MOVED to BigBatUSA [http://bigbatusa.org] / Electoral Reform
DefDog: Elizabeth Warren Spooks the Extreme Right
03 Economy, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Warren Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street
Samuel Jacobs
The Daily Beast, Oct 24, 2011
The Harvard professor has spooked the right. As she begins her high-profile Senate campaign against GOP star Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the consumer advocate tells Samuel P. Jacobs how she created ‘much of the intellectual foundation' for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also talks about her past life as a Republican and the challenges of being a woman on the campaign trail—and says she's no ‘guileless Marxist.'
Phi Beta Iota: The implied claim is a real stretch. Ethics has been around for a very long time, as has populism. The Internet is new. An awakening engaged and modestly enraged public is new. At best Warren is – like most of us – a modest catalyst for convergence.
Eliot Spitzer: Conversation on Democracy & Occupy
Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process
Eliot Spitzer talks capitalism with one of the 99 percent
New York Magazine,21 October 2011
Last week, New York’s Mattathias Schwartz invited Occupy Wall Street protester Manissa Maharawal, a CUNY graduate student in anthropology, to discuss the movement and its impact over coffee with former New York governor and attorney general Eliot Spitzer. An extended transcript of their conversation is below.
FOUR EXTRACTS:
MM: Oh, okay. So we’re in the same system. As I was saying, one of the reasons this movement has been without demands is because without demands we can shift. The moment you have a list of demands, you have politicians take all of those demands and explain to you why they aren’t going to work.
ES: But in order to turn this into something other than a visceral cry of despair, you need to figure out how to confront the actual problems and issues. You need to think about all of this more rigorously. If you’re down in Zuccotti Park six months from now, having made it through a cold winter, I’m not sure whether you would deem that success. Trust me, the media won’t be paying as much attention six months from now if it’s just the same couple hundred people, right?
. . . . .
Continue reading “Eliot Spitzer: Conversation on Democracy & Occupy”
John Robb: China Bans “Occupy” as Search Term
02 China, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency
‘Occupy' Now a Banned Search Term in China
A good rule of thumb for life is that if the Chinese government is against it, you're probably doing something right. The latest evidence to support this axiom is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread from lower Manhattan to cities around the globe, including London, Auckland, Toronto, and Rome, among many others. Terrified by OWS' viral growth, the oppressive regime controlling China is taking measures to ensure the protests don't happen there. And it's starting with the internet.
John Steiner: 10 Years Late, NYT “Sees” Democracy Now!
07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, IO Impotency, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth
A Grass-Roots Newscast Gives a Voice to Struggles
Brian Stelter
New York Times, 23 October 2011
EXTRACT
Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.
Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.
Phi Beta Iota: Now that the rest of the world has seen that the US Courts are generally corrupt and will not entertain law suits against those that led the US to an elective war costing trillions and including crimes against humanity at multiple levels, we anticipate a flood of law suits against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. As committed as we are to Truth & Reconciliation (with presidential pardons when full truth has been offered to the public by the individual concerned) we fear that absent a restoration of integrity to the electoral process and to the US Government in the 2012 elections, we are in for a decade of revenge against specific individuals and specific banks now known to have betrayed the public trust.
Venessa Miemis: Contact Conference Hot Wash-Up
11 Society, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO)
What the Contact Conference Was Really About
I am very grateful to have been able to take part in organizing the Contact Conference, an event that pitched itself as a working festival of innovation, a social technologies exhibitor space, and a celebration of the potential of a network culture.
And it was definitely all those things, so mission accomplished there. The energy in the room was great, the recipients of the three $1oK Innovation Awards worthy, and the four projects conceived and launched at the event exciting. (more details on those things below in Douglas Rushkoff’s letter to participants)
But that’s really only a part of the story.
The bigger picture here is that if we start from the premise that “the system is broken” or “we’re at a critical turning point’ or that “we’re in a global transition,” or any such broad sweeping statements about the functionality of our social/economic/political/environmental/technological/scientific systems, and the majority of the world’s population is either deeply dissatisfied or at the least has an itching feeling that there is something that is just not right… then the only sane choice left is to act.
Graphic: Golden Hawk Killing Golden Goose
07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Tip of the Hat to Marcus Aurelius.
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Dereliction of Duty (Defense)
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit
