intellectual properties

#occupyfashion

i ♥ that this happened: http://www.cynicaltimes.org/articles/occupy-brings-working-class-outrage-to-fashion-week/

“The whole Occupation thing is important because it’s about people going out and talking about the things that are messed up in our own society and the fashion industry is one of them,” said Mediavilla. “New York City used to be popping with jobs for people making clothes and then the industry outsourced many of those (apparel) jobs so they could pay people pennies on the hour in other countries instead of a decent wage.

“Meanwhile, they’re spending $500,000 on a single magazine cover photo that gets photo-shopped all to hell and is often very unrealistic. Young people see these fake images and think they have to look like that.”

Employment in the U.S. apparel industry has fallen by 82% since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect Jan. 1, 1994, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. had 149,700 apparel workers last month, compared with 834,900 in January 1994.

The median pay for the 64,100 sewing machine operators left in the U.S. was $19,180 in 2010.

…”Most of my friends that work in the fashion industry are only part timers and they’re given less than 30 hours of work each week so they don’t qualify for benefits, but they still make too much to qualify for food stamps,” Stone-Diaz said, pausing briefly as a passing fashionista called the protesters “assholes.”

He smiled, shook his head and continued.

“We have all these fashion shows on television right now – like Project Runway – that romanticize the industry and hold it up as part of the American Dream,” Stone-Diaz said, “but it’s built on 1% structures just like the American Dream.”

One of those structures is grossly underpaying workers in order to lavishly overpay investors and top executives, models and designers.

i think some people think my work in fashion shows is counter to all of the other socio-political stuff i do/write about and wonder how i could be dong this “really superficial’ thing one day and then writing about poverty and justice the next. first of all, it irks me that some people think that fashion is only trivial and superficial and belittle its importance in human culture, especially as compared to the other arts, but that is another topic in itself and so i digress. my point here is that in fact, i ONLY, and i mean ONLY, work with designers who are dedicated to responsible clothing, who source their goods as responsibly as they can, and to keeping their lines ethical from beginning to end.

i do these fashion shows because i love fashion as a form of self-expression, but also because i think supporting my friends who do local fashion IS IMPORTANT – as noted above, the U.S. fashion industry is not only cruel in its treatment of women as objects, but the treatment of workers here and abroad is horrid.

youwillhavetolearntolookattheskyagain

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-city-is-wilder-and-kinder-than-you-think (2/9/12):

The poems on Old Street are set in capital white letters on a brushed black background, in a sort of mangled Futura; it’s a type treatment that should send his words running and screaming through the streets but somehow does not. Instead, the words lean calmly against the wall and arouse a kind of subtle and unnoticed reflection. People pass by on their way to or from here or there. They do double-takes and slow down. Intrigue wraps their faces. They stop, read, think, and eventually move on, carrying something with them that maybe wasn’t there before. Something that came free, silent and unexpected, set in capital white letters on a brushed black background.

“I’m an acolyte of Situationist ideas,” Montgomery says, referring to Situationist International, a group of 20th-century European revolutionaries who used public art installations to capture people’s attention, ask questions, and express ideas. “Their influence on me is far reaching. But the key introductory idea is perhaps Guy Debord’s idea of the spectacle, by which he means loosely the coalition of capitalism and the media.”

Debord, a French social theorist, writer and filmmaker, helped to form the SI in 1957. In his influential book, The Society of the Spectacle, he suggests that the combination of capitalism and the mass media will lead to a society dominated by false images, and that these images will act as a spectacle isolating people from reality. Debord eventually shot himself through the heart in 1994 in a small village in Auvergne, France.

“What Debord and the SI really get into,” Montgomery says, “and what sets them apart from much other post-Marxist thought, is questions of what capitalism does to us on the inside; in the inner sphere of life, to our hearts and minds, almost to our karmic sphere. I think those questions have never been more pertinent, especially in this historical moment when it is inarguably clear that capitalism in its current extreme form is not only immoral, but technically flawed.”

