1. OccupyCafe.org – a linked phone and online forum space for conversations among everyone “who cares about what is happening on Wall Street and around the world.” Its phone mode uses the advanced MaestroConferencing system that enables activities like breakout groups and hand-raising. Topic conversations begun on the phone can be continued in the online forum, and vice versa. The first phone call is Monday morning. See details below.
2. Organizational consultants study grassroots activist communities – This article didn't exist online, so I got a blurry scanned copy from one of the co-authors and typed it up over a couple of days so I could post it and send it to you. The next day the other co-author posted a clear pdf online, so that's what you get below. I think it is applicable and potentially useful to the Occupy movement.
3. Some very clear advice from nonviolent activist Sharif Abdullah of Commonway in Portland Oregon. Sharif's the fellow who spread the phrase “create a world that works for all” into movement circles. Taking lessons from Gandhi, King, Argentinian activists, and his own work in Sri Lanka, he offers guidelines to help the folks in the Occupy Together movement sustain their transformational impact.
Bit by bit, action by action, conversation by conversation, we develop the collective knowledge we need to make a world that works for all…
The FBI has released a new gang assessment announcing that there are 1.4 million gang members in the US, a 40 percent increase since 2009, and that many of these members are getting inside the military (via Stars and Stripes).
The report says the military has seen members from 53 gangs and 100 regions in the U.S. enlist in every branch of the armed forces. Members of every major street gang, some prison gangs, and outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) have been reported on both U.S. and international military installations.
Phi Beta Iota: One can only marvel at the ability of the US Government (both political leaders and senior civil servants) to carry on without intelligence or integrity for decades. The USA remains the top proliferator of nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, and small arms as well as cyber-weaponry. The USA remains locked into elective wars that have nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with special interests. And now we learn again (DHS published first, in 2007) that we are also training tens of thousands of gang members who are at the same time gaining access to weapons and munitions that we cannot account for…
My friend Andrew Cockburn is on a roll. One week after his brilliant article on IEDs in Harpers, he has produced another hard-hitting tubesteak, this time in Counterpunch. Andrew's targets are the Banksters, whose looting continues to push the middle class into poverty and the lower income classes into a kind of debt servitude that is reminiscent of that imposed by company stores in the West Virginia coal towns in what we had hoped was a bygone era.
Andrew's essay is important, because the problem he is describing exists against the backdrop of the Great Recession, which now, three years after the banking system started to collapse, may be on the cusp of a full blown debt deflation, triggered by another, even more catastrophic banking collapse. My introductory comments are intended to help you understand that magnitude of that danger that Andrew is describing.
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The following charts (Figures 1 & 2), based on the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve,
portray ratio of debt to gross domestic product over time. Figure 1 shows how the cumulative debt changed in the entire system, with debt expressed as a percentage of the GDP produced by the economy. The debt ratio for the entire economy should not be thought of as an absolute measure of debt burden but as an indexof that burden, and is an indicator of the comparative pressure of that debt regardless of the overall size of the economy.[1] Thus, one can compare
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changes in earlier years to those in later years. Figure 2 plots the sector burdens separately for the components in the private sector (note: since Federal Debt is arranged in bottom position in Figure 1 it is also the same shape that would be plotted in Figure 2; other categories, like state and local debt have been ignored because over time their ratio changes have not been significant enough to the alter the pattern in the figures). What do these figures tell us?
“If the Occupiers start chanting ‘Mark to Market,’” an attorney highly conversant with the darker workings of the Wall Street-Washington complex told me, “we’ll know they’re serious.” Such a call would quickly presage the collapse of our “too big to fail” banks, for it would highlight the fact that a huge proportion of the assets of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Citigroup consist of loans that will never be paid back and are therefore essentially worthless. The so called “recovery” of our leading financial institutions from the post-Lehman abyss has depended on a fraudulent valuation of these assets, but stripped of the fiction, the banks are insolvent.
Phi Beta Iota: The banks are on the brink–wildly fearful of a run on stocks and deposits–and the US Government knows they are on the brink–and is wildly fearful of nation-wide violence. Pissed off white people will make the Watts Riots looks like an effete tea party. There is good news. The close OccupyWallStreet gets to understanding the depth of the depravity of the government that enabled and enables Wall Street, the lack of intelligence and integrity within that government, the closer we get to being able to demand and secure the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, in our view the sole means by which a non-violent revolution might restore the integrity of the U.S. Government.
I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.
The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:
Phi Beta Iota: This is why US Day of Rage and Phi Beta Iota both feel so strongly that Electoral Reform is the only immediately reasonable and achievable demand. Congress and the White House are under the delusion that they are going to be in power after 2012, and that #OWS is a light rain that will disappear over the winter. We do not agree. Politics has finally become very personal to the 99%. That is what's new. The lack of intelligence and integrity in the US Government is not new, but God willing, will be old news by 2012.
Things are still wildly bubbling in and around the Occupy movement, which is still radically expanding and evolving. Despite many growing pains, the co-creative, committed engagement of the participants is inspiring. So many among them are using the disturbances in and around them as a motivation for personal growth and collective innovation.
Occupy Together is, as they say, a phenomenon. It is such a passionate, complex, self-organizing initiative that even chaos and complexity theories have a hard time adequately explaining it. It is ALIVE!
The word “occupy” – as a connotation-rich idea or meme – is itself a fascinating part of the movement's impact. It invites everyone who wants a new and better world, to claim a space where they can work together to co-create that world. So far, that space is usually a public park. But that's expanding and morphing: More people are talking about occupying a school, a workplace, a bank, a heart, a profession, an industry, a government office, the airwaves, our minds – any “place” where some piece of the new world needs to evolve and replicate itself to become the actual New World. And the word “occupy” suggests commitment to that place, persistence in it, putting down some roots, claiming and owning and taking responsibility for holding it and making it good.
Phi Beta Iota: Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and also Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. Safety copy of Guardian article with additional comments from others below the line. The NYPD and DHS are OUT OF CONTROL and far, far beyond the bounds of the Constitution. The time has come to begin demanding impeachments of public officials and criminal prosecution of specific police officers so that they might learn what they evidently were not taught: the responsibility to refuse illegal orders. What our military officers abroad and our police officers at home are doing is illegal, unconstitutional, and reprehensible in every possible morally disengaged way.
WASHINGTON — Four months ago, Admiral William McRaven commanded the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Now, as the new head of U.S. special forces, he argues that his shadowy, secretive warriors are increasingly central to how America and its allies fight.
When the suntanned, towering SEAL testified to the Congressional House Armed Services Committee in September, just a few weeks after he took over his new role, he used posters detailing the growth of his forces. In the decade since September 11 2001, U.S. Special Operations Command personnel numbers have doubled, its budget tripled and deployments quadrupled.
Phi Beta Iota: In a debt-based secrecy-enabled government, there is no scrutiny of such programs, neither in relation to return on investment or in relation to moral engagement. The US Government lacks intelligence and integrity and is OUT OF CONTROL.
