Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNEXnbfRtRg>
  

    
I like your four points, Lisa.  Particularly #4.  An employer should not 
be able to bind an employee to give up most of their day without paying 
them a living wage.   A point that needs to be a big part of the 
conversation.
  

    
Perhaps the best wisdom to exercise to prevent fragmentation of the
OWS activity is not to try to see it through any lens including the
hippie movement. I would suspect, as I was only seven in 1968, that
there were many attempts to "frame" the hippie movement and that these
attempts to view it were resoundingly rejected.
 
 I believe that there has been music pulsing in this country for some
time that has been voicing anger about economic disparity and
inequality and I think one voice has been rap.
 
The best thing for the survival of the conversation is to help it
remain a gathering because one can't turn a gathering into a commodity.
I think the danger of the press domesticating a protest "astroturfing
it" is not today's danger. The way this country tames anything anymore
is to make a commodity out of it giving us something to buy and sell.
Sure there are going to be people like the woman mentioned who is going
like a consumer to acquire-to get in on the action, but if the
gathering is a gathering then there will be real conversation and she
will either walk happily away emptyhanded and ready to foster change or
she will look for a way to sell the story of her experience. 
  

    
Speaking as someone a bit older than you, who was arguably a young
hippie (I was in High School, on the one hand, but on the other we went
skinny dipping with our teachers), I think the "hippie" frame is
utterly irrelevant to OWS.  Young people in 2011 are almost as distant
from hippies as we were from Flappers.  And yeah, at the time, older
people who still remembered occasionally drew parallels between us and
the "wild youth" of the 1920s, but it didn't really mean much and it
didn't carry any force.
  

    
Almost a good analogy. My mom was born in '32 and the Flapper ethos
apparently was still fashionable.

No, these kids aren't hippies. They are the first generation in the
U.S. to get a quality education and have nothing supportable to do with
it. Some of them have grandparents who were possibly hippies though.

Which is also overwhelmingly the case in places like Egypt and
Lebanon. Maybe Israel too. 

And they communicate. The upheaval in Egypt was led by a bunch of
college grads and students who know how to communicate.
  

    
If we start hearing about Democratic politicians "pandering" to the
Occupy movement in order to win votes (like happened with the Tea Party
movement for the Republicans) then I'll consider it a win. I have
trouble imagining a better-case scenario than that.
  

    
George Lakoff on framing the OWS message:

<http://www.countercurrents.org/lakoff211011.htm>

(Boldly stolen with thanks from David Gans, <tnf>).
  

    
That article is full of interesting insight.  This part is very
interesting:   

>This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge,
by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all
things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral
in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as
they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in
acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean
elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the
99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the
positive and the moral.
>
> Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual
responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual
and social responsibility.
>
  

    

> (Boldly stolen with thanks from David Gans, <tnf>).

I got it in the <politics.> conference here.
  

    
The 147 Companies that control everything:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-ne
twork-that-runs-the-world.html
  

    
Are the Naked Guys here? I went by the Occupy SF at the Fed here in
San Francisco, the other day, and there a few of them were --
pantsless, heavily tanned, serenely exposed -- I thought to myself how
this movement, like those I remember from the 1960s & 70s, was becoming
a little diffuse. 

I've been reading about the ancient Greeks: their internal politics
was all about land distribution, and how the imbalances of
maldistribution caused perennial troubles for them and inevitable awful
revolutions.

So when I see charts, now, of the Gini coefficient of US wealth
distribution and how that has changed over time -- it has gone steadily
up, since the 1960s, indicating that the distance between our rich and
our poor has been steadily increasing -- Wikipedia offers some good
resources on this -- that worries me. And I think of the old Greeks,
Cleisthenes & Peisistratus & Themistocles & their revolutions --
recently maybe of the new Greeks, too. Our Silent Majority needs to
protect our Poor, I hope they don't just get reactionary this time.

The drama of the Occupy movement is the contrast, between their
appearance and what they are saying and the Wall Street & Downtown SF
plutocratic environments where they say it. The incomes of some of the
passers-by and some of the demonstrators are 100x different: that gap
needs lessening -- not closing entirely, maybe, but narrowing.
  

    
Another way of looking at it: Time (Oct 31, p. 16) says the average
yearly income difference, US top 1% versus the entire group composing
The Rest, the 99%, is $1,530,773 vs. $54,792. 

