Year: 2011

Exploring OWS's collective thinking process – and Michael Moore's

Below are four documents that provide interesting insight into the kinds of energies and proposals that get born through Occupy Wall Street's collective thinking process of working groups and General Assembly deliberations.

The first document is a “Statement of Autonomy” passed by consensus at the OWS General Assembly (GA) November 10th. It clearly states the non-partisan nature of the movement and their resistance to being co-opted or manipulated – and it names the standard by which a statement can be considered to speak for Occupy Wall Street. Beyond that, the encourage people to “Speak with us, not for us.”

The second document is an unusual OWS statement of position on a political issue – electoral reform. Most efforts to get OWS to take a stand on a specific issue don't make it to or through the General Assembly process. But this issue did: It was passed by consensus on December 10th. Interestingly, it is not a lobbying document, but an invitation for citizens to educate themselves, dialogue about, experiment with and take action on a broad range of approaches to electoral reform.

The third document is a 9-point vision statement crafted by the OWS vision and goals working group. They submitted it to the OWS General Assembly in late November, but it was not approved. It is apparently in that limbo between the work of a focused group – the vision and goals working group had 40 people in it – and the broader feelings of the General Assembly. The fact that it hasn't been authorized by OWS-as-a-whole intrigues me, and makes me wonder what were the concerns that came up during the GA deliberations that impeded consensus…

Progressive filmmaker and author Michael Moore participated in the working group that created that vision statement. After it, he crafted his own 10-point set of goals and demands that he felt were consistent with the vision statement and offered an agenda that OWS could rally around. I've found no signs that it was approved by either the working group or the General Assembly. Again, this seems another sign of OWS's reluctance to restrict their impact to a set of focused demands.

For information on all the proposals that have been placed before the OWS GA – whether they were passed (either through consensus or modified consensus), not passed, tabled, discussed, or withdrawn – see
http://www.nycga.net/category/assemblies/proposals-past

Looking over the list on that page, it seems that, in general, proposals having to do with logistics, on-the-ground actions, or support for other Occupy-related efforts have a greater chance of approval than proposals for policy positions. Although the whole OWS population tends not to readily agree on policy proposals, most such proposals were developed by working groups who, themselves, came to consensus about those proposals. I suspect the working groups' deliberations have considerable impact on their members and others, even when their recommendations don't make it through their General Assembly, and so it is not in vain. I suspect action often develops out of these working groups, especially when they connect up with comparable working groups in other Occupy sites or with groups already working on the issue in question.

To explore current and future proposals to the OWS GA, look over http://www.nycga.net/category/assemblies/proposals-future.

All these proposals are easy to scan and make for interesting reading, revealing much about the thinking of OWS activists. I think we're seeing a rich and complex fabric of change activity being woven for 2012 on a loom of deeply serious conversations.

Blessing on their journeys, and ours…

Coheartedly,
Tom

 STATEMENT OF AUTONOMY

People Before Parties: Recommendations for Electoral Reform

Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here?  by Michael Moore

 

How the Interventionists Stole the American Right

And how Ron Paul is taking it back.

Ryan McMaken

LouRockwell.com, 30 december 2011

Thanks to Ron Paul, the Conservative movement is having an identity crisis. The old guard of the Conservative movement, which also happens to be the Republican Party establishment, still clings to the old creation myth of the Conservative movement. Namely, that there was no opposition to the New Deal-Liberal consensus until William F. Buckley and National Review came along in 1955, saving America from the American left, social democracy, moral turpitude and international Communism.

The modern gatekeepers of the movement, and the Republican Party officials, who fancy themselves as the keepers of the last word on the acceptable range of debate within the movement, cannot understand why the Ron Paul movement is more concerned with actually shrinking the size of government than with waging endless wars for endless peace. They cannot fathom that people claiming to be part of the American Right might actually be interested in rolling back government power to tax, wiretap, spy, arrest, imprison and feel up American citizens. This runs contrary to everything they have ever imbibed about what it means to be Conservative in America.

Read full article.

See Also at LouRockwell.com:

Well, Was it Worth It?  [Iraq]

I Hereby Secede [One Man's Answer]

Stop SOPA Now [End of Free Speech]

The Big Lie

Michael Thomas

Daily Beast / Newweek, Dec 26, 2011

Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America.

Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

Flurry of local #OccupyWallStreet actions and successes show strength and staying power of movement

Excerpted via Rose Aguilar:

” the movement is far from dead.

Here in California, the movement is exploding. In a recent study called “Diffusion of the Occupy Movement in California,” UC Riverside researchers surveyed 482 incorporated towns and cities in California and found that 143 – nearly 30 percent – had Occupy sites on Facebook between December 1 and December 8.

According to the study, many of the small and medium-sized towns are active with likes, posts and events on their Facebook pages. For example, the town of Arcata has about 17,000 people and 2,950 subscriptions on their page.

“The Occupy Barstow website proclaimed that Barstow is ‘about as far from Wall Street as you can get.’ But the Barstow occupiers probably did not know that there were also Occupy actions in Weaverville, Idyllwild, Calistoga, El Centro and many other small California towns, even in very remote areas,” write professor of sociology Christopher Chase-Dunn and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange.

And the majority of Occupy cities are not in the Northern, more liberal, part of the state. They are almost equally divided between the north and south.

Continue reading “Michael Bauwens: Occupy Movement Alive and Well”