Two years after the rise and demise of Occupy, we are still spinning around wondering what happened . . . and what comes next. The discussion runs in tail-chasing circles so often that when my radio show co-host suggested that we interview Nathan Schneider, an editor for Waging Nonviolence.org and the author of Thank You Anarchy, Notes From the Occupy Apocalypse, on the subject, I rolled my eyes in exasperation. Why beat the old Occupy horse?
For In These Times' December 2013 cover feature, “Generation Hopeless?”, the magazine asked a number of politically savvy people, younger and older, to respond to an essay by 22-year-old Occupy activist Matthew Richards in which he grapples with what the movement meant and whether Occupy’s unfulfilled promises are a lost cause or the seeds of the different world whose promise he glimpsed two years ago. Here is Neal Meyer's response:
The decentralized movement toward freedom is raging across the world. It cannot be stopped. The tipping point is near. Despite the lack of coverage in the mainstream media, actions are springing up on an increasing basis. A wave of transformation is rising. The zeitgeist is shifting in our direction.
In current protest culture the estranged ideologies of anarchism and progressive populism are coming together around a critique of the neoliberal “corporate state” and a new imaginary of mass insurgency.
The "Grand Bargain" is a hoax. Find out more about who's behind the push for austerity in deficit hawk America. Learn more about billionaire Pete Peterson and his "Fix the Debt" group of manipulators here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?...
An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street is helping people to tap services that run on "mutualism," like community gardens, CSAs, credit unions, and healthcare providers with sliding scales.
A fledgling financial-services group that grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement is looking to launch a debit card aimed at people who want to forgo conventional banks. The group, Occupy Money Cooperative, is currently seeking donations on its website, where it hopes to raise $900,000 to launch a prepaid, low-fee, FDIC-insured debit card that it will offer free to co-op members. As of Wednesday afternoon, the group had raised only $5,389, but the campaign has picked up steam since Monday, when an article about the proposed card appeared in the New York Times.
I am reading and rereading the debates among some of the great radical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries about the mechanisms of social change. These debates were not academic. They were frantic searches for the triggers of revolt.
Before Occupy came along, the Tea Party narrative was dominant in American politics. Conservative activists told a story about how big government was strangling taxpayers and small businesses, holding back growth, fiscally bankrupting the nation, and attacking freedom. Occupy’s rise was a pivot point away from that narrative. It legitimized public discussion of inequality and helped embolden Democrats to talk about this problem, including President Obama, who gave a hard-hitting speech on inequality in Osawatomie, Kansas just three months after demonstrators first appeared at Zuccotti Park.
In an apostolic exhortation issued last Sunday Pope Francis characterized the free enterprise system as a form of “the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.”
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. Occupy movement opened the possibility for a left regroupment against resurgent neoliberalism. Yet the forceful eviction from the squares just two months after the movement emerged, cut short the development of such a constituting power, of a historic bloc of the “99%.”
It's happened before, in 1848 and in 1968. The youth of the world took to the streets to protest the injustices of autocratic political regimes and rapacious business interests and to demand the most basic human right to participate as equal citizens in the affairs of society.
An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street is helping people to tap services that run on "mutualism," like community gardens, CSAs, credit unions, and healthcare providers with sliding scales.
There is something unfair in the way this world is organised. Why is our environment deteriorating? Why is unemployment rising? We want a new vision for the future. The upcoming third industrial revolution needs a new economic paradigm.
A Web site promoting the card suggests its use might represent a “protest with every purchase,” but some in the Occupy movement are displeased with the idea. (Coming Soon?
As governments in economic difficulties increasingly turn to environmentally damaging extraction industries for quick cash citizens of those countries are responding with increasingly louder cries of protest.
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