#OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

[Plutonia]

Posted by the tireless @wordymcwriter:



The counter-insurgents are coming.

Edit: Their physical address is handily in the bottom left corner.

[Plutonia]

My preferred #OccupyEverything anthem ATM.

"And if the old guard still offends,
they got nothing left on which you depend,
so enlist every ounce of your bright blood,
and off with their heads! Jump from the hook!
Cause your not obliged to swallow anything
That you despise ... "

[Plutonia]

Mash-up time!

Better stop! Hey what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down ..

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of October 10, 2011

Occupy! Occupy! Occupy!

Comedian and social activist Dick Gregory had a “bulletin” for the protesters at the kickoff of the occupation of Freedom Plaza, in Washington, DC, last week: “President Obama endorsed what you all are doing here!” The crowd was skeptical, to put it mildly. October2011 organizer Dennis Trainor set the record straight. “We will endorse Barack Obama when he disproves Martin Luther King’s assertion that the United States of America ‘is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, today,’ when he brings home all the troops, and when he redirects all those resources to human and environmental needs,” said Trainor, who is also an accomplished political comic and satirist. “A whole generation of Gordon Gekkos has hijacked control of the three branches of government away from We The People.”

People of Color Come Forward

People of color are prepared to bring “our platform, our agenda” to the proliferating centers of protest, says Kanane Holder, a spokesperson for the People of Color Working Group at the Occupy Wall Street nexus, in Liberty Park. Some African Americans hesitated to join what began as an overwhelmingly white initiative for fear that “we are going to be the first ones to be brutalized by police” and “so many of us are already in ‘the system’ because of stop-and-frisk” and other targeting of Blacks, said Holder, a writer and performing artist. People of color will bring a perspective that “includes the prison industrial complex, racial profiling,” and other facts of Black life in the United States.

Right Place, Right Time, to Stop Stop-and-Frisk

The young white activists in Liberty Park are getting an education on the real nature of the police. “They don’t have the day-to-day experience with cops being on top of them 24-7,” said Carl Dix, of Stop Stop-and-Frisk. “You guys are in the right place,” he tells the demonstrators, “because Wall Street is a symbol of capitalism, and it is capitalism that is responsible for all these problems you’ve identified and for the horrors in the world.” However, the protesters must disabuse themselves of the idea that police brutality is a fault of “a few bad cops. It is a system that you are dealing with.” The Stop Stop-and-Frisk disobedience campaign kicks off on October 21 at “the worst” police precinct in Harlem, said Dix.

Getting Ready for a Winter of Struggle

“No one can speak for the movement at this time,” said David DeGraw, editor of Amped Status online magazine, who was part of the relatively small group that set the stage for the Occupy Wall Street project. The “central theme” of protest is “breaking up the concentration of power” in the U.S., which is experiencing “the highest level of inequality ever.” Most people “don’t understand derivatives and CDOs, yet,” but they know that “the system does not work for 99% of the population,” said DeGraw. “Everyone that’s here is not planning on going anywhere. There are extensive plans go get us through the winter” in New York City. “We’re in it for the long haul.”

Haitians Join the Occupation

“We think that what is happening to Haiti is an amazing example of the beast that is destroying this country, destroying people of color, destroying working people,” said Ray LaForest, one of the organizers of a contingent of Haitians that marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to make common cause with the Wall Street protest. Capitalists “are willing to use any means to achieve what they want, including imposing wretched conditions on the Haitian people, incredible violence, malnutrition, denial of rights, and denial of education and health care,” said LaForest. “We think these kids are pretty brave. We have to seize the moment, we have to find the way to make the connection.”

Listen: http://www.blackagendareport.com/

And from the non-Black Agenda Report Foreign Affairs Magazine [!!!] - Hardt and Negri!!!

The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street
The Encampment in Lower Manhattan Speaks to a Failure of Representation

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political grievances and aspirations. As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack -- or failure -- of political representation. It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic constituent process.

The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside the other "encampments" of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square earlier last spring. To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation.

In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was obvious. The demand that "Mubarak must go" proved powerful enough to encompass all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid's Puerta del Sol and Barcelona's Plaça Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more complex. The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic complaints -- regarding debt, housing, and education, among others -- but their "indignation," which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans, "Democracia real ya," or "Real democracy now."

Occupy Wall Street should be understood, then, as a further development or permutation of these political demands. One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world). A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians and political parties charged with representing the people's interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis -- that is, the entirety of social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become subservient to economic and financial interests.

By insisting on the political nature of the Occupy Wall Street protests we do not mean to cast them merely in terms of the quarrels between Republicans and Democrats, or the fortunes of the Obama administration. If the movement does continue and grow, of course, it may force the White House or Congress to take new action, and it may even become a significant point of contention during the next presidential election cycle. But the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations are both authors of the bank bailouts; the lack of representation highlighted by the protests applies to both parties. In this context, the Spanish call for "real democracy now" sounds both urgent and challenging.

If together these different protest encampments -- from Cairo and Tel Aviv to Athens, Madison, Madrid, and now New York -- express a dissatisfaction with the existing structures of political representation, then what do they offer as an alternative? What is the "real democracy" they propose?

The clearest clues lie in the internal organization of the movements themselves -- specifically, the way the encampments experiment with new democratic practices. These movements have all developed according to what we call a "multitude form" and are characterized by frequent assemblies and participatory decision-making structures. (And it is worth recognizing in this regard that Occupy Wall Street and many of these other demonstrations also have deep roots in the globalization protest movements that stretched at least from Seattle in 1999 to Genoa in 2001.)

Much has been made of the way social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been employed in these encampments. Such network instruments do not create the movements, of course, but they are convenient tools, because they correspond in some sense to the horizontal network structure and democratic experiments of the movements themselves. Twitter, in other words, is useful not only for announcing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific decision in real time.

Do not wait for the encampments, then, to develop leaders or political representatives. No Martin Luther King, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of Wall Street and beyond. For better or worse -- and we are certainly among those who find this a promising development -- this emerging cycle of movements will express itself through horizontal participatory structures, without representatives. Such small-scale experiments in democratic organizing would have to be developed much further, of course, before they could articulate effective models for a social alternative, but they are already powerfully expressing the aspiration for a "real democracy."

Confronting the crisis and seeing clearly the way it is being managed by the current political system, young people populating the various encampments are, with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question: If democracy -- that is, the democracy we have been given -- is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?

If the forces of wealth and finance have come to dominate supposedly democratic constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution, is it not possible and even necessary today to propose and construct new constitutional figures that can open avenues to again take up the project of the pursuit of collective happiness? With such reasoning and such demands, which were already very alive in the Mediterranean and European encampments, the protests spreading from Wall Street across the United States pose the need for a new democratic constituent process.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... ?page=show

Not bad, not bad at all ...

[Plutonia]

More 1%ers stepping up.









And more!: http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/

This is really, really, really gonna scare some marauders!

[Project Willow]

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/10/12/occupy-seattle-seemingly-hellbent-on-defying-authority-just-for-the-sake-of-it-votes-to-stay-in-westlake-park-indefinitely-and-risk-arrest

Occupy Seattle, Seemingly Hellbent on Defying Authority Just for the Sake of It, Votes to Stay in Westlake Park Indefinitely and Risk Arrest
Posted by Christopher Frizzelle on Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 7:48 PM

After a series of votes, Occupy Seattle's general assembly of about 200 people does not want to go to City Hall and has instead decided to stay at Westlake Park indefinitely, Dominic Holden just called to report.

But over the course of their votes and conversation in the last hour—this process-driven stuff takes a long time—the crowd has lost about 40 percent of its numbers, which raises the obvious question: How many of these people voting now are actually going to be here at 10:00 pm when police make arrests and how many of them are going to actually stay inside the park? Protesters said they believe that those of them who go to the awning under Nordstrom or simply stand on the sidewalk near Westlake Park won't be arrested. Which indicates that few of them are actually willing to get arrested, but everyone who doesn't get arrested will have nowhere to go, as they have just indicated they're not going to City Hall. One speaker used the analogy of the 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge as an example of what "made the shit blow up" in New York. The lone voice of reason in the course of the talks was a middle-aged man who pleaded with the group to reconsider their commitment to Westlake because he was exhausted and they needed to be a sustainable movement, i.e., to be getting sleep, and spending nights at City Hall and days at Westlake Park would allow them a regular sleep schedule. Nobody cared what this guy thought.

Most of all, more than anything, it appears a frenzied, righteous, anti-authoritarian element of the group is successfully persuading everyone else simply to not agree with anything the mayor offers them—their primary goal is to not be told what to do. This sort of thinking could steer the whole movement into a ditch and just proves how stupid the fetish for consensus is. Some members of the crowd are clearly exhausted and sleep deprived after days down at Westlake Park, and it's hard to see how this cycle of sleeping on the sidewalk and/or staying up all night is sustainable. The people who want to "make shit blow up" aren't the kind of people who like to solve problems.

[Project Willow]

Large numbers of police are moving in on Westlake right now. Livestream at http://www.livestream.com/owsoccupyseattle

[ninakat]

OPERATION COOPTATION: THE DEMS TRY TO SEDUCE THE OCCUPATION MOVEMENT
Wed, 10/12/2011 - 13:06 — Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report

If the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon were to collapse tomorrow, it will have already greatly advanced the struggle against the rule of finance capital, simply by virtue of having pointed out that Wall Street does, indeed, rule. For the general, white American public, from which the initiators of the movement spring, the idea that finance capital utterly dominates every mechanism of societal power, is felt as a kind of revelation. The relatively sudden intrusion, historically speaking, of this elemental fact of life under the current order, which was thrust so painfully into the collective consciousness by the meltdown of 2008 and the great “betrayals” that followed in such swift and stunning succession, threatens to detonate like a social bomb. The explosive human device has implanted itself in the very “belly of the beast” – politically, figuratively and, in the case of the New York City encampment, literally.

Like a political Andromeda Strain, the anti-Wall Street phenomenon has replicated itself in a thousand locations, a pattern of leftish activism resembling a new and successful cell-phone service map; everyone seems, potentially, connected.

The Lords of Capital understand they are at peril – or, more accurately, they employ legions of people in all social sectors and both major parties (and plenty of better camouflaged political groupings) who are well compensated to figure out such situations for them, and to respond accordingly. The cooptation offensive is in full swing, commissioned from the very top of the Democratic Party, which is determined to claim the Occupation movement as its own.

African Americans are the indispensable ingredient in any genuine U.S. progressive movement. Historically, Blacks are the constituency that is most opposed to war and to concentrations of economic power, most eager to join unions, most concerned with issues of elemental social justice, and the most aggrieved in good times and bad. That African Americans were initially slow to join the occupations can be explained by the white organizers’ shallow contacts with Blacks. But a much more serious challenge looms. The Democrats, who are as wedded to Wall Street money as the GOP, know full well that any significant crack in the “Black Wall” around Obama will mean defeat in 2012. And they are aware that historical Black progressivism and distrust of Power has been effectively short-circuited by the advent of the First Black President. That’s why African Americans are prime targets of the Democrats’ cooptation response, along with the heavily overlapping union constituency.

