radical organizations” that had sullied its public image. Then the most radical of the right-wing radicals, Goldwater’s beloved speechwriter Karl Hess, moved into a houseboat, renounced politics altogether and dedicated the rest of his life to peacefully protesting the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the new aristocracy he dubbed “the one percent.”
You read that right: The first guy to call the 99 percent to arms was the author of a speech that claimed: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Goldwater had fondly referred to Hess as “my Shakespeare.” …
