Occupy Wall Street

[Ogopogo]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/10/camp ... the-march/


Campus Radicals on the March

Posted by Arnold Ahlert Bio ↓ on Feb 10th, 2012
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[Editor's note: The radical Left in America is once again mobilizing in our communities and on our campuses. Get the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and the new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left by reading the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]

The latest attempt by the radical Left to capitalize on the neo-communist movement known as OWS is emanating from an old source. The “new” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which derives its name, inspiration, and mission from the original SDS of the ’60s, is calling for a “Day of Action” scheduled for March 1st. The rhetoric is tiresomely familiar. “We believe that education is a right, not an economic privilege for the advantaged,” says their website. ”We demand and fight for a university that is for everyone! … We want student, worker and faculty control over our universities; we should be in control of our own futures and lives.”

Hoping to channel the mob-rage made so fashionable by the broader Occupy movement, it is no surprise who these students blame for their woes. “We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%. We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits. We refuse to accept educational re-segregation, massive tuition increases, outrageous student debt, and increasing privatization and corporatization. They got bailed out and we got sold out. But through nationally coordinated mass action we can and will turn back the tide of austerity.”

But don’t count on the campus Left acknowledging government culpability in the crisis it bemoans. It was government, after all, that threatened banks with fines and other restrictions if they refused to lower their lending standards to accommodate mortgage applicants who had no business owning a home. Likewise, government has also facilitated the enormous increases in college tuition. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education discovered college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income rose 147 percent. Why? Because taxpayers are guaranteeing student loans (to the tune of $1 trillion currently)–all of which were taken over by the government in 2010 as part of Obamacare. Thus, colleges have no incentive whatsoever to lower their costs.

Furthermore, one of the critical funding sources for colleges is endowment funds. Even in the down economy of 2009, such funding totaled more than $300 billion. Who endows universities? Those with enough wealth to give large sums of money away, aka the very “1 percent” those currently attending college love to vilify.

Ironically, the same SDS that calls for “chops from the top,” meaning to overpaid administrators, is the one that is calling for even more of the cost-increasing academic inanity we’ve seen rising for decades: “Ethnic, Women’s, Queer, and African/a studies departments,” along with “reparations [i.e., affirmative action] for bias in admissions owing to [longstanding] systems of oppression.” What they don’t know is that they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

What kind of administrators? Those who facilitate the SDS wish list. Here’s a partial roster of administrators at UC Berkeley: Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion; Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; Academic Enrichment Coordinator; Diversity Program Coordinator; Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; and Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations.

And yet on March 1st, SDS is determined to engender a “nationally coordinated mass action” in order to “turn back the tide of austerity.”

What kind of mass action is anyone’s guess, but considering the guest list — “students, teachers, workers, and parents from all levels of education –pre-K-12 through higher education in public and private institutions–and all Occupy assemblies, labor unions, and organizations of oppressed communities” — it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to envision some of these protests getting out of hand. A 2010 Day of Action saw the arrest of 15 protesters after they threw punches and hurled ice chunks at campus officers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. More than 150 students were arrested in Oakland after they blocked Interstate 880. In Northern California, protesters blocked gates at two universities, smashed car windows, and intimidated visitors to the campuses.

And that was prior to the birth of the OWS movement. They too had a Day of Action on November 17, 2011. A total of 544 people were arrested in 14 cities around the nation, including 300 people arrested in New York and 72 in LA. One day earlier, 100 were arrested in San Francisco. Furthermore, since the OWS movement began, 6506 documented arrests in 110 American cities have occurred. Thus, when SDS says it is up to “each school and organization to determine what local and regional actions–such as strikes, walkouts, occupations, marches, etc.–they will take to say no to business as usual” and tell protesters to make March 1st “a day to remember” and remind them that “Education is a right, now is the time to fight!” they are instigating something that could quickly spin out of control.

None of this should surprise anyone. Every Day of Action, every OWS protest, and a substantial amount of union thuggery, is another facet of the ongoing campaign to divide Americans by class and foment hatred toward the Left’s political enemies (which now includes college administrators). Bringing chaos to civil society is the objective — the latest incarnation of a much older movement with the same roots in Marxism that has produced untold misery and more than 100 million deaths around the world.

About Arnold Ahlert
Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.

[Kate Shaw]

When I was in Grade 7 we had a Communist (as it turned out) history teacher who attempted to get his classes to sign up for the SDS, but (this was in 1961) made the error of cautioning us "Don't tell your parents." Naturally, most of us did tell our parents, because in 1961 kids did that, and the Fellow Traveller was almost literally 'run out of town'. The next year a history class was put in our school that taught Grade 8 exactly what communism was.