…

Montgomery’s poems hang near the vacant Old Street Magistrate’s Court, where, until recently, a group of Occupy London protesters had been squatting. “If you look at what Occupy are doing,” he says, “I think we’re finally seeing a positive international forum for positive change to the global financial system. That’s if we listen to them and don’t marginalize their voice.”

Emma is a 42-year-old Occupy camper and writer. She says she thinks it’s important to see artwork like Montgomery’s in the public realm. “Reclaiming public space is vital,” she says. “Art, music, poetry, performance, debate, conversation—these are the things that bring us together, that lead us out of our isolation, that allow us—the 99%—to connect, to share, and eventually, to mobilize. Every attempt to stimulate conversation regarding how we live now and how we could do it better is valuable.”

Beyond Aesthetics: Occupy Art (post #12)

following up on my last #occupy post……

the Muppets have taught us so many things since 1976. and this week, they’ve taught us just how well popular Art can be used to call bullshit:

Watch: The Muppets Diss Fox News:

 Miss Piggy was more combative and political; the puppet added that the charge was “almost as laughable as accusing Fox News of being news.”

(this is a response to this)

have the Muppets always been so intense?

anyway, i love it, and this is a great segue for me to post some of that which i recently wrote for my art school application on the subject of the current state and intersection of art vs. politics in America. this is definitively the longest post i’ve ever published, but if you’re interested, read on….

Continue reading »

occupy everything. (post #11)

last night at the salon, a nice older woman sitting next to me asked, “so what happened with the Occupy? why did it all go so bad? it makes me so sad, i watch the news and i want to cry. i wanted good things to happen.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-first-casualty-of-fairness-is-the-truth/2012/01/30/gIQA2VYneQ_blog.html

“You know what you don’t see much of these days? Those moist-eyed bloggers’ odes to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Gosh, remember the columns telling us these people had a noble political agenda? Seems like just yesterday the lefty bloggers were picking through polls, telling us the American people embraced the OWS gang. But then protest turned to filth, and high-mindedness turned out to be just plain-old stench.

To write such loving tributes to OWS took extraordinary discipline, I suppose. Not to actually look (or smell) and determine who the real Occupiers (as opposed to the Occupiers refashioned for the readers of the New York Times and the Nation) were must have taken real will-power, especially since the encampments in major cities (as in the District) were only a few blocks from the journalists’ offices. Had they taken a peek or inhaled on the way to work they would have discovered the real Occupy movement.

Zack Munson reports: “There are lots of bearded folks (male and female), lots of dirty tents, some college students, the unemployed, the career homeless, some white people dancing out of rhythm to rock music played over a loudspeaker. The ‘movement’ itself is still a jumble of anti-capitalist/police/government rhetoric and pointless noise and pungent smells.” Oh, well, who wants to write about that?”

it’s true.  i haven’t wrttien about OWS/OccupyOakland in over a month, but it is not because i think the shine wore off to reveal a bunch of dirty hippies.  in fact, the opposite is true. i think once the new smell and initial popculture interest wore off, who was left was a bunch of super invested people who have since then been heads-down entrenched in making things happen, not out there in the camps but in smaller working groups, in meetings, behind closed doors. see: the Alternative Banking Working Group, for example.

and despite all the negatives, the movement has been effective — causing democratic change on issues local and global, from healthcare to home evictions to school funding, not only in the higher-profile cities like New York  and D.C. but also in small towns across the U.S. …. not to mentioned having kicked the door open for a lot of other progressive non-Occupy NGOs and social and cultural groups to take a stand. The Media, of course, chooses to only focus on the the bad apples.  this is true for nearly every single aspect of society, not just OWS, and everybody knows it. so why don’t people question what they see on the news more often?

i told the woman at the salon to try to look up other places to read about Occupy, and that while i am not actively involved much  personally, i know many amazing, hardworking people who are and i know, without any question or doubt, that they are doing good things with the right intentions.

