OCCUPY SANDBOX

"@susie_c: Two #D12 confirmations: the valiant return of the sound truck, & the valiant return of Scott Olsen, on the sound truck. 3pm."

!!

also this

http://www.portlandoccupier.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pawns-take-king1.jpg

In re: the Luntz thing from a coupla weeks ago, George Lakoff wrote a thing saying not to fall into his trap:

http://www.truth-out.org/words-dont-work/1323270276

i just wrote a rhyming press release for an action outside a GOP xmas party in the style of "twas the night before christmas" that rhymed "republican staff" with "wall st gold calf."

what is my life.

based on the number of "where do we go from here" thinkpieces showing up online and being written by nutjobs & sent to our ~official~ accounts (including a whole series sent by a guy which begin FOCUS, OCCUPY, ITS TIME TO FOCUS) i feel like we're entering the "but have you ever ~really~ looked at the back of a dollar bill" phase

CNN Headline News coverage of Occupy Ports is all why do they protest against longshoremen, who they say they support"

christ

and they're not interviewing any of the wildcat ILWU guys, i suspect, who were behind it all the way.

Support the values of the strike and all, but it's going to make for some difficult conversations w our inventory people in a few weeks.

Well, "difficult" in the sense that I'll have to not be too chipper about delivering the news that books are late.

ha

i mean i don't mean to uncomplicated a complicated situation

there were a lot of competing issues here and lots of union people i know in dc and through twitter were not behind the blockade in principle--i wasn't even behind it all the way--but in practice as a one-day shutdown i think it was successful and counts as a victory.

I guess I have to read more to understand this victory

yeah is there a definitive 'why occupy ports' article

http://www.alternet.org/economy/153393/how_goldman_sachs_and_other_companies_exploit_port_truck_drivers_?page=entire

a few of my boys are on day 5 of a hunger strike for full dc congressional representation & budget autonomy for the district.

they just met with darrel issa's staff & had a productive convo--then issa, presumably having prewritten some damage control imagining he would look bad for not meeting with them, put out a press release demanding to know why the dept of the interior is letting us camp illegally on "stimulus-funded grass."

boehner's staff wouldn't send out anybody but a low-level press secretary who ran away as fast as she could & didn't answer any reporters questions.

eleanor holmes norton, my goddamn hero, just intervened and said she would facilitate a meeting between boehner's people and my boys.

might be time to get yr credit cards out (if u have them):

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/donations_to_occupy_wall_street_plummet/singleton/

also, Duarte Square rally/reoccupation this afternoon at Canal St & 6th (Lou Reed lol & Titus Andronicus):

http://occupywallst.org/article/d17-reoccupy-schedule/

Near half a million still in the bank, and they're sending money to other occupations--I think they're OK for the moment. Local occs could probably do more with the money; some of them have seen malfeasance that left them nearly broke. Not that DC has heard anything about that.

how yr boys hunger strikes hoos?

Sometimes I think Lou Reed has been declared mentally incompetent and has some power of attorney person with instructions to just bring him to whatever seems relevant.

Sam had an editorial published in the Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-hunger-strike-for-democracy-in-dc/2011/12/12/gIQAEsFzvO_story.html?wprss=rss_localopinions

my boy adrian got arrested for blocking one of the doors to congress with his wheelchair
http://s1-01.twitpicproxy.com/photos/large/473815626.jpg

k bowed out at hour 177 because medical was seeing unexpected complications.

nice piece on them here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/occupy-dc-hunger-strikers-frail-but-undaunted/2011/12/15/gIQAkWX8yO_story.html

Meanwhile, in Portland, the World's Smallest Park has been occupied:

http://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/388420_2617863377236_1574679480_2383035_286234221_n.jpg

what they're calling "the portland snake"

The Portland Occupation stumbled upon a tactical innovation regarding occupying public spaces. This evolution in tactics was spontaneous, and went unreported in the media...

Now, to move on to the actual application of these tactical principles (that evolved by accident rather than conscious thought), we can take the example of Shemanski park on the 3rd. We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking traffic the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us...

After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that we’d been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to traffic (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to traffic)...

hey lookit i'm in greek

http://www.megatv.com/warzone/pages.asp?catid=24530&subid=2&pubid=28189187

this article about archiving OWS is great (and namechecks my MA program!):

http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/the-struggle-for-the-occupy-wall-street-archives

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/21/tom-clancy-game-casts-99-percent-as-domestic-terrorists/

^^ new rainbow 6 game has villains that sound an awful lot like a weaponized ows

“This all started when you became bigger than the governments,” a narrator’s voice explains. “And governments became bigger than the people. That’s how the land of the free became the kingdom of the few — a few like you, Mr. Walsh. It’s time for a new balance of power. You may not answer to the government, but you will answer to us.”

xp hey thank you so much for that archive article link

fwiw i've been known to play some real dogshit in terms of FPSes from time to time, and even i have no clue who still plays rainbow six games

lol

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/re-progressive-taxation-the-people-get-it/

can I get a book rec for anarchist thought inline with occupy and horizontal democracy? or just anarchism generally? thanks bunches.

well kinda depends what direction you wanna come at it from--

mcglaughlin's "anarchism and authority" is a good one on broader principle stuff, david graeber's "direct action: an ethnography" is good on how those principles have been put into practice by the anti-globalization movement.

those are both great but a touch dry, though. the "spirit" of anarcho organizing & ows comes through really well in Crimethinc's book "Days of War, Nights of Love," i think. also their newest book "work" is actually a kinda sophisticated analysis of capitalism from a """"postmodern""" anarcho perspective, which i didn't really expect from them.

Proudhon?

haha i was just about to type "property is theft"

i was just leaning towards more recent stuff--i read a lot of proudhon & kropotkin in college and as "timeless" as it was it was also frustrating that these were mostly dudes that had died a century ago. took crimethinc to made me realize people were still talking about this stuff.

Gotcha — I'm only now getting into Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin et al so I'm no expert. All this is pretty much extra-curricular so I don't have as much time to spend on it as I would like.

btw some friends of mine in a dc art group put up this lil "guerilla gallery" in the park today, all pieces about economic inequality

https://p.twimg.com/Ah7qcTaCMAAdz1W.jpg

park police said we can't have it there "because this is where you have GAs." not kidding.

they moved it to a diff lawn, all copasetic.

plan is for companion "galleries" to pop up throughout the city.

arrests in Iowa at Dems', Paul's HQs:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/12-arrested-at-occupy-the-caucus-protest/

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2103332,00.html

my homie drew is from iowa and he travelled back there for #occupycaucus, keep waiting to see a photo of him getting dragged off

so

#J17 is a thing that is happening and i'm one of a few spearheads

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2011/12/occupy-dc-planning-major-january-demonstration/2039451

ilx shld be more like facebook because i want to 'like' every hoos update on this thread.

xposts those seem like legit recommendations. thanks you. gonna get on that for the new year.

don't know if this is inline with occupy (and its the first time i've heard of it): lawrence lessig and mark meckler held a 'conference on the constitutional convention' back in sept. i'm convinced at this point that an article 5 convention might be the only viable avenue for occupy to get its needs met. otherwise it seems occupy will be relegated to local skirmishes with little effect at the federal level. not that local activism isn't equally noble.

the url is unfortunate: http://conconcon.org/

http://occupycapitolhill.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/crearresistir-014.png?w=640&h=1024

media team is at the bar for new years and my man says "dude, search twitter for zuccotti park right now"

"what am i looking for"

"just do it"

*thumbtyping*

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.999411.1325401567!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_485/image.jpg

"..................oh. fuck."

happy fucking new year