Showing posts with label OccupyWallSt.org. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OccupyWallSt.org. Show all posts
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Occupy Your Heart!
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Protester
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All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher &
politician (1729 - 1797)
No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit
vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that
would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters
didn’t just voice their complaints; they changed the world.
Read more: Time.com |
For
“once again becoming a maker of history” two sleepy decades after political
soothsayer Francis Fukuyama declared Western liberalism the end point in the
evolution of human society, Time magazine named “The Protester” 2011’s Person
of the Year.
Nathan
Schneider, author and editor with a number of publishing outfits—including
‘Waging Nonviolence,’ a blog devoted to analysis of nonviolent movements around
the world—was pleased with Time’s decision. He pointed out, however,
that the mainstream American press was slow to get to the uprisings at home and
beyond: “As I first saw this announcement percolating on Twitter, being spread
around proudly every which way by Occupy Wall Street-allied accounts, all I
could think was: What took you so long? Where were you?” he asked.
“Where,
I mean to say, was the American press when Tunisia—or Egypt—first started
lighting up,” he continued, “when we at Waging Nonviolence were glued to
Al-Jazeera and our Twitter feeds, wishing we had the means to be there
ourselves? In the American news, the start of those revolutions was hardly a
blip—that is, until Anderson Cooper got beaten up in Cairo.” —ARK [ Truthdig.com ]
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
15.o - II
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| #WORLDREVOLUTION “Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”
~Aristotle “You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, Not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.”
~Abbie Hoffman Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
~Herbert Marcuse. One-dimensional man. "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." ~Edgar Allan Poe |
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
15.o - I
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| ( Today the words are not carried away by the wind ) |
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| 15.O ctober Mexico |
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| ( The impossible has already started ) |
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| ( When The 99 % Move, The 1 % Fall ) |
On 15th October 2011, united in our diversity, united for global change, we demand global democracy: global governance by the people, for the people.
Inspired by our sisters and brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, New York, Palestine-Israel, Spain and Greece, we too call for a regime change: a global regime change.
In the words of Vandana Shiva, the Indian activist, today we demand replacing the G8 with the whole of humanity - the G 7,000,000,000.
Lorenzo:
"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."
"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."
The Merchant of Venice (V, i, 83-85). William Shakespeare
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Sunday Reflections
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guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 September 2011 18.43 BST Article history Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation –despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA? There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates. Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future? Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down. But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?" It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before. Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart. What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity". The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged. When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side. We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can. |
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Waves of Love
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From Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan People tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is. Seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds; The world of ordinary people and The world of sorcerers. The real thing is when the body realizes that it can see. Only then is one capable of knowing that the world we look at every day is only a description. My intent has been to show you that. Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge, Because the art of a warrior is to balance, the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man. |
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