The goal, of course, is to keep the attentions of African Americans and unionists focused on the Republicans and their Tea Party annex, as opposed to Wall Street, with which the administration has been intimately entwined from day-one. Therefore, the Democrats are the most clear and present danger to the Occupation Movement, because their entire purpose is to negate the central message: that Wall Street controls both parties, all three branches of government, and most social discourse in the United States. Republicans growl on the sidelines about “mobs” and “anti-Americanism,” with little effect. But the Democrats aim to divert the movement into nonexistence, to reduce it to (warmed over) Obama groupies and snuff out its potential in the bud.

Obama will contort himself to woo the Occupation forces while simultaneously raising a billion dollars from Wall Street – a great learning and teaching moment for the movement, if it is not itself enmeshed in the charade. The president believes he can convert the movement into an asset, blaming Republicans for “obstructionism” while offering them bigger social service cuts than they’ve demanded; keeping Social Security “on the table” for his entire term in office; expanding the theaters of war while claiming to be saddled with an inheritance from Bush; and protecting the bankers at every significant juncture. But, like all corporate operatives, Obama has no shame. The U.S. Parks Department’s decision to offer the 2011October occupiers of Washington’s Freedom Plaza a four-month permit, rather than summarily evicting them, shows the White House believes it can use the protestors as a stick against the GOP. Obama’s handlers are mistaken but, apparently, they think cooptation is their best shot.

Moveon.org, the Democrat’s front group in movement politics, is all over the protests. The party’s fundraising unit in the U.S. House, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is attempting to get 100,000 rank and filers to declare: ''I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests.'' Meanwhile, the DCCC fills its coffers with Wall Street money.

Al Sharpton is the point man for the strategy to keep African Americans in the Democratic fold for the only purposes the party has for them: the 2012 vote. He’s the drum major for an October 15 Washington “march for jobs” that is, for all practical purposes, an Obama campaign event to bring together the president’s Black and union supporters. The administration’s doomed and fatally flawed jobs bill is the centerpiece. “The American Jobs Act is the solution,” said Hillary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau.

No, breaking the power of Wall Street is the solution, and any movement will have to fight the Democrats to do it.

Veteran journalist Danny Schecter reported that Occupy Wall Street “has now endorsed” the October 15 march. That’s apparently a misunderstanding. ALF-CIO chief Richard Trumka visited Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, endorsed the occupation, and asked for an endorsement of the Washington march. But OWS spokespersons insist they did not, and would not, endorse any event, because their platform prohibits it, although expressions of solidarity are allowed. Other key activists tell us there was never any question of endorsing the march for Obama’s bill. But Democrats and their operatives may have gone away thinking they had a deal. They’ll be back, over and over again.

As we said at the beginning, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s contribution to human welfare to date has been to call out the enemy’s name and address: finance capital, Wall Street. In time, substantive policy positions will emerge from the laborious process to which the demonstrators are wedded, and new forces and coalitions will appear. But the essence of the movement requires that there be no compromise on the necessity to remove finance capital from the commanding heights of U.S. politics. Absent that fundamental focus, all coherence vanishes. Any collaboration with Obama and his corporate Democrats means the instantaneous death of the movement – and rightly so.

Ultimately, finance capital must be utterly destroyed, or it will kill us all. But that’s a truth that will be learned in struggle, once joined.

[Plutonia]

These little snippets are really telling.

WeOccupyAmerica We Occupy America

Met a BofA lobbyist tonight at McPherson. A little drunk, teary, offered to let us use WiFi from her apartment overlooking the square.

22 minutes ago

WeOccupyAmerica We Occupy America

I started to ask Ms. BofA about conditions, as soon as she could tell I knew about bank regulation, she choked up. I think they're done.

21 minutes ago

Imagine the headline: "BOA Lobbyist Contrite and Openly Weeping at OccupyDC Protest!"

[Plutonia]

10,000 Wall Street Employees To Lose Jobs In 2012

Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street protesters have a little reason to celebrate today as a new report from the New York state comptroller warns that 10,000 securities industry jobs will be shed on Wall Street before the end of 2012.

News of the layoffs shouldn’t come as a surprise with the securities industry already cutting 4,100 jobs since April while various other jobs have been announced for the chopping block.

Bank of America could be responsible for a big chunk of the expected layoffs after the company’s “New BAC” program announced plans for 30,000 layoffs although they have not directly tied a certain number of those firings to the securities industry in New York City.

Also cutting jobs are Barclays and Credit Suisse Group while Goldman Sachs plans to eliminate 1,000 jobs.

According to the head of the New York business group:

“The banks I talk to are talking about significantly reduced compensation … and layoffs and downsizing,” while adding, “There’s going to be a real impact on the New York City economy.”

Do you believe 10,000 layoffs on Wall Street will have any type of significant difference on the way things are done? Given the high bonus levels and lack of regulation I’m going to say it will have no difference at all.

http://www.inquisitr.com/149778/10000-w ... s-in-2012/

That's a lot of potential whistleblowers. I hope Wikileaks is ready.

[operator kos]

click to enlarge, note the captions...

[Allegro]

.

Occupy Wall Street | Jelani interviewed

[VIMEO NOTES.] Jelani, a 16-year-old protester, traveled with his grandmother from Pontiac, Michigan to New York City for the Occupy Wall Street protests.

“I had never slept on the street before,” he says. His mom said it was okay to take time out from school, because he has a 4.0 GPA.

What a cool kid, and what a cool mom and grandmother he has.