It's a little bit amusing to me that these same hobgoblins are still lurking round peoples' feet.

[styky]

Proof The January Jobs Number Was Real
Submitted by CrownThomas on 02/10/2012 21:10 -0500

Not convinced NFP was +243,000 in January? Fret no more folks, proof has surfaced.

Jobs are in fact being created - Unions are paying protesters, and not only for occupy wall street demonstrations. .................http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/pr ... r-was-real

[J.B. Stone]

It's a little bit amusing to me that these same hobgoblins are still lurking round peoples' feet.

If you view them as harmless, that would be true............but,

They've done SIGNIFICANT damage to the fabric of America over the years.

[styky]

Andrew Breitbart Loses It At Occupy Protesters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4od4QQVK1o

[Kate Shaw]

I saw that guy on Fox News this morning and it doesn't surprise me in the least to hear that the Yners are now a rent-a-mob. It seems that generation will do absolutely anything for money, except work for it.

[Ogopogo]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... S=syllabus

* FEBRUARY 17, 2012

A Syllabus for the 'Occupy' Movement
Conservatives are wrong to deride college courses on the anti-Wall Street protests. Here's a lesson plan and possible reading list.

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

Schools from New York's Columbia to Chicago's Roosevelt University are offering courses on the "Occupy" movement. This has inspired some derision from the right, but I think that derision is misplaced. There is much that a course on the Occupy movement might profitably cover. Here are some possible lessons:

1) The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. Since ancient times, debt has been a tool used by rulers to enslave the ruled, which is why the Bible explains that the borrower is the slave to the lender. One complaint of many Occupy protesters involves their pursuit of expensive degrees that has left them burdened by student loans but unable to find suitable employment. This unit would compare the marketing of higher education and student debt to today's students with the techniques used to lure sharecroppers and coal miners into irredeemable indebtedness. Music to be provided by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties.

This unit would note that social-protest movements are sometimes orderly and sometimes disorderly as a matter of approach, and it would compare the effectiveness and ultimate success of such relentlessly bourgeois movements as the tea party, the pre-1964 Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage activists, and the American Revolution, against such anti-Bourgeois movements as the post-1968 Black Power and New Left movements, and the French Revolution.

Which accomplished more lasting good? Is Max Weber's Protestant work ethic applicable to social movements?

3) Class struggles and the New Class. Professor Kenneth Anderson of American University has suggested that the Occupy movement is best understood as a struggle between the upper and lower tiers of the elite. In recent years, the upper tier, composed of bankers, financiers, etc., has become decoupled from the lower-tier sub-elite of "Virtue Industry" workers in fields like education, nonprofit activism, social work and the like—with the latter feeling betrayed and abandoned.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement in Union Square on Nov. 17, in New York City.

Mr. Anderson writes: "It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It's a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It's not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however."

This unit would begin with Milovan Djilas's analysis of the managerial "New Class" that ran the late-stage Soviet Union, and would then consider that analysis's application to American society today. Similar thoughts by Friedrich Hayek and Christopher Lasch would provide insight on the nature of the intra-class, intra-elite struggle that marks the Occupy movement.

4) Scapegoating and anti-Semitism in mass economic-protest movements. The Occupy movement began as an assault on "the 1%," a shadowy elite of bankers and financiers charged with running the world for their own benefit. Within a few months, the Anti-Defamation League was noting that anti-Semitic statements and sympathies seemed surprisingly widespread within the Occupy encampments. Compare with other such movements that led to similar results. Are such developments inevitable? If so, what strands in Western (and perhaps non-Western) culture account for this?

5) The Fragility of Public Health. Young and healthy upper-middle-class Americans, when huddled into encampments without modern sanitary facilities, developed a number of diseases, ranging from scabies to lice to tuberculosis, with surprising rapidity. In addition, populations of rats and other vermin exploded. What lessons can be learned about the fragility of public health, and the complacency bred by modern sanitation? Are we similarly complacent in other areas?

6) Class Differences Within Economic Protest Movements. While the Occupy movement's proletariat were sleeping under canvas, many of its leaders were staying in five-star hotels. Six-figure sums of money were collected, but their disbursement was cloudy. Does every movement, however egalitarian in doctrine, inevitably produce its own overclass? Are "egalitarian" movements more prone to such outcomes? Readings: George Orwell's "Animal Farm," Li Zhi-Sui's "The Private Life of Chairman Mao."

It is likely, of course, that the Occupy courses offered will partake of none of the above, and will instead be tedious, dated mashups of Fanon, Marcuse and Frances Fox Piven. But if students are offered no better than that, it will be the fault of their instructors, not of the subject matter.

