Last night, former Bush official Karl Rove appeared at Johns Hopkins University to speak as a part of the annual Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium. Rove soon discovered that he wasn’t going to deliver his right-wing rhetoric unopposed, as a cry of “Mic Check!” rang out among the audience. “Karl Rove is the architect of Occupy Iraq, the architect of Occupy Afghanistan!” yelled the demonstrators. Occupy Baltimore had infiltrated the crowd and began chanting against Rove.
On Thursday November 17th, the two month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, we call upon the 99% to participate in a national day of direct action and celebration!
New York City
BREAKFAST: Shut Down Wall Street – 7:00 a.m.
Enough of this economy that exploits and divides us. It’s time we put an end to Wall Street’s reign of terror and begin building an economy that works for all. We will gather in Liberty Square at 7:00 a.m., before the ring of the Trading Floor Bell, to prepare to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the frontlines of economic injustice. There, before the Stock Exchange, we will exchange stories rather than stocks.
LUNCH: Occupy The Subways – 3:00 p.m.
We will start by Occupying Our Blocks! Then throughout the five boroughs, we will gather at 16 central subway hubs and take our own stories to the trains, using the “People’s Mic”.
“… according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.”
What role does the Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) play locally and nationally?
Is there a national anti-Occupy “war room” in DC?
What does Obama know? When did he know it? What plans, funding, oversight and acts did he personally give the green light to?
Who serves the people, and who serves the system of oppression?
Follow the trail, bring it to light. Shout out to the journalists who are fighting to bring the truth to light — the coordination and planning to crush the Occupation movement, and a trail of command that includes Democratic mayors and federal officials.
‘Occupy’ crackdowns coordinated with federal law enforcement officials
by Rick Ellis
Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
This piece speaks for itself. From Capitoilette and BBC. Next question: Was the Obama administration in on the phone call? When did they know? When did they approve?
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Admits Cities Coordinated Crackdown on Occupy Movement
Posted on November 15, 2011
Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”
Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.
NYC authorities surrounded and attacked Occupy Wall Street at its Zuccotti park encampment.
Hundreds of police mobilized just after midnight. Backed by glaring klieg lights, they announced all had to leave or face arrest.“It’s happening.”
People stood their ground. Many were arrested — including of people chained to the spot. People held tight together, and police pried them apart to drag them off. A NYC city councilperson among the people was reportedly badly beaten and arrested.
Message circulating:
“If you live in NYC or driving distance: come to Manhattan now. Tell everyone you know. Take off work. Show up at school so you can bring other students downtown. Fill the city.”
and
“<police state> Sanitation trucks clear Zuccotti Park, police helicopters circle lower Manhattan, police phalanx box in OWS near Foley Square, City council member Ydanis Rodriguez beaten and bleeding. #tiananmensquare.”
Equalize, an active supporter of the communist Kasama project, has been deeply involved in Occupy Portland from the beginning.
by Equalize
This weekends events stood in a context of a coordinated effort by the city, local media, and other forces to discredit the occupation.
The occupation and the homeless
The occupation has been overwhelmed since soon after its beginning with a huge presence of the city’s homeless and the associated social problems of drug addiction and mental illness. Our occupation opened our arms to these broken, cast aside and ignored victims of capitalism and attempted to provide support and space for them. It is ironic, that, our attempt to shed light and address, to the humble extent we were able, became a way to paint the occupation as, somehow, the cause of these problems. The main excuse to shut down the occupation was the drug addiction and violent behavior of some of the people that took refuge in our camp.
Saturday:
After frenzied activity for a couple of days after the ‘eviction notice’ we were all very apprehensive on Saturday morning. And early signs that day were a bit disappointing.
Kasama has received two leaflets from Seattle’s Red Spark Collective. They deal with sharp choices and controversies surrounding the occupation movement in their city. Red Spark is part of our Kasama network.
When Students Move Millions Follow
OUR PAST
In Paris, May 1968, students held massive occupations at some of France’s most prestigious university campuses.
When riot police crushed the first of these protests, popular support grew and within days more than a million marched through the streets of the city. Workers started independently occupying factories, beginning one of the only general strikes to ever fully paralyze an industrialized, first-world nation.
This was a wildcat strike, led autonomously and directly by workers, rather than any union bureaucracy.
Soon the Sorbonne was reoccupied and declared an autonomous “people’s university.” The populace mobilized across France. Enormous marches were held in every major city, calling for president de Gaulle to step down and dissolve the National Assembly. Factories all over the country were seized by their own workers, who demanded full share in the wealth they had created. France was, within a month, brought to the brink of a revolution which could have changed the course of history.