[2012 Countdown]

NEWS IN BRIEF

Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them
OCTOBER 12, 2011 | ISSUE 47•43

NEW YORK—As the Occupy Wall Street protest expands and grows into a nationwide movement, Americans are eagerly awaiting a list of demands from the group so they can then systematically disregard them and continue going about their business, polls showed this week. "The protesters need to unify around a shared agenda with precise policy goals so I can begin paying no attention to them whatsoever," said Tulsa, OK poll respondent Kaye Petrachonis, echoing the thoughts of millions across the country. "If they don’t have a clear power structure organized around specific demands first, then I'll never be able to completely tune them out due to a political conflict of interest or an inability to comprehend complex, detailed economic concepts. These people really need to get their act together." Once Occupy Wall Street has a concrete set of objectives in place, the majority of Americans said they would go back to waiting for the sluggish economy to recover while blindly accepting things the way they are.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation ... lat,26353/

===

Why Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won
By Alain Sherter | October 12, 2011

Occupy Wall Street is winning. Not as a political movement or as an engine of economic change — time will tell if the uprising has legs. As a cultural force, however, the protests already have opponents on the run.

full-
http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-busi ... -won/16592

===


Lech Walesa, former Polish president, to visit New York in support of Occupy Wall Street

BY CORKY SIEMASZKO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, October 12th 2011, 12:23 PM

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/occ ... z1af9nySz8

===



Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Oct 12, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been expanding across the US, with celebrities and even politicians joining the protesters who started their movement in Zuccottia park in New York City. Al Jazeera's Scott Heidler spent a day in the one-block park in lower Manhattan with one of the movement's organisers to see the conditions of those who slept out on the streets for more than four weeks.

[seemslikeadream]

Burning Man 2011: Primal Culture and Core Civilization as a Moveable Feast
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 8:55am.

Guest Commentary

RICHARD POWER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Burning Man isn't what you think it is. Well, OK, Burning Man is more than you think it is. Much more. There is a powerful, new narrative developing within the legend of Burning Man, one that moves beyond Black Rock City and into the daily lives of some dedicated Burners.

What is this new narrative? And what does it offer those working to overcome the challenges of this troubled era? To answer these questions, I visited the offices of the Burning Man Project, on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, conducted numerous interviews with burners, and yes, drove up into the Nevada desert to immerse myself in Burning Man 2011.

Ethos and Pathos

Merriam-Webster defines pathos as "an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion," and ethos as "the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution." We are currently awash in pathos, but severely deficient in ethos.

As 50,000 burners headed to Black Rock City, the National Guard was airlifting food and water to the citizens of thirteen Vermont towns cut-off for days, without electricity or potable water, in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. (NYT, 9-1-11) With four months to go in 2011, the U.S.A. has experienced a record 10 weather disasters causing at least $1 billion each in damages. (AP, 9-3-11)

As 50,000 burners headed to Black Rock City, James Hansen, the NASA's leading climate scientist was getting himself arrested outside the White House, in an act of civil disobedience aimed at urging President Obama to block the XL tar sands oil pipeline. Hansen says that the project would translate into "game over" for the climate upon which human civilization has been predicated for millennia. (Climate Progress, 6-25-11) Shouldn't NASA's leading climate scientist be inside the White House advising the President, rather than outside the White House, with thousands of other citizens, trying to get the President's attention?

Within the dominant culture of "the default world" (a term many burners use to refer to the world beyond Black Rock City), the cable news networks recently offered 24 hour coverage of Hurricane Irene as it hit NYC, but did not mention climate change once; similarly, earlier this year, U.S. President Barack Obama dared not even mention it once in his 2011 State of the Union address.

Friends, we are on our own.

So what is the Burning Man ethos? What does it speak to the pathos of our time? What does it offer us at this perilous crossroads?

Welcome Home

Burning Man is held in northern Nevada, on the Playa of the Black Rock Desert, a remnant of the Pleistocene Lake Lahontan.

The Playa is a wasteland, and as such it is an apt venue for these musings.

After all, deforestation is one of the major contributing factors to human-induced Climate Crisis; and desertification is one of its major impacts.

Both are advancing rapidly, and on a global scale.

At the entrance gate to Burning Man, the security officer, took my ticket and inspected my car for contraband, and greeted me with a heart-felt "Welcome home" and a genuine embrace. There is powerful magic and deep meaning in greeting 50,000 people in this manner.

To be welcomed "home" into a nomad city on the desolation of the Playa.

Yes, the truth is that culture and civilization if they are to survive must be a moveable feast, and as the movers of that feast, we must be adaptive, adventurous, expansive and inclusive.

The Playa itself greeted me with an intense sand storm that led to several white outs on the long drive from the entrance gate into Black Rock City.

A Zone of Freedom

Do you remember the 1985 Australian film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? Max, portrayed by Mel Gibson, comes to Bartertown, which is run on energy drawn from pig feces, and ruled over by the ruthless and beautiful Aunt Entity, portrayed by Tina Turner. The dystopian premise behind this and the other films in the Mad Max series is that our obsession with oil, and our refusal to develop alternate fuel resources, would lead to the collapse of civilization. It is does not require much of a stretch of the imagination to envision a dystopian post-Climate-collapse world, similar in its environmental harshness and its social barbarism.

But what instead of a cruel world-view predicated on brute force and self-survival, we approached the collapse of it all as both a call for a synergy of self-reliance and collectivity? What if we approached the collapse as a party instead of a war?

At Burning Man, 50,000 people come together to build a city and life in it for a week, and then disband again. A month or so before Burning Man there is no sign of it on the Playa; a week or so after it, there is no trace of it left behind.

But in the course of that brief time, many burners report transformative experiences that re-define their life-journeys, and they return again and again to deepen the process. How is this possible?