Mr. Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He hosts "InstaVision" on PJTV.com.

[Lucille]

Short Form - Wall Street Protesters - Dazed & Confused Hypocritical Idiots!

[styky]

Protestors throw urine bombs at Denver police

http://kdvr.com/2012/02/26/5-arrested-i ... -downtown/

[Ogopogo]

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/17/occupys_heiress/

Saturday, Mar 17, 2012 5:45 AM Mountain Daylight Time
Occupy’s heiress
Leah Hunt-Hendrix, the granddaughter of an oil and gas billionaire, is determined to radicalize America's wealthy
By J.A. Myerson


Leah Hunt-Hendrix

Leah Hunt-Hendrix, right. Left: An OWS march with Hendrix at far right. (Credit: Photos courtesy of Leah Hunt-Hendrix)
Topics:Editor's Picks, Occupy Wall Street

“For Aristotle,” says Leah Hunt-Hendrix, “ethics is not a question about right and wrong, it’s a question about who you are. It doesn’t come down to a decision in an instant. It comes down to what kind of life you live, and what kind of life you live as a community.”

That question is an essential one to Hunt-Hendrix, 28, the granddaughter of the late billionaire Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. She grew up surrounded by 1 percent privilege — but has spent the last several months neck deep in general assemblies, human microphones and consensus twinkles. She’s made the study of popular protest her life’s work – and Occupy Wall Street has allowed her to roll up her sleeves.

On this February afternoon, Leah’s just finished an Occupy Faith meeting about how to mobilize those communities to participate in an upcoming foreclosure defense action. The action would emulate successful (and soulful) previous attempts to shut down an auction where bank-seized homes are sold by breaking into song. The lyrics go: Mrs. Auctioneer / All the people here / We’re asking you to hold all the sales right now / We’re going to survive / But we don’t know how.

“So the idea,” she says, continuing on Aristotelian ethics, “is that part of what it means to think about ethics is to ask: How are we formed as people? How do we become who we are? Capitalism and advertising obviously form us in very concrete and specific ways and have formed us into a consumer public. Rosa” – she refers to the legendary organizer Rosa Luxemborg by first name – “writes about the mass strike. Participating in a strike is formative. It creates a consciousness of one’s agency and role in creating change.

“For Rosa, the revolution couldn’t happen without the re-formation of the whole society,” she says, setting up her point. She seems, even in casual conversation, to think surprisingly deeply, so when pressed on revolutionary philosophy, she goes all in. I use the word “re-formed” because that’s how she says it, not like “reformed.” It is a little startling to have someone from her background speak so directly about radical change.

“And the way to get re-formed,” she says, “is by participating in a collective movement, collective resistance. Through that process, the whole public is transformed, little by little. Their consciousness is reshaped, and they become agents of change. I think that’s also what is happening with Occupy Wall Street. Everyone who participates is becoming re-formed a little and their character is being reshaped. And their consciousness is definitely being reshaped. That’s how change will have to happen in America.”

*

Leah went to evangelical summer camp in Missouri when she was a kid and loved it. “I knew I didn’t agree with it politically, but I really valued the community.” Getting involved in Occupy Faith “has been partly figuring out how to reclaim that upbringing, but in line now with my politics.” After all, she notes, “America is such a religious country. We need to be able to reach people where they are, at that heart level.”

Faith, however, is only one of two suppressed aspects of her identity that she is now reclaiming, thanks to Occupy Wall Street. The other is her class background. In addition to diving into organizing in New York’s communities of faith, the Brooklynite is also attempting to radicalize the world of the wealthy.

Hunt-Hendrix’s Upper East Side childhood brought with it the ultimate privilege: ignorance of her level of privilege. Schooling at Sacred Heart, dancing in “The Nutcracker” at Lincoln Center, gymnastics, shopping – it took moving temporarily to rural New Mexico to bring her family’s wealth starkly to her attention. “Some of my friends didn’t have indoor plumbing,” she says of her new schoolmates, who mostly lived in the pueblo. “There was no way I was going to bring them to my house.”

Moving back to New York for high school, Leah was struck to find even what was embarrassingly extravagant in rural New Mexico to be conspicuously modest among New York City wealth. “My parents are both inspiring role models who spend their lives fighting for justice. They were not at all materialistic, and had no intention of giving me money to buy new things at Barney’s every week.” Her relationship with her family is strong. Still, she concedes, “that didn’t mean that we didn’t have a yacht on the Hudson and things like that.” But in “a city that makes wealth seem like the highest good,” she says it was hard to find a way between the pressure to fit in with her classmates and the poverty and hardship she had witnessed. Amidst this confusion, Leah began to ask other, deeper questions: “What if you are part of the problem? What do you do when you realize that your history is the history of exploitation? That your lifestyle is depends on a system that you now see is unjust?”