“The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas.  The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation — “occupy the river” — in little ones below.” – Compassion Is Our New Currency

last weekend in Oakland  there was another Occupy vs. OPD clash when Occupy tried to take over an empty building.  before you keep reading,  WATCH THIS VIDEO.

the press and City Hall reported that the Occupiers were breaking into buildings and harrassing police and that, 6 months into the movement, all this is is a temper tantrum on the part of entitled youth and rabblerousers who should find better uses for their time and stop being a public nuisance.  but here is the perspective from Occupy:

http://occupywallst.org/article/regime-change-oakland/

“In Oakland, thousands of active community members chose to engage in true democracy by supporting the real and pressing needs of the people. The state, which supposedly represents these people, exercised extreme police brutality and violence to protect the 1%’s vacant assets. The explicit goal of the action was to build community—to open a desperately needed community center with a library, medical care, free education and emergency housing in a city that has suffered massive budget cuts, high unemployment rates and ravaged public schools. In response, the city government poured hundreds of thousands of dollars, bullets and canisters of tear gas into declaring open war on these parents, students, workers, artists, teachers, children and veterans. These people’s only offense was to believe so deeply in the American tradition of democracy, self-sufficiency, and sacrifice for the next generation that they were willing to put their bodies on the line to make this nation the empowering democracy that we know it can be.”

And here is a journalist’s first hand account of the situation, and being unlawfully arrested: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/journalists-arrested-occupy-oakland

so yeah, there are obvious issues with people taking over public buildings and setting up DIY healthcare units etc.  not up to code, health violations, blah blah blah.  but what i don’t understand is why the City can’t just,……let them try? see what happens?  wouldn’t that cost FEWER CITY DOLLARS AND RESOURCES than hiring an outside army of police to shoot rubber bullets at citizens, people trying to create for their communities what the government has neglected to protect or provide?

which leads me back to reiterate that the main success of this movement has been to get people to WAKE UP.  maybe they’re waking up to an American Dream Turned Nightmare, but if that’s the case then if Occupy stands for anything it’s this: STAND UP AND FIGHT. OCCUPY EVERYTHING that matters to you.

The Ultimate Culture Jam

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/spiritual-insurrection.html

“We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.”

this post is to be continued, in the vein of CULTURAL TRANSFIGURATION: OCCUPY ART.

philip glass and OWS (post #10)

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”

i admit i am getting more cynical by the day about the tactics of the Occupy movement, so i was almost relieved when this almost brought me to tears (the first few minutes are of protesters encouraging the opera goers to disobey the police and come down the steps; you can jump to the 2:45 mark for the Philip Glass appearance).

“The protest, which was directed not at the opera itself but at a certain disparity between its lofty moral message and the machinery of corporate arts funding, got under way during the third act…When the Satyagraha listeners emerged from the Met, police directed them to leave via side exits, but protesters began encouraging them to disregard the police, walk down the steps, and listen to Glass speak. Hesitantly at first, then in a wave, they did so. The composer proceeded to recite the closing lines of Satyagraha, which come from the Bhagavad Gita (after 3:00 in the video above):

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”

In accustomed style, he said it several times, with the “human microphone” repeating after him.”

–http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/12/the-satyagraha-protest.html

sigh.

lots more about it is worth reading at http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/at-satyagraha-and-occupy-lincoln-center

on community and OWS (post #9)

i haven’t written anything about OWS in a while, because i’m not sure what to say now that isn’t being written and argued everywhere else. the issues are complex. the economics are gargantuan. politicians are evasive.  is it winning? are things happening?  yes. and no. but i will repeat again that what is indisputable is that it is changing the lives of people involved, people who were hopeless and disconnected who have now found a community. like this man.

and so on that tip, and along the same no-currency principles as burning man, someone is making a docu on the ideas of economics, loneliness and disconnection in humanity and why community is as much an important part of the Occupy Wall Street movement as political and economic reform:

Life is pretty bleak at the top too – and all the baubles of the rich are this phoney compensation for the loss of what’s really important. The loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy. The loss of meaning.

Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. And today, we live in a money economy where we don’t really depend on the gifts of anybody. But we buy everything. Therefore we don’t really need anybody, because whoever grew my food, or made my clothes, or built by house, well if they die, or if I alienate them, or if they don’t like me, that’s okay because I can just pay someone else to do it.