What happens at Burning Man is that a zone of freedom is established; but it is not a platitudinous freedom, it is willful, conscious freedom: a freedom from routine and inhibition, a freedom for creative expression and self-discovery. On the Playa, there is both personal responsibility (not only to take care of oneself but to be part of the whole) and a radical acceptance (something more than tolerance) of the creative expression and self-discovery of others; and there is space for self-elected ambassadors of a range of human interests from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the sacred to the blasphemous, from the beauteous to the obscene, and every combination thereof.

Asked about her "biggest life lesson learned" from the Burning Man experience, Marian Goodell, Burning Man's Director of Business and Communications (one of the principle figures in its growth and success over the years) responded: "The power of creativity to change the way you feel about yourself and the way you interact with other people. And through that I learned about the importance of finding ways to communicate and connect with people, because once we do, there is a lot we can do together."

Truth is Not Written on Stone Tablets

The framework of this Zone of Freedom is best epitomized in Burning Man's Ten Principles:

. Radical Inclusion

. Gifting

. Decommodification

. Radical Self-reliance

. Radical Self-expression

. Communal Effort

. Civic Responsibility

. Leaving No Trace

. Participation

. Immediacy

The "Ten Principles" are meant to be "descriptive, not prescriptive," as Burning Man founder Larry Harvey remarked at a Playa press conference.

They evolved organically, from the nature of the shared experience, and they serve to describe the community to itself.

For Ria Megnin, burner, and freelance journalist, the "Ten Principles" are "what makes Burning Man stand out."

"This is not a bunch of happy hippies or random ravers playing around with sparklies," Ria told me, "this is an organization of people who know how to Get Stuff Done ... we're able to return to the default world with a new sense of empowerment and possibility ... it's about making the world tangibly, lastingly better for each other and for future generations."

In a pre-Playa interview, Goddell recounted the origins of the document.

"The group grew bigger and the questions grew more and more imposing ... it became clear that there were certain types of questions that were coming from these regional contacts, as they were trying to develop their communities ... guidance on a party or a gathering, and also some questions that grew up around personal dramas ... [Larry] went to Mazatlan for a holiday [in 2004], having digested all of the exasperation that Andie Grace and I had been delivering to him ... and he came back with this document, and Andie and I swooned, it was nine bullet points, and we teased him, 'Well, gee, Larry, why would you not want ten.' So he disappeared and came back a day later and had added a tenth, which he said was he favorite, although I can't remember which one it was, he has played with the sequence a bit since ..."

Burning Man's Ten Principles shares a fundamental realization with the philosophy of anarchism, e.g., truth is not written on stone tablets, it evolves organically from the human heart/mind through direct experience.

Anarchy is one of the most misunderstood of all political ideologies. Anarchy is not nihilism. Conventional wisdom presents the image of a masked bomb-throwing provocateur as the prototypical anarchist, but actually the face of Noam Chomsky would be more representative. "As I understand the term 'anarchism,' it is based on the hope (in our state of ignorance, we cannot go beyond that)," Chomsky has said, "that core elements of human nature include sentiments of solidarity, mutual support, sympathy, concern for others, and so on."

During the grim first decade of the 21st Century, I dived deeply into the history of the Spanish Civil War, re-reading George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and Arturo Barea for cross-section of bold, direct perspectives. One common theme in all that I read was that among the diverse factions within the popular front that stood against Franco and the Fascists, the anarchists were the most trustworthy, the most efficient, the fiercest, and yes, the most well-organized.

The Playa as Anti-Museum

How many times a year can you escape to the museum to see the art imprisoned there? And when you do you typically pre-purchase a ticket, and wait on a long line to get in, only to be rushed through the exhibit.

Well, at Burning Man, huge, audacious art installations are spread across the Playa. After dark, they are illuminated by rainbow LEDs powered by a solar array. Night and day, throughout the event, these installations are caressed by billowing sand storms and circled ceaselessly by burners on bicycles and mutant vehicles (which are art works in and of themselves, duly registered with the BRC Department of Mutant Vehicles).

"At Burning Man, the art is so sensational that it draws people to gather together and share an experience of curiosity, awe and wonder," Josie Schimke of the Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF) explained. "Visiting works of art becomes the highlight of one's day, and social interactions, connections and inspirations naturally grow out of the experience."

What if was life affirming, psyche-stimulating art that invited interaction and empowered your own creative expression, or that of your children or parents were being created on your downtown boulevards, in your parks, and in the courtyards of your neighborhoods?

That's what BRAF was established to fund in world beyond the Playa

"Every year's crop of grantees astonishes us with their diversity, both in their chosen media and strategies of bringing art into their communities," Schimke remarked, "Each project responds to a community's culture, needs and environment in an innovative and unique way."

The BRAF web site documents many examples of BRAF funded art projects.

Burn Down the Borders

At a café on Valencia in the Mission, several weeks prior to Burning Man 2011, I sat down with Carmen Mauk, Executive Director of Burners Without Borders.

"When Katrina happened, and we Burners got involved after Burning Man 2005, I said 'Whoa...' I had been working in human rights and with people in poverty my whole life. The creativity we brought to the Gulf Coast was completely different than the other groups who were there. We were taking debris from the surrounding areas and creating beautiful art, and inviting the community to do the same, and then burning it on Saturday night. We had not done it before in a disaster zone, but it was something we knew to do as a community, but we weren't just doing it for us, it was Radical Inclusion ... So in addition to a million dollars worth of debris removal and reconstruction work, we contributed a real sense of culture and community."

Since Katrina, Burners Without Borders has been working on the ground in the aftermath of catastrophes in Peru, Haiti, Joplin, Missouri and elsewhere.

"What we try to do is fill in the gaps as an organization, or create a new organization when needed," Mauk explained, "so that things that wouldn't ordinarily happen can happen."

But Burners Without Borders are limited to disaster relief efforts.

"A woman in Detroit, doxie (little "d"), was upset about the homeless situation, and noticed some marginalized people who didn't seem to be getting services, and so rather than become like a social worker about it, and blame and fight, she just started to getting materials that they might need for harsh winters and putting them in backpacks. She is been going on three years now, and has an entire community that supports her, she has so many donations ... the city loves it ..."

The Sun Delivers a Sustainable Burn

Black Rock Solar is another example of how burners are taking the inner fire lit on the Playa and using it to energize and illuminate their communities (in this instance, quite literally).

"We installing solar for non-profits, and tribes, and schools in northern Nevada, and basically giving it away to them, charging them a very small portion of the actual cost, Patrick McCully, Executive Director of Black Rock Solar explained.

"We're saving money for our clients, who are all worthy entities, and we're sticking more clean energy on to the grid, and hopefully reducing carbon emissions. We are funded mainly with rebates from NV Energy."

Like Burners Without Borders, Black Rock Solar sprung directly from the Playa.

"In 2007, the theme was the Green Man, so there was an attempt to green the festival, and there was a pretty sizable array donated to power the Man, recalled McCully, "you don't want to leave it sitting out in the desert or in a shipping container somewhere ..." So some burners installed the panels on a building in nearby Gerlach, and with the rebate, bought more panels for another array.

Meanwhile, back in Black Rock City, the drive to green Burning Man continues.

"We have both solar models out here on the Playa," Marnee Benson, Deputy Director of Black RockSolar reported. "At the Snow Cone Solar camp, they have two large systems providing power to a grid they create for their camp mates, and in the Alternative Energy Zone (AEZ), it's more that each camp has their own system [no generators allowed]."

But as Benson, who hosted a Sustainability Summit during Burning Man 2011, also noted, most camps are still using generators.

"Someone wanting to put solar panels on their RV is faced with similar decisions to someone wanting to put solar panels on their house [i.e., the cost]. I hope what we are doing out here on the Playa is helping them get over that initial hurtle."

Red Lightening and Sweetwater in the Desert

There is music everywhere at Burning Man, it blares 24x7, and merges with the sound of the burner multitude and a fleet of engines, into one glorious cacophony. Nevertheless, there are spaces steeped in silence and serenity.

For example, Red Lightening camp has a Medicine Wheel, with four tipis (north, south, east and west) and a sacred fire at its center, "holding energy and intention for the camp and the Red Lightening family."

Ria Megnin, who belongs to Red Lightening, shared some background.

"What makes Red Lightning so unique is its focus on collective evolution and healing. Our programming is super-diverse, but all of our workshops support personal growth that connects us with community, Mama Gaia and the cosmos. We started with visions drawn from Plains Indians traditions about how to honor our planet and ourselves, woven with new visions of balancing and empowering the feminine and masculine powers in all of us."

Out on the Esplanade, Samantha Sweetwater, founder of Dancing Freedom, is leading a journey in a canopied pavilion.

"Yesterday was Wednesday, we don't know what that means anymore. Today is Thursday, in case you were wondering. Mid-burn. That means it is going to get juicy ... We are about to work with medicine. The medicine is your biochemistry in motion. The medicine is our community in motion ... This one blessed, profane, fucked up, perfect heart, how does it feel right now? These blessed, profane, fucked up, perfect fingers, hands, elbows, knees, genitals, bellies, shoulders, jaw-bones, how do they feel right now? Anchoring into the Earth, the mystery of this life is going to be our material ..."

The Temple

In the beginning, there was the Man, and the powerful magic of burning him year after year. In that burning, great archetypal power is released, and great archetypal fear is banished. But the Man alone was not whole, not full, not balanced, there was something missing, and so the Temple came into being, and now each year, like the Man, it is built and then burned.

All around the Temple, there is an aura of sacredness; it is palpable in the atmosphere. It is burned the day after the Man. It turns the straight line of the arrow into a circle. It completes the ceremony. It is the Yin to the Yang, the Apollonian to the Dionysian, and it embodies the Divine Feminine.

Burning Man invested $80,000 in the 2011 Temple; $80,000 just to circumambulate it, use it as a crucible of memories, dreams, and losses, and then to burn it; a truly, profoundly communal experience of the sacred.

Leaning into Change

In 2007, James Hanusa was at his second Burning Man, and volunteering in Media Relations, telling the story of greening the Burn. (He described his first Burn as "the greatest party" he had ever experienced.) But it was at the Temple on that second year, that Hanusa had a transformative experience.

"I was alone, among 20,000 people who were silent in the middle of nowhere, offering respect to those that had passed on. Walking back from the Temple, in the dark, I heard a women crying behind me. She told me she had been honoring an addicted friend who had died. As his addiction worsened, he had continued to lose friends until she was the last person communicating with him. At that moment, something in my life opened up, and I understood, at the cellular level what I had often read about in books, the Buddhist concept of impermanence. Leaning into change became my mantra from that point forward."

Today, Hanusa is responsible for New Initiatives at the Burning Man Project. These "New Initiatives" include an Economic Development & Civic Engagement program, partnership with the City of San Francisco to develop an Arts & Innovation Zone in the Market Street area, as well as a showcase for sustainability, technology, social enterprise and interactive urban art forms. Other partnerships in development include collaborations with neighbors in the Tenderloin, to work toward a cohesive community prepared for any disaster, a citizen-based, special forces group for disasters in other cities, and special plan for the city of San Francisco, involving a Burner-assisted disaster recovery.