*

Hunt-Hendrix has only watched one episode of “Downton Abbey.” “I’m told I’m like the middle sister, right?” She asks me.

Actually, it’s the youngest sister, Lady Sybil, everyone’s favorite character on seemingly everyone’s favorite show. She’s the sister whom World War I rids of her interest in the British aristocratic life she is expected to lead. In the fourth episode of Season 1, before war breaks out, the Irish socialist chauffeur Branson overhears Lady Sybil indicate her support for women’s rights and subsequently provides her with pamphlets, or what we on the left self-assumptively call “literature.” From then on, it is only a matter of time before Sibyl is politically radicalized and disenchanted with the trappings of nobility (and in love with the help).

“Everybody keeps saying I should watch that show,” she says.

Watching it myself recently, I was struck by Lady Sibyl’s similarities to Nancy Cunard, the historical love of my life.

Cunard’s childhood was straight-up Grantham. Born in 1896, so every bit Sibyl’s contemporary, she grew up in a castle in the U.K., the daughter of an American socialite mother and a British baronet father. She had her debut season in London society, attended celebrated girls’ schools – the whole thing. Then came World War I, and Cunard split for Paris, hanging out with literary luminaries and political radicals.

In France, Cunard founded a publishing house, which put out works by Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon. (These were just three of her many boyfriends whose work they attributed to inspiration she provided; Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Man Ray, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi and William Carlos Williams all fell for Nancy and made artwork in her honor.) She devoted herself feverishly to combating oppression, over which she agonized very powerfully, allocating her most fervent opposition toward Spanish fascism and American white supremacy. For this offense, Cunard was trashed in the press and disinherited, which suited her, since she’d grown to hate the ruling class from whence she’d come.

Cunard poured all of her remaining resources into helping refugees who’d fled Franco and wound up in concentration camps, setting up a shelter to feed them, reporting their devastation in the international press, struggling to enlist comrades. Years of desperation and horror later, Nancy couldn’t handle it any more. She fell headfirst into drunken depression, hitting the sauce harder than she ever had before, which is saying something. She died insane, penniless and paper-thin in 1965, having spent much of her curtain call shouting incomprehensibly about bigots and fascists.

Not all heiresses-turned-revolutionaries have stories as tragic as Cunard’s. And there are several of them. Jessica “Decca” Mitford was one year old when World War I ended and therefore had a very different type of childhood from Cunard. Nevertheless, she flew the noble coop, reporting on the Spanish Civil War and landing in the American communist milieu (superior, one thinks, to her sisters Unity and Diana, who were big supporters of Nazism and fascism). In the 1950s, Decca, like many communists, got heavily involved in trailblazing civil rights activism and displayed great hostility toward the House Un-American Activities Committee. She broke with the Communist Party as Stalin’s atrocities came to light and led a successful life as a left-wing journalist, living out the credo attributed to her: “You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.”

*

There is something tremendously appealing about the heiress who decides to ignore the conventions of the life opulent and commit to the ideas and struggles of the underclass. And to its men. Sibyl has her Irish chauffeur, Rose had her Jack, and Jasmine has her Aladdin. The more Hollywood you get, the less the class element receives meaningful exploration, and the more the story becomes a perverse negation of the knight-and-damsel rescue story.

The archetype here is Maid Marian, the folk legend who occasionally appears in Robin Hood tales. There is no orthodoxy in the Robin Hood canon, but in many of the versions with which modern audiences are most familiar, Marian is liberal gentry, a minor noble, a Lady Sibyl, who falls for Robin Hood and joins his cause (sometimes quite valiantly). In Mel Brooks’ parody “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” Marian’s prophylactic armor constricts her libido to the provinciality of the rest of the aristocracy. In the Disney animal version, she’s a high-born vixen whose kisses are auctioned as prizes for an archery contest. In each of these, her beau leads a socialist commune in the woods, whose members terrorize the corrupt political leadership and stop it from getting rich off the peasantry.

“Titanic,” “Aladdin,” “Robin Hood,” “Downton Abbey” – those stories are all just stories, and all of those stories were written by men, so of course a charismatic bachelor with nothing to lose is the one who rescues the lady from the banality of wealth (and often himself from the discomfort of poverty). But Leah Hunt-Hendrix seems not to need saving. Though I don’t ask, as the present topics – politics, religion and class – are sensitive enough.

