Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I'm not going to debate it, but will note that what came after Napoleon wasn't worse than him or the earlier revolution or Locke etc. - by far.

I guess we have different views. My view is there is a direct line between the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the ensuing escalation into nationalist wars. Wars in which not just professional armies, but the entire citizenry of nations were thrown into the fray.

And Napoleon himself bears significant responsibility for the population of France freezing up for a full generation - the other part likely being wrong headed land division policies. Something about 1 million to 1.4 million military deaths of French men out of a total population of 30 million.

And I'll also note that there were very few that thought the Berlin Wall would come down as soon as it did.

I don't know about that. It was clear even in the '70s that the Soviet Union was having severe economic issues, and that Eastern Europe was particularly vulnerable as it was a huge resource sink.

[marvenger]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

wars in which not just professional armies, but the entire citizenry of nations were thrown into the fray.

Europeans with power have long been great at using any old excuse to go to war to try to gain more while wiping out vast portions of their population in the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I wish I would have taken a photo, but I've already seen "Die, Yuppie Scum, Die!" posters being worn on the backs of protesters. How confident is everyone that this won't be leveraged against the public?

Not at all confident. A huge array of "PR" forces are working and in place to leverage the haters and "extreme" folk, to try and minimize and destroy real OWS efforts and intentions.

On the other side, many are quite well educated about "PR" and things like the Pueblo incident... and PR can also be used both ways.

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I guess we have different views. My view is there is a direct line between the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the ensuing escalation into nationalist wars. Wars in which not just professional armies, but the entire citizenry of nations were thrown into the fray.

And Napoleon himself bears significant responsibility for the population of France freezing up for a full generation - the other part likely being wrong headed land division policies. Something about 1 million to 1.4 million military deaths of French men out of a total population of 30 million.

Of course, and I have believed that much war and very ugly stuff is ahead since at least 2005, if not the '70s.

But what I'm saying is that it was overall quite different and better in France after 1820 or so, my basic point being about the pendulum swinging both ways.

I don't know about that. It was clear even in the '70s that the Soviet Union was having severe economic issues, and that Eastern Europe was particularly vulnerable as it was a huge resource sink.

You were apparently one of the very few I noted earlier.

[Dave Stratman]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

You can find her at the law firm of Steven J. Baum.

Don--

Thanks for this brilliant series of posts. It makes me regret I haven't visited iTulip much lately.

A friend and I are presenting a workshop at Occupy Boston this Sunday at 1:00 pm which is deeply involved with the paradigm shift needed in our society. The theme will be "From Occupation to Revolution":

From Occupation to Revolution

by John Spritzler and Dave Stratman
November 7, 2011

There is no step the OWS movement can take that would have greater impact than to decide explicitly that its goal is revolution.

Transforming the whole society has in fact underlain the movement from the start. It is implicit in the movement’s profound commitment to democracy, to equality among participants, to sharing and support for each other. Why should the values embodied in OWS be limited to a few blocks in towns and cities across America? The movement’s refusal to focus on specific demands is an unspoken acknowledgement that the whole society has to change.

To make transforming the whole society its explicit goal would clarify the agenda for the coming years: a national and international dialogue about how to defeat the ruling elites and what a post-revolutionary society should look like.

If OWS takes this step, then folding the tents in the heart of winter (or losing them to police raids) will matter less. The revolutionary strategy can be carried out even without them. The movement can scatter and regroup as the situation demands.

What does it mean to make revolution the goal? Does it mean picking up a gun or smashing bank windows or attacking the police? No, it certainly does not. It means building on the foundations already established by OWS: equal and supportive relationships among the people and democracy in decision-making. The question is how to extend these to all of society.

Some believe that if occupiers hang on long enough, then the desired changes will happen. Others believe that if enough people get themselves arrested in civil disobedience actions, this will exert “moral suasion” (as Gandhi called it) on the rules and make them change their ways. Some think that if everybody can agree on a few realistic demands, that will do it. And some believe that electing different politicians will solve our problems.

None of the above actions can succeed, however. Any solutions which do not remove the ruling elite from power and create a real democracy offer only more of the same. Difficult though it may be to achieve, revolution is the only practical solution to our problems.

To declare its goal to be revolution would transform the OWS movement. OWS would have a strategic goal within which the movement can develop tactics and measure success. By declaring its goal to be to defeat the 1% and extend equality and sharing and democracy to all of society, OWS would gain a new level of consciousness and create the possibility for far deeper ties and participation from the wider community.