Changing Culture

"When the economic collapse began, I was talking to my brother on the telephone," said Larry Harvey at the Playa press conference, "and my brother said, 'Larry, isn't capitalism sort of a Ponzi scheme?' The market system of course is almost cognate with civilization in many ways, but this notion that it is all predicated on endlessly increasing amounts of consumption doesn't really work anymore, which makes for a paralyzing ... we have just reached a state of cognitive dissonance. Everybody knows that almost everything we do is unsustainable now. If the Chinese consume at the rate that we have the world's got a problem; the 21st Century is going to be about resource wars. One thing that could mitigate that is using the resources that inhere in communities, which can lead to remarkable economies ... if you look at a theme camp and where they acquire their resources, projects out here tend to create these ever-enlarging gifting networks, and doing things that way it is possible to recycle, reuse, repurpose ... I do not think the economic system is going to change until we change the culture that we have concocted in the last several decades, and in that way, I think what we are doing here is an inspiring model that could be applied as yet un-thought of ways ..."

Time Travel

Approaching the Temple on my first night at Burning Man, I vividly remembered the Central Park Be-In on the night humankind walked on the Moon; that "giant step" was televised on a huge TV screen to that massive tribal gathering, and Jimi Hendrix playing the Star-Spangled Banner at dawn in Woodstock, as well as the wild magic of attempting to levitate the Pentagon two years earlier. These memories had not been buried in my psyche; but out on the Playa, I experienced them in a new way. It occurred to me that there was a continuity in all of these events, and that an evolutionary spiral was underway, and that although the thread sometimes seemed lost or broken, it never was or would be, and that one day (or night) hopefully sooner but probably later, the tapestry of a better, truer more humane society will be revealed.

Meanwhile, primal culture (i.e., expressing, celebrating, sharing, loving, educating) and core civilization (i.e., food, water, shelter, clothing and security) would have to continue to be a moveable feast.

you might just get what you're after

[seemslikeadream]

The All-American Occupation: A Century of Our Streets vs. Wall Street
Thursday 13 October 2011
by: Steve Fraser, TomDispatch | Op-Ed

Last weekend, in Washington Square Park in downtown Manhattan at a giant mill-in, teach-in, whatever-in-extension of Occupy Wall Street’s camp-out in Zuccotti Park, there was a moment to remember. Under what can only be called a summer sun, a contingent from the Egyptian Association for Change, USA, came marching in, their “Support Occupy Wall Street” banners held high (in Arabic and English), chanting about Cairo’s Tahrir Square (where some of them had previously camped out). The energy level of the crowd rose to buzz-level and cheers broke out.

And little wonder. After all, it was a moment for the history books. An American protest movement had taken its most essential strategic act directly from an Egyptian movement for democracy: camp out and don’t go home. It had then added (as one of the Egyptians pointed out to me) a key tactic of that movement, the widespread and brilliant use of social media to jumpstart events. And keep in mind that some of the Egyptian organizers at Tahrir Square had been trained in social networking by organizations like the International Republican Institute and the Democratic National Institute (created and indirectly funded by the U.S. Congress). Now, the American version of the same is being re-exported to the world. Try to unravel that one if you will -- and while you’re at it, toss out the great myth of American non-protest of these last years: that going online, Facebooking, and tweeting were pacifiers that suppressed in the young the possibility of actually heading into the streets and doing something.

By the way, the Egyptians weren’t the only ones there. As reporter Andy Kroll points out, from the beginning there were Greeks, Spaniards, Japanese, and others involved in Occupy Wall Street, all representing a new era of global activism. And better yet, the growing American movement isn’t denying these foreign influences; it’s hailing them, it’s cheered by them!

If that isn’t myth-busting, what is? Think of it as blowback as neither the CIA, nor even Chalmers Johnson, ever imagined it. Or maybe it’s some kind of modern export-import-export business. In any case, standing in Washington Square Park watching what could only be called the festivities (if you ignored a police lock-down in the vicinity more appropriate for Kabul, Afghanistan), it wasn’t hard to believe that the very idea of American exceptionalism was expiring right in front of our eyes. It had, of course, already worn desperately thin, or all those Republican presidential candidates and our president wouldn’t be insisting on its reality every five seconds. All I can say is that when the neoliberal globalizers of the 1990s first proclaimed the world to be one, this was surely not what they had in mind!

And yet, consider something else as well (and for those of you who don’t feel comfortable holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts in your head at one time, stop here): Foreign influences or no, Occupy Wall Street couldn’t be a more homegrown or traditionally American movement. As our preeminent historian of Wall Street, TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, points out, the young occupiers of Zuccotti Park caught the zeitgeist of the moment by mainlining directly into the central vein of American oppositional movements for more than a century before the Great Depression ended. No wonder their movement is spreading fast. They may not have known their history, but they sensed it and so went right for that essential strand of American protest DNA: the “street of torments” at the bottom of Manhattan Island. Tom

The All-American Occupation:
A Century of Our Streets Vs. Wall Street
By Steve Fraser

Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn’t be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters.

The fact is that the end of the world as we’ve known it has been taking place all around us for some time. Until recently, however, thickets of political verbiage about cutting this and taxing that, about the glories of “job creators” and the need to preserve “the American dream,” have obscured what was hiding in plain sight -- that street of streets, known to generations of our ancestors as “the street of torments.”

After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history. And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.

The Street of Torments

Peering back at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street,” so full of sound and fury signifying quite a lot, it’s astonishing -- to a historian of Wall Street, at least -- that the present movement didn’t happen sooner. It’s already hard to remember that only weeks ago, three years into the near shutdown of the world financial system and the Great Recession, an eerie unprotesting silence still blanketed the country.

Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. The economy slowed and stalled. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached record levels. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged -- but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” financial goliaths, not the legions of victims their financial wilding had left in its wake.