*

In the United States, we are not very good at talking about privilege. Christopher Hitchens attributed the rise of the Tea Party to anxieties about a loss of privilege, writing that followers “are worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers.” Tulane professor and MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry has said that a noteworthy component augmenting the country’s emotional reaction to September 11 was the shattering of Americans’ privilege of security from terrorism (a privilege which many in the world do without).

There is also a healthy, honest and moral way of dealing with ones privilege, but it is no easier to talk about. Leah, who can quote Hegel and Voltaire, who can recite pieces of Arabic poetry she encountered when learning the language in Syria, who contributes ideas and questions in an unending suite of meetings, admits that she has trouble explaining her relationship to wealth.

“I get the ironies. I understand that there are contradictions between coming from an oil and gas family and doing this kind of activism for social equality. There are parts of our identity that we might have to be willing to give up to live in the kind of world that we want to live in,” the type of world where “everyone has enough.” It is clear that, however, that unlike Cunard, Hunt-Hendrix is not motivated by a mere desire to rebel, but by a vision of a better world. “To get there, however, we can’t hide from who we are. We have to work with what we have, from where we are and what we’re given.” She says that she has come to this conclusion partly through the influence of an organization called Resource Generation, which aims to help young people leverage their resources and privilege for social change.

*

Leah is very specific about the form she envisions that leveraging taking. “Before Occupy, I thought a lot about how attempts to create positive change have negative consequences and the ways in which philanthropy and motivations like ‘benevolence’ and ‘compassion’ often reiterate power dynamics and hierarchies. The goal is to figure out how to participate in creating change in ways that don’t recreate those power dynamics.”

Her interest in this question took her all the way to the Middle East, right in the middle of the Bush era “clash of civilizations.” She spent six months in rural Egypt, interned at the Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at the American University in Cairo, improved her Arabic in Damascus, Syria, and headed to the West Bank where she continued her examination of the impact of international aid through different civil society programs. Hunt-Hendrix was hoping to determine “what it was that really transformed power relationships” and found that none of the prominent NGOs did. Economic development programs and Palestinian-Israeli dialogue programs posed no threat to the power dynamics that generated oppression.

Instead, it was in nonviolent direct action on the part of Palestinians, the protests against the wall that take place weekly across the West Bank, where Leah saw potential. Here was a way that an “outsider” could support the movement, stand in solidarity, in a way that didn’t reiterate those power dynamics – “to join in their chorus,” as she puts it, “but not to come in with one’s own projects.”

Her interest in the Middle East ties into the same reasons she has invested in Occupy Wall Street. Not because they’re both controversial, but because they both highlight the interconnections of politics and economics. “What is happening in Israel and Palestine isn’t just an identity conflict,” she tells me. “It’s also related to a global economic system that benefits a few and impoverishes many. The occupation of Palestine is profitable. While the identity issues are real, they can obscure the economic and material underpinnings of the conflict.” Which is why it may make sense to occupy Wall Street instead.

*

The opulence of “Downton Abbey’s” world was not particular to Her Majesty’s aristocracy at the time. Americans ascended to aristocratic levels of luxury not through hereditary nobility but raw capitalism. The matriarch in the Grantham castle (like her real-life counterpart, Nancy Cunard’s mother Maud) is of American birth and American wealth. Sir Richard, a rich media mogul in Downton Abbey, draws out the nobility’s intolerance of the gauche sensibilities of the nouveau riche. But the Granthams’ American equivalents cannot be said to have lacked aesthetic taste.

A debut season off Central Park is awfully similar to one off Regent’s Park; one could summer in Newport just as lavishly as in Yorkshire; Phillips Exeter Academy turned out young Americans as impressive as Eton College’s young Britons. The most famous American counterparts to Nancy and Decca are men: Freddie Vanderbilt Field and Corliss Lamont were both anti-capitalist leftists born, respectively, to railroad and banking wealth. But there is another aristocracy in the United States of America, down South. And no capitalists got much richer in the South than the ones who struck oil in East Texas.

Every Thanksgiving and Easter and summer (those weeks not spent at evangelical camp) Leah spent with the Hunt family in Dallas. On White Rock Lake, in a big house called Mount Vernon (recalling not just Washington’s home but also “Tara,” say, or “Belle Reve”), Granny Ruth would host parties. Surviving her husband, H.L., Ruth was very involved in the church – First Baptist Dallas – “and so we’d have to go twice a week, Sunday and Wednesday, but she would always buy us ruffled church dresses. It was a different world from New York, but there was something beautiful about it. A lot to resist, but also so much love.”