That's saying the top US 1%, on-average, make 30+ times more than the
average for _everybody_ else, not just The Poor. Gated communities and
urban warfare, here we come -- Let'em eat cake -- the New Aristos --
Blade Runner. I'm voting Democratic, again, but I'm wondering whether
even the Democrats can figure out how to close that wide & widening
gap. Trouble's coming, if we don't.
  

    
cross-posted from politics:

why not start your morning with the occupied wall street journal?

http://occupiedmedia.org/
  

    
Here's a clip from Oakland that needs to make the MSM:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZLyUK0t0vQ
  

    
Sheesh.  
  

    
It made it to MSNBC...
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45030431/ns/us_news-life/>
  

    
Thank you for that link to George Lakoff's piece...

I also agree that violence will allow the Occupy movement to be
dismissed. Non-violence in response to the police--how, given that
anyone can enter, can that be preserved? Yet it must be preserved.

Occupying the poetry blog-o-sphere, this piece by a former student of
mine, with the voices of two more senior poets included in it:

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/10/occupying-
providence-with-alfred-corn-and-doug-anderson-by-leslie-mcgrath.html

I especially love her sign, suggesting that the 1% "Occupy Empathy."
  

    
8 rules for a movement without rules

http://pursuitofhappinessyoga.com/2011/10/04/we-occupy-america-the-eight-rules
-by-cynthiaboaz/
  

    

Indeed, civility is the ne plus ultra of the Occupy movement if it wants 
to survive and effectuate change.  Empathy, too.  Nice.
  

    
Especially if they are confronting the plutocrats over the control of
definitions.  Ideal civility is the standard by which everything gets
judged.  To those of us whose immediate ancestors didn't move very
often in "polite" society the assimilation process was gruesome with
constant reminders to "mind your manners."  Of course the the degree to
which the masters of society actually followed the rules themselves
varied widely.  Form is everything to them.  My bugaboo, which I trace
to that assimilation process, is when someone uses politeness to be
impolite. 
  

    
Dramatic and interesting on the street broadcast from occupy SF:

 http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sflpov

Also -- remarkable info from Google that is being tweeted around as
being related to Occupy Oakland:
     
   "We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to
remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove.
Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement
agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement
officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have
categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

It's on their transparency page.  I did not know they had a
transparency page. 


<http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/US/?p=2011-06>


    
  

    
I think what we are seeing is something quite new...A global Digital
Salon, if you will. Right now the structure is modeled as a leaderless
network run by consensus. Committees and subgroups seem to be trying to
tap into the 'ideas' - the zeitgeist - of our times, and bring them to
the 'whole' for a consensus vote. At the same time, local,resilient
communities, to borrow from John Robb and Global Guerillas, are forming
to bring action from the ground up.

This is a new type of networking structure. It's a global conversation
that will take time. And time is one of the few resources the 99% have
plenty of; along with easily accessible digital tools and literacies
and a rapidly growing Smart Mob of intelligent men and women. 

So, for the moment, the focus is on the conversations...local groups
will determine what actions are appropriate for their communities.
Eventually some kind of Declaration of Interdependence will surface --
whether it is Global or national remains to be seen - A Digital Bill of
Rights? Already, Occupy America has scheduled a big pow wow in
Philadelphia for July 4, 2012. Very fitting.

The advantage of remaining leaderless and functioning by consensus is
that it prevents the movement from being hijacked by all the various
groups running their own agendas. If your e-mail box is like mine, you
are getting swamped by everyone trying to marry their ideas to the
'movement', immediately followed by a request for money. Pathetic!

Inclusiveness is essential. Let all come to the table. Let the
conversation continue. Leaders will emerge in time.
  

    
important to note that the report is for the first half of 2011 -
can't wait to see the second half :)
  

    
One other thought. While Doug Rushkoff and many others are talking
about a global raising of consciousness and we make the transition to a
digital, globalized world, there may be a tendency to mistake what's
occurring as some kind of unified global oneness. What we are going to
see over the next 30 years or so is 'fracturization' (is that a word?),
not globalization. New paradigms are necessary in every area -
political, economic, the commons (air, water, climate, energy,etc.) and
this will all be modeled from the ground ups, not the top down. So,
while it is great to share, tips, tools, and tricks all across the Web,
where it's all going to happen is in our local neighborhoods, towns,
and cities.

Our focus needs to be on connecting with those physically around us,
while digitally using all the networks and tools available as
resources.
  

    
And as a co-host here, we should also remind readers off the Well that
they can add to this conversation (and I hope they do) by e-mailing us
at inkwell at well dot com, and one of us will post your question or
whatever posthaste.