Kasama has received two leaflets from Seattle’s Red Spark Collective. They deal with sharp choices and controversies surrounding the occupation movement in their city.
It is Right to Serve the People
Lessons from New York Occupations
In 2008-9 there were three occupations at two New York colleges: The New School and New York University. The Red Spark Collective writes this in order to help draw lessons on legitimacy, power, tactics, and strategy from these experiences, for our own occupation and our global movement.
A tremor is shaking the world and the occupations which first took off in Tunisia and Egypt are at the heart of it. Like a tsunami it rippled out, awakening and giving heart to those awaiting. And here too, occupations are now tearing at the fabric of normalcy, making the impossible possible — while we discover (and invent) what that means for everyone and what that requires of us.
But as we pull and tug, we are told from every angle which forms of action, which ways of expressing our agency and our power are “legitimate.”
We are told: You can’t disrupt business as usual… You’re only legitimate if you make practical demands… If you aren’t speaking to your representatives you aren’t in the game… We beg to differ.
We received the following essay from a young communist in Ohio breaking his ties with the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Behold, the emperor’s clothes were nowhere to be found…
A critique of the RCP,USA and
a challenge for those seeking a better world
by Kassad
For the first time in decades, the masses are seriously in motion and the winds of radical change are blowing. These winds are fierce and they are powerful. With the rise of the Occupy Wall Street that has inspired people across the globe, something historic is brewing. As these winds blow, as communists, we must ask ourselves: do we take flight or do we allow our wings to be clipped once more by this system?
This upsurge is what many of us have only dreamed of and discussed. The potential to shake this empire to the core is very real and the empire’s eyes are on us. The critical contradiction is this: though the rulers of this brutal system seek to chain us down, are there even some on the revolutionary left that, whether intentionally or without recognition, do the very same thing?
In brief…
To briefly touch on myself and why this essay is being written, I am a young communist living in Ohio. I have been active in supporting the RCP for a little under a year.
I would like to publicly withdraw that support after the RCP’s absurd attack on Kasama Project and Avakian’s recent article on the Occupy Movement. The Occupy Movement is historic and to boil it down to merely being a vehicle to support Avakian’s cult of personality is pure laughable grandiose for reasons that I will get in to in this essay.
Eric Ribellarsi, national organizer of the Kasama project, recently returned from deep investigations into the movement of the squares in Greece and the revolutionary movement in Nepal.
Mike Ely, veteran revolutionary and editor of the Kasama discussion.
What can we learn from other revolutionary forces around the world — from their successes, their frustrations, their innovations and their still-unsolved problems?
How would we imagine a revolutionary change in the U.S. — how would it happen? Where would it lead? Who are the forces who might congeal to carry it through? How has revolution changed in a time of globalization and instant horizontal communication.
What does Occupy Together mean for the chances of radical change in the U.S.?
How do we create a new revolutionary movement that can creatively learn and understand this rapidly-changing world and actually empower oppressed people?
Be there.
Download and print color and b/w versions of the poster.
“I can appreciate the desire to limit the critique of the RCP to what Mike calls “questions of line” (i.e., their ideas).”
There is a debate here about “the high plane of two line struggle” — something I have argued strongly for. I want to take a second to clarify this term “questions of line.”
I understand why CWM equates line simply with “their ideas” — but that is not exactly how I would look at it.
What road are we on?
Sometimes, on the left, people say “what is your line on this? What is your line on that?”
This is not what I mean by line. To me (and to Maoists generally) line is a matter of examining “where does this lead?” It is like a surveyor’s tool that projects forward.
It is an approach to methods, policies, theoretical “packages” — that asks the questions: where does this lead? who does it serve? what will come from taking this road?
You have to consciously fight to get things considered and decided on that basis. And only by posing and deciding things on that basis can a communist program come forward, and gain support broadly among key sections of the people.
It is no longer five minutes to midnight. After Arab Spring leaps to Spain, and Greece, and on to New York’s Wall Street, it suddenly feels like five minutes to dawn.
We no longer need assume that there is no time to stop the world going to shit. There is an opening and we are flooding into it.
We are suddenly in a moment that is not marked by exhausted routine protests that speak for no one and speak to no one.
I spoke last night with someone in our Kasama project about a pro-Occupy meeting with many local union officials. One thing jumped out at me.
An emerging truth is now being spoken out loud:
That Occupy Wall Street is not some progressive “constituency” that unions and others need to “relate to.”