Leah depicts her grandmother as constantly giving, as everyone’s granny, as a woman with a huge heart. But, she remembers, “there was something almost 19th century about it. That part of life was like another era.” It’s hardly the way one expects to hear a Luxemburg-enthusiast talk about the power elites in her life. “My theme in life,” she tells me, “is open hands. Everything is welcome, but everything is also free to leave. You can’t clasp onto anything.”

Her nascent dissertation at Princeton will explore what she provisionally calls “the genealogy of solidarity.” Solidarity must be right next to open hands as a theme. “There are two aspects to solidarity,” she observes. “One is standing with others and the other is an awareness of ones own complicity in systems of oppression.”

Her interest in solidarity, however, is tied to her analysis of movement-building. “Oppression is experienced in different ways,” she tells me. “But if you can trace it back to its roots, then a diverse array of groups can link up in solidarity and combine their efforts toward changing the system rather than palliating the symptoms. I think that Occupy is doing just that. There is no other social movement that I’ve been exposed to that as clearly is shedding light on the root causes of oppression, not only in America, but also globally.”

Those root causes are twofold. The first is “an economic system that necessarily creates the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.” Nothing like hypocrisy here: “It’s not just good people versus bad people. The causes of this are structural. We need new economic models, and many people involved in Occupy are thinking about and working on exactly that question. Particularly, I think that the focus we’re seeing is on models for local autonomy, self-sufficiency and sustainability.”

The other root cause is “is the link between the economic system and state power. For people who care about democracy, currently, the political system is so tied down by lobbyists, and the people who get into office are already strapped down by the people who funded them.”

*

Back stateside after her work in the Middle East, Hunt-Hendrix was forced to confront “this whole industry of philanthropy and the nonprofit-industrial complex” with new eyes. Rather than abandon it, Leah decided to mobilize her experience with funders and engage in conversations about how to support grassroots activists and social movements.

To that end, she has spent the last year working on how to get more money into social movements and grassroots organizing. “But this takes serious thought. It doesn’t mean pouring money out indiscriminately and turning grassroots groups into mainstream NGOs. The question is, how can donors fund in ways that help build movements rather than tie them down? One simple example is to help provide spaces, places in which activists can meet, strategize, share their analysis and come up with plans. Just to enable that process.”

Leah’s perspective on this was shaped by her personal experience at the 2011 World Social Forum in Senegal, an experience she calls life changing. There, she saw activists and theorists tackle the question of how to get from building local power to dismantling or democratizing international institutions. Tens of thousands of activists from around the world convened to discuss how to build a trans-national movement that was locally connected but guided by an international political analysis and policy expertise. Unfortunately, she laments, this sector is severely underfunded.

Resources, media exposure, a mobilized public – all the elusive elements seem to have come together around Occupy Wall Street. OWS took the stage as the opportunity to build that movement at a global scale. But the funding issue remains an important one. “Funding can help or harm,” Leah explains. “And funding Occupy is particularly tricky. But the broader movement for social and economic justice needs support. Activists and communities on the front lines need support. We need to use this time to emphasize the effectiveness of community organizing and local empowerment. There are so many grassroots groups out there that are doing incredible work to build local power, and we need to get more money into that sector, which has typically been neglected in favor of more mainstream institutions.”

“I think,” she admits, “it’ll take time.”
Close

J.A. Myerson (@JAMyerson) is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation, Truth Out, In These Times, AlterNet and elsewhere. He is a field reporter for Citizen Radio and is writing a book on 2011, to be published spring 2012. More J.A. Myerson

[Ogopogo]

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/iris-sombe ... -1-percent

Occupy.com- A Gift from the 1 Percent

By Iris Somberg | April 03, 2012 | 10:17
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Look out Huffington Post. The Occupy movement has a new website to aggregate content for left-wing activists. While Occupy is known for their claim to represent the 99 percent, suave parties and Hollywood money are what made this venture possible.

Known for taking over New York’s Zuccotti Park and other locations nationwide, supporters now look to occupy the Internet. The liberal magazine Mother Jones reported that the new site launched on April 2 “with financial backing from Hollywood” with the goal of mimicking Huffington Post.

Although the Occupy movement quickly became a violent, law-breaking mess riddled with problems, the three broadcast networks ignored it, even while the number of arrests jumped to 6,877, according to the arrest tracker OccupyArrests. Protesters went as far as to attack police with the help of hackers and threw paint, eggs, and even feces at officers.

Mother Jones blogger Josh Harkinson described the beginnings of Occupy.com, which seems to conflict with the ideals of the very movement it aims to promote. Filmmaker David Sauvage co-founded Occupy.com with film producer Larry Taubman after they purchased the domain “for a large confidential sum” to give voice to Occupy activists.