The political class then prescribed what people already had plenty of: yet another dose of austerity plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that, for 99% of Americans, was never much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future withered and bitterness set in.

Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. In the light of American history, this passivity was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again Wall Street found itself in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry mobilized thanks to political parties, labor unions, or leagues of the unemployed. Such movements were filled with a polyglot mix of middle-class anti-trust reformers, bankrupted small businessmen, dispossessed farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, out-of-work laborers, and so many others.

If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon? Finally!

What began as a relatively sparsely attended and impromptu affair has displayed a staying power and magnetic attractiveness that has taken the country, and above all the political class, by surprise. A recent rally of thousands in lower Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from the city’s government center to Zuccotti Park, the location of the “occupiers” encampment, was an extraordinarily diverse gathering by any measure of age, race, or class. Community organizations, housing advocates, environmentalists, and even official delegations of trade unionists not normally at ease hanging out with anarchists and hippies gave the whole affair a social muscularity and reach that was exhilarating to experience.

Diversity, however, can cut both ways. Popular protest, to the degree that there’s been much during the recent past -- and mainly over the war in Iraq -- has sometimes been criticized for the chaotic way it assembled a grab-bag of issues and enemies, diffuse and without focus. Occupy Wall Street embraces diverse multitudes but this time in the interest of convergence. In its targeting of “the street of torments,” this protean uprising has, in fact, found common ground. To a historian’s ear this echoes loudly.

Karl Marx described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. We’ve spent a long generation learning not to mention Marx in polite company, and not to use suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor,” among many others.

In times past, however, such phrases and the ideas that went with them struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as true depictions of reality. They used them regularly, along with words like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class,” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced.

Never before, however, has “the Vatican of capitalism” captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that’s run the country for a generation and has now run it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville, no Marxist he, confessed as much during the Clinton years when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Perhaps that era of everyday intimidation is finally ending. Here are some of the signs of it -- literally -- from that march I attended: “Loan Sharks Ate My World” (illustrated with a reasonable facsimile of the Great White from Jaws), “End the Federal Reserve,” “Wall Street Sold Out, Let’s Not Bail-Out,” “Kill the Over the Counter Derivative Market,” “Wall Street Banks Madoff Well,” “The Middle Class is Too Big To Fail,” “Eat the Rich, Feed the Poor,” “Greed is Killing the Earth.” During the march, a pervasive chant -- “We are the 99%” -- resoundingly reminded the bond market just how isolated and vulnerable it might become.

And it is in confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament, in gathering together all the multifarious manifestations of our general dilemma right there on “the street of torments,” that Occupy Wall Street -- even without a program or clear set of demands, as so many observers lament -- has achieved a giant leap backward, summoning up a history of opposition we would do well to recall today.

A Century of Our Streets and Wall Street

One young woman at the demonstration held up a corrugated cardboard sign roughly magic-markered with one word written three times: “system,” “system,” “system.” That single word resonates historically, even if it sounds strange to our ears today. The indictment of presumptive elites, especially those housed on Wall Street, the conviction that the system over which they presided must be replaced by something more humane, was a robust feature of our country’s political and cultural life for a long century or more.

When in the years following the American Revolution, Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the “moneycrats” and their counterrevolutionary intrigues -- they meant Alexander Hamilton and his confederates in particular -- they were worried about the installation in the New World of a British system of merchant capitalism that would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the Revolution.

When followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States -- otherwise known as “the Monster Bank” -- they were up in arms against what they feared was the systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite. Just after the Civil War, the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties freed themselves of the two-party runaround, determined to mobilize independently to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.

Later in the nineteenth century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street “devil fish” (shades of Matt Taibbi’s “giant vampire squid” metaphor for Goldman Sachs). Its tentacles, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy, but also corrupted churches, the press, and institutions of higher learning, destroyed the family, and suborned public officials from the president on down. When, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, the Populist-inspired “boy orator of the Platte” and Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan vowed that mankind would not be “crucified on a cross of gold,” he meant Wall Street and everyone knew it.

Around the turn of the century, the anti-trust movement captured the imagination of small businessmen, consumers, and working people in towns and cities across America. The trust they worried most about was “the Money Trust.” Captained by J.P. Morgan, “the financial Gorgon,” the Money Trust was skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering Congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposés of “muckraking” journalists, and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.

As the twentieth century began, progressive reformers in state houses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities and out on the prairies, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists, antiwar activists, and numerous others were still vigorously condemning that same Money Trust for turning the whole country into a closely-held system of financial pillage, labor exploitation, and imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by “the Street.”

The tradition the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have tapped into is a long and vibrant one that culminated during the Great Depression. Then as now, there was no question in the minds of "the 99%” that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country’s crisis (however much that verdict has since been challenged by disputatious academics).

Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.

“System, System, System”: It would be foolish to make too much of a raggedy sign -- or to leap to conclusions about just how lasting this Occupy Wall Street moment will be and just where (if anywhere) it’s heading. It would be crazily optimistic to proclaim our own pitiful age of acquiescence ended.

Still, it would be equally foolish to dismiss the powerful American tradition the demonstrators of this moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall Street has functioned as an icon of revulsion, inciting anger, stoking up energies, and summoning visions of a new world that might save the New World.

It is poised to play that role again. Remember this: in 1932, three years into the Great Depression, most Americans were more demoralized than mobilized. A few years later, all that had changed as “Our Street, Not Wall Street” came alive. The political class had to scurry to keep up. Occupy Wall Street may indeed prove the opening act in an unfolding drama of renewed resistance and rebellion against “the system.”

The All-American Occupation for the Wall Street's Crimes of the Century

[Bruce Dazzling]