The chief elements of a revolutionary strategy are recruiting to the movement and spreading revolutionary ideas—that the ruling class has no legitimacy, that revolution is necessary, that it is possible, and that it is the only way to create a society based on equality and mutual aid and democracy. Tactics would emphasize communicating these ideas to a wider public and recruiting fresh forces to the discussion of how to defeat the elite and how to make a new world.

Every Occupation should become a base camp for spreading the idea of revolution and recruiting to the movement. Occupations should actively reach out to the larger community, as Occupy Boston did recently when it cooperated with Occupy the Hood and local people to stage a large rally in the heart of the black community. The rally focused on local concerns, especially police brutality, but put them in the larger picture of inequality in American society.

The OWS movement has already found huge resonance with ordinary people across America and the world. The now-famous sign seen at OWS, “The beginning is near,” touched on a profound truth. Millions of people nationally, perhaps billions worldwide, long for a world based on the values which OWS has expressed. There is no better way for OWS to unite itself with these aspirations for a new world than to declare revolution to be its goal.

How might the Occupy movement proceed to embrace revolution as its goal? Perhaps a Declaration of Revolutionary Aims or some such document could declare the movement’s determination to defeat the rulers and outline some principles on which a new society might be based: for example, economic production to fulfill human needs, not profit; a sharing society in which all who contribute would have equal access to social goods; decentralized government based on federated local assemblies. (Our essay, “Thinking about Revolution,” http://thinkingaboutrevolution.com/outlines what a new society might look like.)

No doubt people’s sense of social possibility will grow more expansive as the movement grows in self-confidence. The point now is to start imagining a new world and put fighting for it on the agenda.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

The protesters were among about 1,000 students, faculty and Occupy activists participating in a statewide protest that marked the first banding of the Occupy movement with students against the financial handling of the state's higher education system. (SF Chronicle front page, Nov 10, 2011)

In the past, regents have urged student protesters to take their demands to lawmakers in Sacramento rather than to UC leadership. Wednesday's protest represented a firm rejection of that approach. (from SF Gate)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...#ixzz1dJaK04Rr

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Europeans with power have long been great at using any old excuse to go to war to try to gain more while wiping out vast portions of their population in the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War

It is a good point, but I would point out that the effects of the 30 years war were primarily because of everyone else's armies (i.e. Habsburg both Spanish and Austrian, Swedish, French, Danish, German princes, and mercenaries of all stripe and color) were wandering around Germany basically taking turns looting. The majority of the losses were due to the typical disease, famine, etc which follows such behavior.

Napoleon changed this model - instead of paid or drafted soldiers, regular volunteer citizens were massed together. It is notable that outside a few of Napoleon's biggest victories, he tended to lose more casualties than the other side even when he won. That kind of thing happens when one of your innovations is a long column of soldiers charging a vital position: sure the first many rows get slaughtered, but eventually you do get in close with the cannon.

The 1 million to 1.4 million military casualties are losses due to fighting; this doesn't even count the deaths due to other causes though it does count the entirety of the Russian experience, civilian deaths, etc etc.

[kriden]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

VIDEO: Farrakhan (Not everyones cup of tea) to Assembled US Media Muppets: 'Take a Long Walk Off a Short Pier'

Minister Louis Farrakhan was interviewed on Chicago radio station WVON 1690. During a break, he let his real feelings show. Highlights ...

• "[The people] don't know ... the media's bought and paid for."

• "This is a hell of a betrayal of the American people when you will not tell them the truth because you're afraid that if you tell the truth your bosses will take your job from you. That's a hell of a thing. You don't have a democracy when you don't have a free press."

• "You're all slaves and you love it so you deserve what you get, the erosion of your democracy. You'll soon be the laughingstock of the world. It's a damn shame."

• "I'm glad. Hell, I'm not hiding nothing. You need somebody to tell the truth. You need somebody that's not afraid to die for the truth that you could be made free – because you're not free and you don't really know what it means to be a free white person, a free black person, a free Mexican, a free Arab."

Listen here ...

(Posted October 29, 2011 to Ahmad770's YouTube User Channel)

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

• "[The people] don't know ... the media's bought and paid for."

• "This is a hell of a betrayal of the American people when you will not tell them the truth because you're afraid that if you tell the truth your bosses will take your job from you. That's a hell of a thing. You don't have a democracy when you don't have a free press."

• "You're all slaves and you love it so you deserve what you get, the erosion of your democracy. You'll soon be the laughingstock of the world. It's a damn shame."

• "I'm glad. Hell, I'm not hiding nothing. You need somebody to tell the truth. You need somebody that's not afraid to die for the truth that you could be made free – because you're not free and you don't really know what it means to be a free white person, a free black person, a free Mexican, a free Arab."

Listen here ...

