“Movement 99%: Through Exclusion to the Community” Slovenian Evaluation Society, Working paper 4/4(Nov. 2011), Bojan Radej
“Understanding and Self-Management of the Complex Society” Slovenian Evaluation Society, Working paper 2/4(2011), 30 pp.
Bojan Radej is a methodologist in social research from Ljubljana. Master degree in macroeconomics, University of Ljubljana – Faculty of Economics (1993). Professional Experience Record: Governmental Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development (1987-04; under-secretary to the government), areas of work: sustainable development (1998-04), chief manager of the modelling department (1993-5); initiator and the first editor of Slovenian Economic Mirror (1995-8); Co-Editor of IB journal (2001-04). Chairman of Slovenian Evaluation Society (2008-).
Very inspiring talk, i listened in silence to him and that doesn’t happen often.
As an ex VN soldier i fully support the generals opinion.
Even after losing his own son in Afghanistan he still firmly believes in his ideals and knows how to express them on a way that is understandable and inspiring to allot of people, i can only say general van Uhm made me proud to be Dutch today, and proud i served in the Dutch armed forces.
Occupy Wall Street has put the attention of the country, in fact of the whole world, on the deep wrongness of the current American economy and democracy. Both are broken and rigged by design to produce extraordinary incomes and security only for an elite few.
I am an enthusiastic admirer of Occupy Wall Street and its organic siblings in hundreds of cities and towns across the United States.
My Facebook news feed has been filled with more astonishingly creative handwritten signs and home brewed video in the last month than at any time since the months preceding our ill-fated invasion of Iraq.
This cannot last. That said, I have no sure prediction as to what will bring the American plutocracy to heel.
We know that change will not come from our judicial system or Congress. Each made the current conditions possible. The Supreme Court, after all, unleashed unlimited corporate spending on elections, turning over a hundred years of precedent. And Congress has repeatedly passed on the opportunity to restore income tax rates on billionaires to Clinton, let alone Reagan levels, or to close the hedge fund tax loophole that has enriched a handful beyond our comprehension.
Change might come at the hands of the rest of the world. Tired of our military presence in nearly 200 other countries. Tired of how our regulators looked the other way as American financial institutions nearly borrowed, manipulated, and deceived their way into a world financial crisis that destroyed family wealth built up over decades. Tired of how our political system could not rein in Wall Street in the aftermath of the crisis. The U.S. has become a peculiar form of rogue nation.
Or change might come as a result of sheer fear among the plutocrats, now that the occupiers know where they live and have the audacity to visit the gates of their homes.
My favorite historian, the late Howard Zinn, studied social change sufficiently to caution that change rarely happens as a result of a plan, or on a schedule, or because it is convenient. Sometimes, a regime appears invulnerable right before the cracks appear, and the wall comes down.
There is no substitute for keeping the pressure on so that when the cracks appear, there are enough people – a movement – to open the crack wider and make possible what previously seemed unthinkable.
Which is why I so admire Occupy Wall Street and the truly grassroots movement it has spawned.
CREDO is not of or from Occupy Wall Street. But we support it. Our actions are of a very different sort. We have a policy agenda. Our members write, call, visit, and rally to make change happen on literally hundreds of public and corporate policies that have the ability to make life better or worse. Our members have written, called, faxes, emailed, rallied, registered and every other way of doing the work of showing up over thirty million times. If you want to participate in this kind of progressive advocacy, check out the footnotes at the end of this piece. But without a doubt, thirty million moments of activism have not been enough because the bad guys keep winning and the 99% are losing the fight.
Which is why we need the space and the challenging conversation forced on a reluctant mass media by Occupy Wall Street. Rather amazingly, the media is now finally reporting on unemployment and jobs rather than solely focusing on the false inside-the-beltway crisis of a Federal deficit.
Our goal is to be supportive of this new space. We have respectfully engaged our members in pushing back on police misconduct. We have marched and promoted marches. We have delivered food.
