The world is riveting toward a possible turning point and we hope that you are able to stand with us in this call to action.
We, the undersigned, have co-authored the document noted below. We are now writing to seek your endorsement. Please if you wish to support our statement and are willing to stand in solidarity with us, then, by return of this email, add your name and affiliation to the signatories. As the current global crises have clearly shown, the whole world is waking up to the value of co-creation and harnessing of knowledge from diverse sources, disciplines, experience and expertise.
We plan to publicise this document widely and forward it to many relevant national and international agencies and bodies tasked with formulating new policies for a new type of world economy.
Introduction to P2P and the Commons as the new paradigm of change
When: Sat, December 10, 10am – 11am
To succeed in social change, I believe we need 3 things.
* a genuine mass movement. As the first native movement and great hope of the digital age that is what #ows is all about.
* concrete alternatives that can change our lives and allow us to live our values right now. This is what commons-based peer production provides – a new way of producing value.
* the ability to be able to stop bad policies, and propose new ones that allow alternatives to survive and thrive, for which we need true democratic processes.
A ‘commons’ rather than ‘market state’ orientation is a fruitful way to think about solving humanity’s problems in a new way.
Michel Bauwens is founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives , a global collaborative researching peer production that maps the thousands of p2p projects being created to achieve mutual alignment and a growing counter economy that can co-exist and perhaps even supersede the today’s dysfunctional one. He is also a partner of the Commons Strategies Group which seeks to seed conversations around the new commons paradigm.
2. Reverse the legalization of the corruption and crime in both banking and related industries (e.g. military-industrial complex.
3. Close loopholes that allow Congress to legally cheat the public at every turn by passing laws favoring their own investments.
Federal Government has federalized state and local law enforcement against its own citizens, and this endeavor is being run by NY Representative Peter King.
The “third rail” of the two-party tyranny has been exposed. A Civil War has begun, between the 99% and the 1%. With the exceptions of Kucinich and Paul Sr., Congress is with the 1%.
Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality
Naomi Wolf
The Guardian, 25 November 2012
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
Phi Beta Iota: Occupy must focus on King and burn him (metaphorically speaking) out of office. Then it must read/listen to the Open Letter to Occupy /* and place its full attention on the Electoral Reform Summit that will take place, it now appears that event will occur in Washington DC is a very prominent place easily accessible to broadcast television networks. The lines are drawn. Congress has turned against its own people, publicly.
Most of the Occupy videos circulating lately are of massive demonstrations, police abuse of protesters, and various Occupy encampments being removed or resisting removal. For this remarkable visibility we can thank cell phones, powerful cheap video cameras, and the Web – from YouTube to live feeds.
There have been earlier periods of video visibility in the US – for example, TV coverage of the Vietnam War helped stimulate rising public resistance and a bystander's video of Rodney King being beaten by LA police in 1991 had a profound impact on the country. But for the last decade or so, images of our wars have been more thoroughly controlled by the government and mass media have often ignored major demonstrations, so today's renewed video visibility is refreshing. The effort to prevent video and other press coverage of the recent trashing of the Zuccotti Park encampment was so unusual and broadly offensive that it incited widespread comment.
One of the videos of this type that most impressed me recently showed the silent vigil that met University of California Davis chancellor Linda Katehi as she walked to her car. I don't know who thought of it, but I see this response by UC Davis students to the brutal pepper-spraying of peaceful student demonstrators on the ground as a profoundly important development in the Occupy movement's evolution. A small group of Great Peace Marchers in 1986 passed out tiny cards to their fellow marchers saying “We are walking in silence on behalf of the silent dead of Hiroshima and the silent unborn future” and silence spread through the crowd of over 1000 as we entered Washington DC, with comparable powerful effect. I hope the use of moral silence as a tactic spreads in Occupy. Here's the video:
However, I want to mainly use this message to highlight another type of OWS videos showing up in my emails – the ones made to inspire us.
Consider the moving videos below – and enjoy them.
War on Terror and War on Drugs actually a war on individual civil liberties. And for this [and the bloated defense/intelligence pork fest] we borrow one trillion a year?
Events like the one in the above video have been far too common in the police response to Occupy protests across the country. I do believe that Occupy Wall Street is at a tipping point, and that it must grow beyond and evolve away from the tent city occupations, but this police response is absurd and excessive.
Arrests exceeding 250 people followed protests in New York City yesterday. All across the country, cops are cracking down on protesters with force. I may be a critic of Occupy Wall Street, but the police are public servants, and public servants have no business treating the public this way.
It is difficult for any intelligent moral citizen to stand by and watch their country self-destruct. Between the ideological idiots on the extreme right and the mere idiots on the extreme left, America is in a pickle. Elsewhere I have posited a solution for 2012.
Here I am obliged, from a sense of duty to the Republic that has been betrayed by our serving flag officers and senior executives, to point to and then demolish a book that is beneath contempt among real professionals, but all the rage among the loosely-educated and macho-shit crowd–this sadly includes a number of ranking Special Operations Force (SOF) officers that should know better. It came out in early 2010 and crap from this book is now making the rounds among the wing-nuts of the right and the uniformed officers that have never actually done any form of successful clandestine intelligence or counterintelligence. I refer to Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack.
Here is a copy of the garbage that is circulating now via email among military officers:
