Julie Dermansky – Julie Dermansky is a multimedia reporter and artist based in New Orleans. She is an affiliate scholar at Rutgers University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. Visit her website at www.jsdart.com.
The Atlantic, 27 September 2011
They're calling it America's answer to the Arab Spring. In July, the anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters urged readers to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there,” it continued, “we shall incessantly repeat our one simple demand until Barack Obama capitulates.”
Click on Image to Enlarge
As planned, thousands began gathering on September 17, but 10 days into their demonstration, it's not entirely clear what that “one simple demand” might be. Many of the hand-scrawled signs lash out against corporations. But as the days go by, new issues emerge. The execution of Georgia prisoner Troy Davis four days into the protest made the death penalty into a central theme. And the NYPD has become a major target for rage, especially after Saturday's reports that a police officer (improbably named Anthony Bologna) had aimed pepper spray at a protester's face.
Photographer Julie Dermansky, who covered the protests in Tahrir Square, headed to New York after seeing videos of the Wall Street demonstrations on Facebook. These photos capture some of the scenes she encountered yesterday.
Monday 26 September 2011
by: Ron Boyer, Truthout | Interview
EXTRACT:
A few years later, with the nation plunged into what appears to be a sequel to the Great Depression and another presidential campaign season taking shape, signs of mass populist resistance to the global dominance of the robber-baron class are widely in evidence, both here and abroad. In this exclusive Truthout interview, the October2011 Coalition co-founder and physician Margaret Flowers discusses the conditions that helped bring this emerging movement of citizen activists into being and outlines the key differences between October2011's mission and that of superficially similar emerging “movements” such as Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream.
SOMETIMES, attention should be paid to the absence of news. America’s economic miseries continue, with unemployment still high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens is wider than it has been since the 1920s.
Koko Signs: A small sign of life within the comatose US democracy.
OBERLIN 2011
A Speech Given to the NAACP
at the Oberlin Inn
September 24, 2011
by
Delbert L. Spurlock, Jr.
Mr. Spurlock was introduced by Robert K. Jones (B.J.), Chief of Police, Retired Oberlin Police Department.
EXTRACT:
We live in a country that has mutated a new confederate virus, wiping out the rights fought for and won against terrible odds by the NAACP, and the unbelievably brave black plaintiffs of the South.
It is a virus that works to obliterate the memory of the contributions of the white southern judges of the old Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
It is a virus that has spread to Ohio through word of mouth in right-wing mega churches and by hypodermic injections of rigged electronic voting devices.
We live in a country that raises its young to be economic units incapable of escaping from a lifetime of paying off the company store.
The days ahead will be very difficult for our America and worse for its human citizens. The country we bequeath to our young people is a country without bearing, without antecedent, a country with a government most resembling the disfunctionality of the slavocracy, which all people of Oberlin should recognize.
President Obama's craven performance at the UN has both humiliated the United States and made a mockery of what little remains of America's pretensions to the principles of freedom, democracy, fair play, and simple human decency. Like Colin Powell, he made the wrong turn at the “to be” or “to do” fork in the road; he put career and short-term ambition ahead of common sense and personal honor; and ironically, he made the same faustian bargain publicly on the same world stage for all to see. For a men of such great promise to stumble so miserably is not only a personal tragedy of Shakespearian proportions: their pusillanimity under pressure opens the door to unpredictable grand strategic* ramifications that menace the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people at home and abroad.
Below is one thoughtful observer's exploration of some of these ramifications; there will be other assessments … and very few of them will be pretty.
At least LBJ, who tried to do some things, recognized when his time was over, and left gracefully. But in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac at the dawn of the 21st Century, that won't happen again, and Mr. Obama's ultimate disgrace will be to prove that the easy being was far more important than the hard doing when engineering the moral and material decline of a nation.
________
* The criteria underpinning a sensible grand strategy are explained here.