But we most emphatically do not know better than the growing number of participants in Occupy Wall Street what demands should emerge or what tactics the burgeoning movement should take. We stand with the vibrant participants of Occupy Wall Street now and in the months to come. As the weather turns cold and the 1% move from ignoring the movement, to ridiculing the movement, to undermining it and eventually seeking to crush it, CREDO will be there.
In the meantime, here are a few ways that I and the staff at CREDO staff have worked to support Occupy Wall Street. There are many more. We urge you to consider taking these and similar steps.
Get information about what's really going on from truly independent media like Democracy Now.
Show up — if there is a local Occupation visit personally. Form you own opinion about the people you meet.
Ask local occupiers if there are ways you can offer support — from delivering food and blankets to participating in the General Assemblies or related marches and actions.
Sign our petition on police misconduct against Occupy Wall Street here.
If you have extra money, consider supporting lawyers defending various Occupy efforts at the National Lawyer's Guild here.
See if the New Bottom Line coalition of unions, congregations and community groups is active in your area in confronting banks over foreclosures and evictions, and join in. Check them out here.
Check out local member-owned credit unions to move your money into your local economy.
If you are politically active, ask politicians you know to return any contributions from banks or Wall Street.
It's Time to See if the 99% Are Really on Your Side; Give Them a Christmas Present: The Electoral Reform Act of 2012!
If there could be unanimous agreement among all the Occupy Wall Street groups that the next phase of the movement should be a general strike, could they pull it off? Not yet, I'm afraid. Not unless they can figure out how to get the backing of the remaining 99%; because general strikes are supposed to include everyone. And while it's true that the rest of the 99% are in the same financial boat, they haven't started rowing in unison with the OWS movement yet. That's because many of the 99% are confused by the movement. They're waiting for a demand they can rally behind. On the other hand, they're not at all confused by their financial reality! So what wrong with this picture?
If the OWS movement really represents the 99%, then they should throw the rest of them a bone. How about the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 tied up with a Christmas ribbon–a one-day General Strike “to show we can.”
Yesterday, December 16, 2011, 40 supporters of Bradley Manning saw him in person in the military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland and another 60 saw him on a video feed from the court, the first time Manning has been seen by the public in 19 months. Over 100 other supporters, including 50 from Occupy Wall Street who had bused down from New York City, were at the front gates of Fort Meade in solidarity with Manning.
. . . . .
The military’s treatment of Manning has reeked of intimidation and retaliation.
Until citizen activist protests six months ago in March, 2011, brought sufficient attention to the harsh conditions of his pre-trial confinement, the US military was treating him as if he were beyond the scrutiny of the law — as if he were an “enemy combatant” in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
. . . . .
Despite the military’s mantra of having the best military legal system in the world, the past treatment of Manning—keeping him in solitary confinement, forcing him to stand naked while in pre-trial confinement and the lack of compliance with the norms of the military legal system of a “speedy” trial have added to the low points of Abu Gharib and Guantanamo in the history of military “justice.”
The federal courts have long established mechanism of dealing with classified information in national security cases.
The military’s contention that it took 19 months to figure out how to try him while protecting classified materials reeks of intimidation, retribution and retaliation.
About the Author: Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserve Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war. She is a member of Veterans for Peace and is on the Advisory Board of the Bradley Manning Support Network
A new program can find and compare relationships in complicated data without having to be asked specific queries
Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they're looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don't know to look for.
David Reshef, one of the scientists behind MINE, as the program is called, explains, “Standard methods will see one pattern as signal and others as noise. There can potentially be a variety of different types of relationships in a given data set. What's exciting about our method is that it looks for any type of clear structure within the data, attempting to find all of them. … This ability to search for patterns in an equitable way offers tremendous exploratory potential in terms of searching for patterns without having to know ahead of time what to search for.” MINE compares different possible relationships (including linear, exponential, and periodic) and returns those that are strongest.
On MINE's website, the program is available for download.
“Movement 99%: Through Exclusion to the Community”
