Night with a Martini

The Occupy movement addresses power. So does religion, but it does so in conflicting ways. To give an example: it often operates with images of divine authority that echo the powers that be. In ancient times, state religions imagined God as a heavenly monarch, modelled after particular rulers. Today, dominant religion imagines God, often by default, as the boss who calls the shots and rewards religious shareholders. This is not only the message of the so-called Gospel of Prosperity; mainstream churches of all major denominations are found in this camp as well. Who can blame atheists for flagging this kind of theism as the wishful thinking of the status quo?

Yet there are alternative forms of religion, and alternative images of the divine to go with them. The early Christians proclaimed a God who was executed on a cross in solidarity with the people. For this, the Roman elites called them atheists. In the Civil Rights movement, God was conceived as the liberator who challenged oppression and used leaders such as Moses and Martin Luther King to lead the people to freedom.

Jesus himself was a construction worker, and would have been in touch with the many unemployed of his time

In the context of the Occupy movement, fresh images of God are emerging. Some of these images connect us back to ancient and forgotten traditions of liberation, rather like the Civil Rights movement discovering Moses and the labour movement reclaiming Jesus as well as the prophetic traditions. In Occupy, these emerging images might bring us closer to the true nature of the world and of the cosmos than any of the dominant images could.

Dangerously, some Christians in the movement were reminded of where and how Jesus had actually lived. Occupiers camping in the streets could relate to Jesus’ deep solidarity, not with the elites of his time, but with the multitude. Jesus had stayed among those who struggled with life: with the sick, the social outcasts, strong women of ‘dubious’ reputation and working people such as fishermen. He himself was a construction worker, and would have been in touch with the many unemployed of his time, who quite regularly experienced layoffs. Perhaps he was even unemployed himself.

Participants in the Occupy movement could also relate to the way that the divine frequently resists elite agendas. Jesus challenged legalism by healing on the Sabbath. He put the demands of liberation above the law, challenged the myriad uses of religion that kept struggling people down, and defied the conservative impulse to marginalise women and children.

Moreover, he rejected narrow notions of the family — still at the core of conservative politics — and declared that the true bonds of community are not biological but social: ‘whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’. Unlike dominant Christianity, Christians involved in the Occupy movement could easily see why Jesus would challenge even the temple, the highest symbol of his religion. Thus the basic tenets of Christian religion take on a new life when seen through the struggles of the Occupy movement, which questioned the powerful and entered into solidarity with the proverbial ‘least of these’.

Some of Occupy’s puzzling features also become clearer in this light: not least, the oft-lamented fact that it did not produce a list of demands. What simple list of demands could Jesus have made to Caesar without turning the tables altogether? This movement is not about reformism — the assumption that the system can be fixed by adjusting a few of its problems — but about a new world where power flows from the bottom up.

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After its encampment in Zuccotti Park, which changed the public discourse about economic inequality and introduced the nation to the trope of the 1 percent, the Occupy movement has wandered in a desert of more intellectual, less visible projects, like farming, fighting debt and theorizing on banking. While several nouns have been occupied — from summer camp to health care — it is only with Hurricane Sandy that the times have conspired to deliver an event that fully calls upon the movement’s talents and caters to its strengths.

Maligned for months for its purported ineffectiveness, Occupy Wall Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery. This altruistic urge was initially unmet by larger, more established charity groups, which seemed slow to deliver aid and turned away potential volunteers in droves during the early days of the disaster.

In the past two weeks, Occupy Sandy has set up distribution sites at a pair of Brooklyn churches where hundreds of New Yorkers muster daily to cook hot meals for the afflicted and to sort through a medieval marketplace of donated blankets, clothes and food. There is an Occupy motor pool of borrowed cars and pickup trucks that ferries volunteers to ravaged areas. An Occupy weatherman sits at his computer and issues regular forecasts. Occupy construction teams and medical committees have been formed.

Managing it all is an ad hoc group of tech-savvy Occupy members who spend their days with laptops on their knees, creating Google documents with action points and flow charts, and posting notes on Facebook that range from the sober (“Adobo Medical Center in Red Hook needs an 8,000 watt generator AS SOON AS POSSIBLE”) to the endearingly hilarious (“We will be treating anyone affected by Sandy, FREE of charge, with ear acupuncture this Monday”). While the local tech team sleeps, a shadow corps in London works off-hours to update theTwitter feed and to maintain the intranet. Some enterprising Occupiers have even set up awedding registry on Amazon.com, with a wish list of necessities for victims of the storm; so far, items totaling more than $100,000 — water pumps and Sawzall saw kits — have been ordered.

….read the full article, it’s beautiful!

Chris Hedges, is so on point.  This article pretty much articulates everything I feel about the trajectory of OWS from here, and what I’ve been blogging about for the last few weeks.  Except of course, Chris Hedges put it so much more elegantly.  

WASHINGTON — The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded — sometimes violently — by local authorities.

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it’s clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces “as long as that doesn’t severely affect the rights of others.”

“One of the principles is proportionality,” La Rue said. “The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order — but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger.”

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don’t work anyway, he said. In Occupy’s case, he said, “disbanding them by force won’t change that attitude of indignation.”

Occupy encampments across the country have been forcibly removed by police in full riot gear, and some protesters have been badly injured as a result of aggressive police tactics.

New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in mid-November, evicting sleeping demonstrators and confiscating vast amounts of property.

The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and bean-bag rounds at demonstrators there in late October, seriously injuring one Iraq War veteran at the Occupy site.