And it’s really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is “we don’t need each other.”

About The Film

Occupy Love will be a moving, transformative feature documentary that asks the question: how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story? 

A profound shift is taking place all over the world. Humanity is  waking up to the fact  that the current system that dominates the planet is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning.  The dominant paradigm is based on separation, as exemplified by the financial system, and the corporate emphasis of profits before people.

more:  http://www.indiegogo.com/Occupy-Love

#OWS, the police, and walking the walk (post #8)

1. i urge you to watch this video of the retired Philadelphia policeman who was arrested at #OWS, talking about the problems he sees with how the police are interacting with this movement.

he is super respectful of the police, but notes that from his experienced perspective,  there seems to be no link between leadership and the police on the ground.  the mayor says she doesn’t know why it happened. the chancellor says she doesn’t know why it happened. everyone’s apologizing after the fact. but what about preventing this from the top down?

also on this point, this article “Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC ” talks about the fact that since 9/11, our police forces have been increasingly militarized (through funding from DHS) in order to be able to respond to terrorist threats. this causes a mental shift in how police respond to things.  they have been given different tools, different directives. and now they are being used against peacful American citizens, treating demonstrators like terrorists. as the cop in the video above says, police are people too, and subject to emotions and situations. so they respond according to what they’ve been taught and the tools they’ve been given. as someone said, when you’re dressed in riot gear, everything starts to look like a riot….

All over the country, police switched out their traditional uniforms for Battle Dress Uniforms, dubbed by one retired policeman in the Washington Post as “commando-chic” regalia. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that swaggering around armed to the teeth and dressed like RoboCop might lead some cops to adopt a more militaristic attitude.

Former San Jose chief of police Joseph McNamara raised these alarms as early as 2006 in the wake of the Sean Bell shooting in New York. He pointed out that the effects of the drug war and 9/11 had led to “an emphasis on ‘officer safety’ [where] paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed”.

Likewise, in the name of “officer safety”, the Taser became a common tool in everyday policing, deployed with little knowledge of the effects, and a tendency to Taser first and ask questions later. But over the course of the past decade, the body count grew as it became more and more obvious that tasers were sometimes as deadly as the guns they purported to replace.”

2.  in addition to illustrating how militant our “Keep the Peace” police forces have become with few checks and balances, the Occupy movement has shown that our politicians are much more willing to talk strongly about supporting democratic uprisings in other countries, even sending in troops to fight multi-billion dollar wars for others’ freedom, while keeping their mouths shut on our own domestic affairs.  Sec. Clinton and Pres. Obama have been on TV since Arab Spring supporting democratic uprisings and movements around the world, but mostly silent about our own.

i realize it’s a pre-election year and they don’t want to too-closely align themselves with what some see as a “leftist” movement (which it isn’t, it’s more of a populist movement), but i dare say they’re losing precious votes and active supporters by more or less staying silent on not only the bank situation (slight nods to “protecting the American Dream” don’t count), but taking a stand for 1st Amendment rights and against police brutality issues. the fact that Obama has made no (or so few) public statements about the rights of Americans in the Occupy movement makes me angrier every day that goes by.

[update] rereading this again, i think it sounds really strident, or, propaganda–y, and i am not wanting to be naive in thinking it’s easy to change an entire way of life, and perhaps Obama “expressing solidarity” with the Occupy movement is all that is really pragmatic at this point. let the movement lead itself.

QOTD: Occupy Reality (post #7)

They say that the Occupy Movement has no leadership.
They are wrong.
You are the leaders

The rest of us are your followers.
What you do here – shows what we can do out there.

You are the classroom – we are the students

You are the experiment – we are the results.

You are the proposition – we are the resolution.

If you can sleep under tarps
the rest of us can tell your story to our children at bedtime

If you can resist the cops.
The rest of us can resist the market and the mall

If you can live on shared food
The rest of us can buy and grow local crops

If you can live with no money
The rest of us can start using alternative currencies

If you can stand firm in the streets
The rest of us can stand firm in our foreclosed homes
and stand with our neighbors in theirs.