Farrakhan's greatest contribution was making it obvious that either 'The Man' dealt with Dr. Martin Luther King, or he'd have to deal the Farrakhan.

The question is whether OWS is King or Farrakhan.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovL...layer_embedded

[astonas]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovL...layer_embedded

Yep, this era of protests, with ubiquitous video cameras, will be a lot harder to spin for an objective audience. The odds of the person who lashes out first being caught on video is quite high.

The problem is that the fraction of the nation that qualifies as an objective audience is so low. It's also much easier to only ever see the story you agree with.

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Keep in mind that the core of the American revolution numbered only a few hundred. About 45% of the colonists supported them, with only about 20% remaining loyal to Britain and the rest neutral.

[astonas]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Keep in mind that the core of the American revolution numbered only a few hundred. About 45% of the colonists supported them, with only about 20% remaining loyal to Britain and the rest neutral.

Thanks for the reminder, bart. Encouraging words indeed. And it's also good to remember that the media of the day was if anything more partisan and biased than today. It can be discouraging to read the news, but it helps to occasionally be reminded that not all hand baskets wind up in hell.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

It Seems Wall Street Is Occupying Us
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...g_us_20111110/
Posted on Nov 10, 2011

By Richard Reeves

The good news of the day is that Bill Moyers is coming back to television next January. The bad news is that Coca-Cola seems to be winning its battle to fill the Grand Canyon with empty plastic bottles.

The two stories came together last week. In a speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, among the things Moyers, a credible voice of the people, had to say to the Nader group were these:

“Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking: ‘Why are you here?’ But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And that’s why in public places across the country workaday Americans are standing up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march in Iowa the other day? It read: ‘I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought this sign.’”

“Barack Obama criticizes bankers as ‘fat cats,’ then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person. ... The president has raised more money from banks, hedge funds, and private equity managers than any Republican candidate. ... Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy—fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.”

Quoting from The Economist, hardly a voice of liberalism: “A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first) Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace. ... Everywhere you look in modern America—in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts—you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working stiffs.”

Moyers then gives a concise history of the rise of the corporate right-wing takeover of a lot of American politics beginning in the 1970s. He cites a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Lewis Powell, then a Virginia lawyer, later a Supreme Court justice, and a book, “A Time for Truth,” by a former secretary of the Treasury. Both men argued that it was time for corporate America to mobilize its people—and especially its money—to build a giant political machine including think tanks, university chairs and departments and college newspapers.

A brilliant idea—and it worked. Conservatives, helped along by the Reagan administration, changed American public opinion, harnessing a new populism that targeted big government rather than the old populist enemies, including Wall Street bankers, railroad companies, big oil and the like. Bureaucrats became the enemy. Plutocrats ruled and still do.

Take Coca-Cola. Last year, the National Park Service moved to ban the sale of plastic water bottles around the Grand Canyon. People were throwing their empty Dasani bottles (that’s Coke’s water brand) into the great gorge. Coke sent its lobbyists to Washington (and $13 million to national parks), and soon enough the bottle ban was ended and sent someplace for “further study.”

That’s the way it works: government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. And it will get worse. Mitt Romney and the Supreme Court have said and ruled that corporations are "people," with all the attendant liberties and privileges. I, for one, am with the guy who sent a letter to the New York Times asking if General Electric was single or married.

Welcome back! Give ‘em hell, Bill.


The whole speech...http://www.thenation.com/article/164...cupied-america

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Originally Posted by bart
Keep in mind that the core of the American revolution numbered only a few hundred. About 45% of the colonists supported them, with only about 20% remaining loyal to Britain and the rest neutral.

Thanks for the reminder, bart. Encouraging words indeed. And it's also good to remember that the media of the day was if anything more partisan and biased than today. It can be discouraging to read the news, but it helps to occasionally be reminded that not all hand baskets wind up in hell.

Thanks. I sometime sure feel very contrarian posting optimistic comments, and ran into something Marc Faber said recently when he was asked about the future that helped.

Heavily paraphrasing, he basically said that if he wasn't somewhat optimistic, he would have taken his own life long ago with all the messes going on and the 'darkness' ahead.

I've been accused of being a Pollyanna on other less moderated forums or ones with real live psycho types that can hardly wait to start murdering members of various races, religions, etc.

Yes, there's much pain and worse ahead, and I have been known to be in despair now & then (especially before some relative bright spots like the Tea Party & OWS appeared), but I find it important and helpful to focus more of my attention on the period after the pendulum really starts moving the other way - whether that's 2 or 5 years ahead, or even more than a decade. 'No hope' isn't exactly my favorite state of being... regardless of how many are already there.