[CS Note: I reformatted this insightful essay to highlight important points, but did not change any text or the order of presentation]
BOSTON — It remains to be seen what actually changes on the ground in the months ahead following the Palestinian initiative to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 Israeli-occupied territories as a UN member or observer state. The move could be a substantive gain for the Palestinian people, a symbolic victory only, or a measurable setback if the United States and Israel translate their vindictive rhetoric into hard policies. While we wait for the impact of the UN move to become clearer, we should acknowledge nevertheless that this has been a historic week in several ways.
I.The most important new development that future historians will record is that this last week in September represented the moment when the Arab-Israeli conflict structurally transformed into the Arab-Israeli/American conflict, because of the profound and explicit manner in which the U.S. government has come down on the side of Israel. The United States historically has tried, without much success but with visible endeavor nevertheless, to express its support for Israel’s survival and security while also trying to mediate a resolution of the conflict that sees the birth of a Palestinian state in much of the 1967 occupied lands. That balancing act, unconvincing as it was, is formally dead for now — repeatedly shot in the heart by a firing squad of American politicians who have unleashed volleys of shotguns at the weak and doomed phenomenon that was once called “American mediation”.
The Brennan Center for Justice will sponsor a panel discussion October 5 at the National Press Club in Washington DC on overclassification and “Curbing Needless Secrecy” to accompany the release of a new report on the subject. Participants include former Rep. Christopher Shays, former ISOO director J. William Leonard, former NRO director and chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board Martin C. Faga, and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center.
One of our contributors passed this to me and asked me to comment in relation to the alarm that Winn Schwartau, Bill Caeli, Jim Anderson, and I sounded in 1994, in writing, to Marty Harris, then head of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora's box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.
EXTRACT:
CSM: How would you characterize the year since Stuxnet – the response by nations, industry and government?
LANGNER: Last year, after Stuxnet was identified as a weapon, we recommended to every asset owner in America – owners of power plants, chemical plants, refineries and others – to make it a top priority to protect their systems…. That wakeup call lasted only about a week. Thereafter, everybody fell back into coma. The most bizarre thing is that even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Siemens [maker of the industrial control system targeted by Stuxnet] talked about Stuxnet being a wakeup call, but never got into the specifics of what needed to be done.
Right now, people in the USA are essentially getting picked off one or two at a time by social trends, like lack of good health care and lack of good jobs or a basic income leading to stress and various consequences including death (like possibly the recent tragedy down the road from us involving a murder/suicide and which is otherwise just seen as an isolated incident of domestic violance).
All together, that kind of stuff is adding up to millions of US citizens harmed (hundreds of thousands killed from heart disease alone). It even led to the loss of an entire US city (New Orleans during Katrina). And that harm ignores the greater the havoc the USA has caused abroad recently (millions of displaced people in Iraq, etc.) or costs being incurred to pass on to future generations (like Fukushima). Where is our trillion dollar a year defense industry ond defending us from all that? There seems very little most people think they can do about it. It is just ascribed to moral failings of the people involved (like you have no job or no health coverage or a bad marriage purely because you're a bad person), or some economic “wrath of God” (ironically for the USA supposedly being too compassionate perhaps with individual welfare-to-work?), or some weird notion of acceptable Congressional “gridlock”, or something like that.
If “communists” or “space aliens” were doing this to millions of US citizens, denying them access to doctors, ensuring they had no money, destroying their homes and cities, interfering with effective decision making by Congress, what would people in the USA be doing, considering we launched various trillion dollar wars based on 9/11 (where only thousands of people were killed)?
As an, alternative consider this essay by Tim O'Reilly, which relates to the Twirlip Open Governance draft I sent before: 🙂 “Government As a Platform”
“Government 2.0, then, is the use of technology—especially the collaborative technologies at the heart of Web 2.0—to better solve collective problems at a city, state, national, and international level. The hope is that Internet technologies will allow us to rebuild the kind of participatory government envisioned by our nation’s founders, in which, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Joseph Cabell, “every man…feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”[1]”