If you can occupy Zucotti Park
The rest of us can occupy reality.

–Douglas Rushkoff to OWS 11/9/11

#oo / #ows post #6

the news of various occupations keeps tumbling in (#OO forcibly dismantled again yesterday, #OWS forcibly dismantled this morning, but now back), and the longer this goes on the more it seems that the value in the movement is less about getting big banks to change (it’s still unclear to me whether the big banks give two shakes about #OWS) and more about 1. fighting City Hall and showing how much they fail to protect your civil liberties when push comes to shove (particularly for Oakland, where this has been a problem forever) and 2. the revival of participatory democracy. both of these things are important, and despite the hiccups and ugly media, i think no matter how you cut it progress has been made, at least for those who have cared enough to be involved, in whatever way. but now i am just repeating myself.

last night after work we walked from home to City Hall (1.5 miles each way through West Oakland) and took in some of the General Assembly that was happening following the early morning raid/deconstruction of the encampment. as we approached, the streets were calm and people coming from that direction seemed enlivened and animated in a good way.

we arrived as the final proposal for whether to support Community Assemblies was up for vote. one of the Qs during open Q&A, presented by a young woman who self-identified as Mexican, was how #OO was going to avoid this being patronizing to these communities, coming in there and telling them how to participate. the response was that they didn’t mean for it to seem like it was any kind of “weird top-down thing”, where #OO would tell the assemblies what to do, it was just to support the creation of the assemblies, so that people in the various cultural neighborhoods could have their own space to talk about how they, as communities, wanted participate in the movement/solve their own problems, and maybe get support from others.

this sounded like a great idea to me – looking around i noted that the large majority of people at the GA where white. and the GA is in English. which does not represent large parts of Oakland. if communities can get support from #OO to have GAs in their own languages about how to participate in their own ways i thought that would be GREAT, so i voted thumbs up/yes. but apparently some people didn’t like this idea for reasons i don’t understand (the patronizing angle? unclear) and voted No.  it passed with 86% in favor.

and then there were some announcements and the next item on the agenda was to discuss whether or not to try to camp in the plaza again. and even before the discussion groups were established someone got on the mic and said “Why do we need to talk about this more? There are too many intellectual conversations about this stuff. We are all here. Why can’t we just vote? Are we gonna do this or not??” to which there were some cheers. While I was interested in the conversation about whether or not to physically re-occupy with tent city (instead of just meeting there every day, or whatever, to hold public discussions and demonstrations, as the city has said again will be allowed), it was also cold and damp and it seemed that this conversation could take a long time and we decided to walk away. right now, i can’t find anything about what was decided as a group (anyone?)

as i stood there on the lawn – now downtrodden but clean, and watched the large group of people circled in the ampitheatre in front of city hall, discussing things in a peaceful way, i thought how nice it would be if this kept on – public forums on the steps of city hall in a safe, welcoming space. every day, every week, whenever. it seemed so provincial and positively democratic and pleasantly productive to me. i feel like the issues with the camp, and constant fights over it, detract from this vision.

Occupy Oakland, November 14, 2011

(via In Focus, which has 40 amazing photos from recent Occupy activities across the globe)

i still can’t sort  out how i feel about the “right to camp”. to me, i don’t see that as part of the 1st amendment. i just don’t. obviously some people disagree and feel that the physical occupation and the tent city is a) a 1st amendment right and b) important to sustaining the movement and c) important because  more revolutionary things without  too many “intellectual conversations” need to happen otherwise the whole thing just ends up embroiled in bureaucracy like everything else.   it’s been interesting, sorting my feelings on this out amongst my peers, who have proven to be much more radical and revolutionary than i, some of whom are out in the streets in the middle of the night fighting for the right to camp.  i am perhaps  too pacifist. i keep having to remind myself of the Red Ink story.

#ows: the point (#5)

i just spent the afternoon downtown at Occupy Oakland, and while i did not join the ride/march out to close down the Port, that wasn’t why i was there.  i was there to try to figure out how i feel about what is going on, and to gauge the mood of the movement. and i am glad to report that i feel a lot better about the whole thing after today.