 Protesters at University of California, Davis were pepper sprayed by a campus police officer in November while participating in a sit-in, and in September an officer in New York pepper sprayed protesters who were legally standing on the sidewalk.

“We’re seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.

“The demonstrations are treated as if they’re presumptively criminal,” she said. “Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene.”

gettinmyrocks:

In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover declared, in a memorandum to the SAC commanders of the local FBI field offices that the Black Panther Party was “…the most dangerous organization in America.” More dangerous than the Ku Klux Klan, Communist Party USA and the mafia. What pray tell, did the venerable…

libraryjawn:

The bookworms of Occupy Wall Street have slapped the city with some hefty library fines.

The police raid on Zuccotti Park destroyed or damaged 2,800 books that had been donated to the protest movement’s “People’s Library,” a new lawsuit charges.

“You don’t nuke books,” said civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel as he filed the lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court Thursday on behalf of four Occupy Wall Streets librarians.

Read more….

Incredibly powerful article. Truthdig nails it once again.  Occupy Wall Street’s May Day protest in NYC saw 30,000 deomonstrators, with thousands more in over 100 U.S. cities, and yet the mainstream corporate media continues to ignore, suppress, and dismiss the movement.

This May Day brought the explosive global resurgence of Occupy, one of the most significant social movement in decades. In New York City, the heart of global capitalism and center of the movement, the New York Civil Liberties Union estimated that 30,000 demonstrators took part in a massive rally and march down Broadway, led by a score of city taxicabs. As has become alarmingly common for a country that constantly proclaims its zealous devotion to democracy, the day ended with brutal police violence and arrests.

The powerful rejuvenation of the Occupy movement, however, was used by the US media - owned by the very same interests that Occupy directly threatens - as an opportunity to finally kill the Occupy movement and marginalize the voices of its participants. Since September, the mainstream press in the US has systematically ignored and demonized the Occupy movement. The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.

While tens of thousands of activists took to the streets on May Day, the only prominent mention of economic inequality on the homepage of The New York Times web site was titled “A Wealthy Guy’s Case for Inequality,” written by a former associate of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital. The Times, in fact, did not even cover the protests as a national story, instead merely producing a brief and dismissive 400-word article buried in the “Paper of Record’s” Metro section. Predictably, the article focused mostly on the wickedness of the demonstrators, who “snarled traffic and smashed windows.” The Times did see fit to cover May Day protests in Europe in its international section, but here, too, no connection was made to protests of a nearly identical nature and size at home. In other words, since “the march was too big to allow Occupy Wall Street to continue to be reduced to a dog-and-pony show,” as Occupy Handbook editor Janet Byrne said, the Times simply chose to ignore it altogether.

The Washington Post adopted a similar approach, producing just one short story, also exiled to the local section, which likewise took great pains to amplify claims of “reports of violent clashes on the West Coast.” It is telling that while these major national papers were outraged by some broken windows, they ignored the thuggish attacks by the police on both coasts on peacefully assembled human beings.

The Tea Party, a movement which serves rather than threatens corporate interests, has received front-page coverage in virtually all of the nation’s national newspapers for events that were smaller and less significant than this week’s May Day protests. Yet, a truly substantial social movement with genuine emancipatory potential and a broad base of support among Americans is largely considered un-newsworthy by the corporate press. When the demonstrations were covered, crude caricatures masquerading as objective news ruled the day.

Occupy is arguably at its most critical juncture since the eviction of Zuccotti Park and the effort by the media to portray Occupy as a toothless shell of its former self is not without potential consequences. It is vital that it be understood that the media are not any more neutral in the war being fought on the streets of our cities than are the corporations that own it. Occupiers can expect no favors from the American media, which will continue to serve their corporate owners and not the public at large. This means that the occupiers must expect to struggle mightily for their view of the world - and even their very presence - to break into mainstream political discourse. The narrative that “Occupy is dead” is merely the latest salvo by the 1 percent. We must not let them get away with it.

Be sure to read the entire article. It is so well written.  My isolated quotes can’t do it justice.

For the truth about the numbers see this Guadian article:

First, the march was too big to allow Occupy Wall Street to continue to be reduced to a dog-and-pony show. Four police officers I spoke with at about 8pm near Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway, estimated the crowd at 25,000, and Occupy Wall Street organizers put it variously at 10,000–15,000 and at 50,000. The office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Affairs at the NYPD explained on the morning of 2 May that the NYPD “does not give out crowd estimates. Ask the organizers.” The New York Civil Liberties Union put the number at 30,000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/02/occupy-wall-street-panel-may-day?newsfeed=true

Great Article by the New York Times on the new resurgence of Student Activism.

It briefly touches on various student protests across the nation including:

• The Morgan Stanley protests at Yale
• Occupy Pocatello at Idaho State University
• Illinois State University maintaining their occupation through winter break
• The Student Debtors pledge, not to pay back student loans. 
• 2009 University of California building takeovers  (However, glaringly absent is the 2011 UCSD Library take over)
• Occupy Harvard and Occupy Harvard 2.0
• Tufts and Occupy Boston
• Seattle Central Community Colleges and Occupy Seattle 
• UC Davis and the officer Pike’s infamous internet meme pepper spray incident
• Occupy Colleges
• Occupy California State University Bakersfield 

The article closes with this great quote:

• But the hardest battle, she [Ericka Hoffman], believes, will be getting the political and financial masters of the universe to listen.

  “People in positions of power, I think they believe nothing is going to happen,” she said. “We’re just going to yell and scream and hold up signs and nothing’s going to change. But you’ve got an entire generation of people that realize something is wrong and something has to change because the system is wrong. There’s more of us than there are of them.”