Harkinson learned of the launch at what occupiers could only describe as a typical 1 percent party attended by “supermodels, socialites, and celebrities” and occupiers brought together by an elite public-relations firm that also represents Dolce & Gabbana and Bergdorf Goodman. This explains the concern he described with some in Occupy at the concentration of power that does not go through their rule-making body, the General Assembly.

Occupy.com initially posted a “General Strike!” notice for May 1, deemed as “The Day Without the 99%.” Supporters of the movement are urged to stay away from work, school, and to simply avoid “participating in capitalism” for the day. A video called “Occupy Earth,” along with music videos and pictures from “under the blue tarp” at Zuccotti Park were also posted on the site.

Their “About” section described the site as “a new media channel that will amplify the voices of Occupy” and has an “open invitation to creators of every stripe” to join the cause and contribute to the site. They do note that the General Assembly does not oversee them, but say they are “morally accountable to the movement as a whole.”

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/iris-sombe ... z1r2DNHWMT

[Ogopogo]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/11/ayer ... eam-alive/


Ayers Keeps the Dream Alive

Posted by Mark Tapson Bio ↓ on Apr 11th, 2012 Comments ↓
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To roughly and depressingly paraphrase the old saying: Old unrepentant terrorists never die, nor do they even fade away; they just pass the torch of their nihilistic, anti-American dream to the next generation.

President Obama’s former associate Bill Ayers and his partner-in-crime Bernardine Dohrn, ex-leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group, addressed a small group of the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City last week. They dispensed the usual shrill, tired old leftist laments about AmeriKKKa being the modern equivalent of the militaristic city-state Sparta. After declaring the United States to be “a declining economic and political power” but “a virulent and expanding military power,” Dohrn complained:

Yes, in many ways, national security… it’s all the United States seems to have to offer. It isn’t jobs or healthcare or public education or public parks or public libraries, it’s security, security, security. So, we don’t want that kind of a future. Occupy doesn’t want that kind of a future. We want a future for the 99%.

Well, if it’s insecurity they want, Ayers’ protégé Obama is certainly moving things in that direction. Dohrn may have a valid point about our declining economic and political power, since Obama has steered us toward a post-American future of crushing debt and geopolitical impotence, as well as slashing the military budget. Insecurity indeed.

As for the kind of a future that the “Occupy” looters want, they have only a reality-challenged, Lennonesque fantasy of one and no clue how to build it. All they “know” for sure is that America is a racist, jackbooted, imperialistic, economically polarized police state, and that if they could just cancel all their student loan debt (which Dohrn ranted about), bring down the greedy 1% and redistribute that wealth “fairly,” then the country would finally be a beautiful utopia. Rather like Cuba.

The star-struck handful of protesters listened intently as Ayers picked up Dohrn’s baton and ran with it:

We are living in a militarized society. That, that, it’s clear what the message is from power. The message is that Occupy represents violence, and marginalization and insanity, when in reality it’s the 1% that represents violence, and insanity and militarism.

Besides this ludicrous concept that America is a militarized society and his class-war nonsense about the 1%, the evidence couldn’t be more overwhelming that the Occupy movement does represent anarchic violence and insanity in the form of a mob mentality. Ayers’ imaginary 99% does not suffer from “marginalization”; on the contrary, it is the Occupy movement that is hell-bent on violently marginalizing the so-called 1% out of existence: “Kill the rich,” their signs demand. “Eat the rich!” “Only the blood of the rich will stop Occupy!” These, along with “Kill your parents,” are exactly the same sentiments Ayers endorsed in his previous lifetime as a Weather Underground terrorist. Apparently becoming an influential university educator hasn’t mellowed his anti-capitalist nihilism.

Not content to incite the Occupy automatons against “the rich,” Ayers went on to voice this bitter, petty complaint about how American service members were actually allowed to board his flight to New York first:

We’ve got a militarized society and it’s become so commonsense that, getting on the airplane coming out here, the first thing they said was “Let all the, uhh, let all the, ya know, uniformed military get on first and thank you for your service.” And I said as I always do, “Let’s let the teachers and nurses get on first and thank them for their service.” I mean, why is it everything military has gotta be good and everything that has to do with actual work, real work, not jobs, real work for people, that stuff gets discouraged and marginalized?

Ayers has borne a murderous animus toward the military for decades. In 1970, three of his compatriots were killed when a bomb they were constructing accidentally detonated. That bomb had been intended for a dance attended by hundreds of Army soldiers at Fort Dix. Ayers himself attested that the bomb would have torn through “windows and walls and, yes, people too.” His fingerprints were found at the site, along with other terrorist weaponry and Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Two years later he participated in a Weatherman bombing of the Pentagon.