I.

so everyone wants to know: what is the point? what are the goals? what are the demands? i think the wide, broadview goal is an end to corruption of our government by allowing capitalist institutions – who are focused soley on making money, whether someone gets hurt in the process or not – to buy our politicians.  so for me, my personal #1 reason for supporting this movement is that i want campaign finance reform and more rules about lobbying.  bank regulation, i think, falls in line under that, eventually, but if not, it is a parallel primary concern.  but most of us don’t understand more specifically how to get that done. we’re not economic experts.  but campaign finance reform is NOT THAT HARD.

anyway, “what do they want?” contains a whole universe of  macro and micro issues ranging from those above to home foreclosures to racial injustice in the prison system to whatever other issues exist in people’s lives to be unpacked and addressed. lots of them.  and so on a grand scale this needs to be thought about less as ISSUES but more about INTERESTS.

so what is the point? the point is that this is America, and for a long time people have been apathetic to the point that they have allowed themselves to be bought.  there was a dream, a haze, that a large majority walked into. the American Dream got sold out.  and i for one am glad that if nothing else, this is a sign that people Woke Up.  i mean, my god, i thought 9/11 was going to wake people up, but somehow it really didn’t. it only entrenched people more into the dream. and so color me happy that people are talking about this and doing things and organizing events for long enough that there has been discernable impact. i admit that i can’t really tell how much of this is going to “stick”, but the longer this goes on, the more chance there is for things to stick. and i guess how far this movement gets remains to be seen, one year from now, in the 2012 election.

II.

that’s on the domestic side. or is it?  no matter how you cut it, the U.S. financial and consumer culture affects the rest of the world, and the greed and corruption here does not end at our borders.  it gets exported. and hopefully these conversations about injustice and inequality here at home lead to some more understanding about how that affects the rest of the world. a friend of a friend recently said:

“ He was hoping that #ows would help people understand how they were part of a global system and those who are facing the cruelty of structural inequality in the US should also recognize how they are a part of a system that reinforces inequality globally.  He was hoping that this would be a wakeup call not just about privilege in America, but American privilege writ large.”

my highest hope in my heart of hearts is that this is what eventually happens.

III.

recently, this article went around:  http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/10/28/attention-protestors-youre-probably-part-of-the-1-.aspx

 ”In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.”

jist:  all you Occupiers are part of the 1% globally.  you’re not starving in the Sudan or living under a facist regime.  the fact that you can even PROTEST means you have nothing to protest about.  so shut up!

yes, we are blessed in America, but that does not mean that we should continue to allow corruption under the flag of capitalism? absolutely not, because, as noted above, it’s not just about us – it does have a global impact. so to those who like to say that the white americans with iPhones can’t/have nothing to protest…..i understand that perspective – that from a certain viewpoint this whole thing is just a flaunt of entitlement - there is a lot of that feeling in Oakland, that protesting is something that only the rich(er) white people do – but IMO, if you flip that around, if rich(er) white people are the only ones willing and able (able to protest in the streets, able to get arrested without dire consequence, able to not be at work, able to leave their families for hours/days), then THEY ARE THE ONES WHO SHOULD.

IV.

yes, the Colbert Report segment on OWS was really funny.  yes, the young people with their ideas are amusing and yes, their systems are very odd and maybe not the most effective.  i’m not into physical occupation myself, and the GAs are way too tedious for my temperament. BUT that does not mean i think THEY should quit, and in fact i am SUPER EXCITED that so many people who have never participated in consensus-based community organizing are now getting to have that experience and i do believe that if nothing else, that is going to shift a lot of people’s lives.

V.

so what is the point?  the point is that people are thinking about and doing things, and whether you think that we have the RIGHT or PRIVILEGE, to me it is more important that people are OUT THERE exercising those rights and privileges than what their specific demands are. the demands will eventually evolve. but right now, the most important thing is for people to pay attention, stay awake, and contribute however, whenever, wherever works for them so that the overarching INTEREST of getting corruption out of our political and financial systems happens before America gets deeper into shit. THAT is the point.