Things have gone far beyond that. This is now a historical moment, a true tear in previous politics, alignments, possibilities and silence. It is a rupture and an opening where everyone needs to act, based on their understandings and political concerns.
And the implication of this is profound: This is no longer just about “go down to the occupations and hook up with what they have created.” The opening is there for many kinds of people to speak — from where they sit in society, about what they see — and to be part of something new erupting within the power relations of society.
The occupations remain (symbolically, politically, visually) the core of this. Their growth, spread, survival, maturation and defense is an important part of this moment.But (again) this is not JUST an occupation event — it has become a large, open flapping tear in fabric of deadly normal/official politics, in its language, allignment and assumptions.
“I heard Ralph Nader praise “the brave founding fathers , who settled this land”. I thought I would throw up listening, but I have run into that kind of stuff in many cases in this movement.”
Many people have been trained to think of the settler/slaveowners of the early U.S. as “their” founding fathers. And Louise is deeply correct that this is mistaken, and has ongoing implications for politics. History is not just about the past, but about the present.
This country was founded in genocide and slavery. It was built and maintained by some of the most vicious exploitation imaginable — obviously of kidnapped Africans but also of impoverished immigrants from Asia and Europe who were herded into mines, and mills.
And it is not just that the “founding fathers” were slave traders, capitalists, and slave owners (and therefore not “ours”) — but (more controversial even) their very political system, constitution and even their concepts of property, authority, law, and morality were all deeply marked by this exploitative, expansionist and genocidal nature.
They are not “our” founding fathers — but the founders of the empire we now confront, and within which we seek to act as an increasingly conscious and determined force of negation.
Fuck Joe Paterno and his rapist lackey Jerry Sandusky. And the criminal administration of Penn State. And all those who think the institutional protection of the male rapist is not a crime.
The Vatican, Penn State, reform schools, and countless other spaces of horror and smothered screams. No more.
Paterno’s silence, disbelief and complicity should be exposed and renounced.
All that is progressive and revolutionary in society must speak and speak clearly. And a verdict must be imposed on a society defined by the Paterno’s and their morality of self, success and male right. (Please consider the word “imposed.”)
The public agonizing in Penn State and the media is outrageous. The public demonstrations of support are outrageous. The worrying about his “football program” is outrageous.
The whole episode exposes utter indifference to the sexual brutalization of the powerless — including women as well as children. And the indifference is not just in the shower stall, in the front office, in the college administration… but in the media and in the society at all. No more.
A lifetime of football coaching and mentoring does not negate the crime of covering up rape — so coldly, with such callous indifference, with such focus on image and self-protection.
End old boys’ networks and the protection of rapist male right.
In the aftermath of Mayor Bloomberg’s brutal raid on Liberty Square in New York City, this is a statement from Occupy Wall St.
You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.
Posted 6 hours ago on Nov. 15, 2011, 1:36 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
A massive police force is presently evicting Liberty Square, home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country and around the world
The raid started just after 1:00am. Supporters and allies are mobilizing throughout the city, presently converging at Foley Square. Supporters are also planning public actions for the coming days, including occupation actions.
You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.
Two months ago a few hundred New Yorkers set up an encampment at the doorstep of Wall Street. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol — with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future.
Americans are talking about the consolidation of wealth and power in our society, and the stranglehold that the top 1% have over our political system. More and more Americans are seeing the crises of our economy and our democracy as systemic problems, that require collective action to remedy. More and more Americans are identifying as part of the 99%, and saying “enough!” Read the rest of this entry »
Nous sommes à cinq minutes de l’aube
et le vent a un goût de liberté
par Mike Ely
du réseau Kasama
Nous ne sommes plus cinq minutes avant minuit. Après que le printemps arabe se soit transporté en Espagne puis en Grèce, et finalement à Wall Street, on a soudainement l’impression d’être à cinq minutes de l’aube.
Nous n’avons plus l’impression qu’il n’y a aucun moyen de stopper le merdier mondial. Il y a maintenant une brêche et nous nous jetons dedans.
Nous sommes brusquement projetés à une époque débarrassée de la routine des manifestations fatiguées qui ne parlent plus pour personne, ni à personne.
Les oppresseurs (notre ennemi commun) ne sont plus en sécurité – ou encore moins qu’avant. Ils sont au contraire repoussés, confus, déconcertés, furieux. Le maire milliardaire de New York ne peut pas « nettoyer » un petit parc (ndt: le Zuccotti park, à Wall Street)- et soudain la question n’est plus de chasser les occupants, mais plutôt comment il sera lui même chassé du pouvoir si il continue sur ce chemin.
Oakland