Despite his outrage over our servicemen and –women being accorded a modicum of gratitude, Ayers shared with a few admirers his hopeful vision for the future:

I get up every morning and think, “Today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution.” I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it… We have to begin to imagine a world without war, a world without prisons, a world without borders… We can’t imagine a world without capitalism!? What the f–k would that look like? But actually, I can imagine it, and I want you to imagine it.

Radicals like Ayers and Dohrn can think only in terms of destruction. They are incapable of creation, of creating wealth or security or a workable future for all, which is a promise that only capitalism can offer. That’s why when it comes to solutions, they can only propose zero-sum measures like “redistribution” or dimly-imagined utopian fantasies like a world without war, prisons, or borders.

In reality, when Ayers’ ilk hold power, the leaders occupy the mansions of the rich and pack the prisons with their political enemies, at least the ones who haven’t been rounded up and shot by sadistic cowards like Ayers’ idol Che Guevara. Remember that Ayers and friends estimated recently that it would be necessary to eliminate some 25 million people in “reeducation camps” in order to advance the revolution.

So when Ayers wants his impressionable followers to imagine a world without prisons, what he really means is a world in which there are no more dissenters left to imprison or execute. That’s the world he still dreams of every night and gets up every morning to work toward.

[styky]

Occupy Crowd Plans to Blockade Golden Gate Bridge on May Day

http://www.infowars.com/occupy-crowd-pl ... n-may-day/

[Ogopogo]

http://occupywallst.org/article/may-1st ... tunnels-a/

May 1st Blockade Called For New York Bridges, Tunnels, and Ferries — Commuter Delays Expected

Posted 5 days ago on April 19, 2012, 5:28 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

from an anonymous source, via strikeeverywhere.net:

MAY 1: NEW YORK BLOCKADE ANNOUNCEMENT

NEW YORK – On May 1, 2012, autonomous direct action groups within Occupy Wall Street, as a part of the global mobilizations for general strike and economic non-compliance, will block one or more Manhattan-bound bridges or tunnels to protest the shameful opulence of the 1%. Working and unemployed people across this country have seen no improvement to their lives in spite of all of the chatter about a recovery from the Financial Crisis of 2008. We don’t care what Obama or Romney say because only working people —domestic laborers, rank and file union members, undocumented workers, restaurant, retail and chain-store workers— can solve today’s problems.

Last fall, when Occupy Wall Street blocked the Brooklyn Bridge for several hours, we were acting within a long line of protest in New York City that stretches back to the so-called Fiscal Crisis of 1975, which much like now, was a bank led assault against working people. In the summer of 1975, striking hospital employees, including doctors and nurses, blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was even blocked by thousands of laid-off police, the very people who act as the guard dogs of the 1%. More recently, both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Holland Tunnel were shut down during protests of the shooting death of Sean Bell. But this May 1, we will create the biggest shut down the city of New York has ever seen.

We are announcing these blockades now as a fair warning to the rest of the working people of New York and New Jersey who are considering joining the strikes and mobilizations of the day: the city will be shut down, so enjoy the day without the 99%!

[styky]

Occupy wants you to call in sick May 1
QMI Agency

First posted: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 09:55 AM EDT | Updated: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 10:20 AM EDT
Forget taking city parks away from dog walkers; the Occupy movement has a new strategy: staying home and doing nothing.

The Occupy protesters, whose tents and campfires turned public urban areas into outdoor homeless shelters last fall, now want you to join them May 1 by not working. Do not go shopping. Do not go to school. Do not go to the bank.

The call for a "general strike" was made by Occupy LA in December and efforts are now ramping up to recruit as many volunteer lazies as the group can muster.

"Occupy LA supports in principle a general strike on May 1, 2012, for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace - and to recognize housing, education and health care as human rights, and calls for the building of a broad coalition to make that a reality," a statement from the group said.

In Toronto on Tuesday, people wearing giant smiley faces held up signs over the Gardiner Expressway during morning rush hour to encourage people to take May 1 off.

The strike is also being publicized on Twitter, using the hashtag #May1 and #OpMayDay.

The online group Anonymous has issued a video statement encouraging people to take part.

"On May 1, Anonymous will stand in solidarity with the Occupy movement and the MayDay general strike. We call for a global strike against the 1%," a video from the group Anonymous says. "The 1% need to realize one essential thing, and that is that without the 99%, they are nothing. They need us more than we need them,"

In another video, comedian Lee Camp suggests it's an easy movement to participate in because people will be "changing this world without doing a damn thing."

Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto Occupy movements have pledged their support for the strike day.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/04/24/oc ... sick-may-1