Bruce Levine - Americans Are Disempowered -- Can the OWS Uprising Shake Us Out of Our Depression?

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet

Posted on October 26, 2011, Printed on October 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152873/400_rise_in_anti-depressant_pill_use%3A_americans_are_disempowered_--_can_the_ows_uprising_shake_us_out_of_our_depression

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans ages 18-44. Among Americans 12 years and older, 11 percent were taking antidepressants by 2005-2008 (the most recently reported study period), and 23 percent of women ages 40–59 years were taking them.

Why has U.S. antidepressant use skyrocketed? Are the symptoms of what is commonly called depression—helplessness, hopelessness, and immobilization—always evidence of a medical condition? Or is it time to repoliticize a great deal of our despair, and reconsider the old-fashioned antidepressant of political activism?

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Slavoj Zizek - Occupy First. Demands Come Later

Published on Saturday, October 29, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton

Critics say the Occupy cause is nebulous. Protesters will need to address what comes next – but beware a debate on enemy turf

by Slavoj Žižek

What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: "They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time."

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

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Jeff Madrick - The Occupy Wall Street Victory: Filling a Hole in Democracy

Thursday 27 October 2011

by: Jeff Madrick, TripleCrisis | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-street-victory-filling-hole-democracy/1319730391

The general scorn for the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS), now spread to hundreds of cities in the U.S., reveals a lot about Wall Street, the press, and the state of economics. I was invited to speak there early in their campaign and found the people eager to learn, courteous and hell-bent for justice, not revenge.

The scorn has subsided somewhat as the movement grows and has withstood the threat of police and Michael Bloomberg’s demand that they should clear out of the park they occupy because the owners of the park wanted to clean it. It is called Zuccotti Park because it is privately owned by the Zuccotti family with the proviso that it is made available to the public at all times. Now it has become available to all America, and arguably all the world.

The unions joined in and this week, OWS has yet another clear victory. President Obama will announce some kind of student loan relief plan [4]. He is also proposing a more aggressive mortgage refinancing [5] scheme for under-water homeowners. This too may be partly the result of OWS.

The attempt to minimize OWS, or at the least deride them, goes on, however. The press was initially very skeptical and is now more respectful. Still, they wonder what these (mostly) young people really want. The Right calls them a mob [6] so as to distinguish them, I suppose, from gun-toting Tea Partiers. The most reprehensible bit of demagoguery I saw was an ad on a major TV network posted by an international issues lobbying organization with shots of anti-Semitic signs. There are in fact almost no such signs at Zuccotti.

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Ralph Nader - Occupy Wall Street on the Move

Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/27-7

by Ralph Nader

The question confronting the Occupy Wall Street encampments and their offshoots in scores of cities and towns around the country is quo vadis? Where is it going?

This decentralized, leaderless civic initiative has attracted the persistent attention of the mass media in the past five weeks. Television cameras from all over the world are parked down at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street.

But the mass media is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed regularly. Apart from the daily pressures of making sure the encampments are clean, that food and shelter are available, that relations with the police are quiet, that provocateurs are identified; the campers must anticipate possible police crackdowns, such as that which has just occurred in Oakland, and find ways to rebound.

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Linh Dinh - Common Dreaming

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Common-Dreaming-by-Linh-Dinh-111026-306.html

October 26, 2011

By Linh Dinh

A protest sign in NYC, "FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE I FEEL AT HOME." Home is Liberty Park, a 33,000-square-foot plot where hundreds have camped nightly for over a month. During the day, they march together, their bodies merged into a common thrust, while at night, theylie together. Some are barely covered, while others are entirely wrapped, like collateral damage of yet another stupid war. Be careful or you'll step on an arm, leg or even head.

In a country of walls and locked doors, where even infants have private domains, there are no barriers here. With everyone exposed, and no TV to distract, conversation comes more readily. Here, no canned music slops over each dialogue or interior monologue. Here, all crazy,percussive rhythms and melodies must be generated by living muscles and breaths. Here, all faces are real all the time, with none beamed from uptown or across the land mass.

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Ravi Batra - The Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Coming Demise of Crony Capitalism

Tuesday 11 October 2011

by: Ravi Batra, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-street-movement-and-coming-demise-crony-capitalism/1318341474

In 1978, to the laughter of many and the derision of a few, I wrote a book called, "The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism," which predicted that Soviet communism would vanish around the end of the century, whereas crony or monopoly capitalism would create the worst-ever concentration of wealth in its history, so much so that a social revolution would start its demise around 2010. My forecasts derived from the law of social cycles, which was pioneered by my late teacher and mentor, P. R. Sarkar. Lo and behold, Soviet communism disappeared right before your eyes during the 1990s, and now, just a year after 2010, middle-class America, spearheaded by a movement increasingly known as "Occupy Wall Street (OWS)," is beginning to revolt against Wall Street greed and crony capitalism. Will the revolt succeed? It surely will, because the pre-conditions for its success are all there.

The first question is this: Why does rising wealth disparity create poverty? My answer is that it causes overproduction and hence unemployment and destitution. It is all a matter of supply and demand. Inequality goes up when official economic policy does not allow wages to catch up with the ever-growing labor productivity, so that profits soar and rising productivity increasingly raises the incomes and bonuses of business executives. I have detailed this process in an earlier article [3]. Then money sits idly in the vaults of bankers and big-business CEOs and restrains consumer demand, leading to overproduction and hence layoffs. The toxic combination of mounting layoffs and absent job creation raises poverty, which, according to official figures, is now the highest in 50 years.

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Jim Lobe - New Inequality Data Likely to Boost "Occupy" Movement

Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/27-6

by Jim Lobe

A major study on income equality by a non-partisan government agency is likely to boost the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, whose standing with the general public appears on the rise, according to a new poll.

The study, released here Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), found that the average after-tax real income of the top one percent of the nation's households grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 - about seven times greater than the increase in income by the remaining 99 percent over the same period.

And the income of the poorest 20 percent of the nation's earners grew by a mere 18 percent during that period, according to the report, which had been requested by the senior Democratic and Republican members on the Senator Finance Committee several years ago. That was less than one percent per year.

The report – the latest in a series of private or non-profit studies that confirm a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality over the past generation – came as a new New York Times/CBS News poll showed stronger-than-expected popular support for the "Occupy" movement, which has spread to dozens of cities across the country.

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Nick Turse - Cops Blame Occupy Wall Street for Surge in Shootings, City Wastes Money Policing Non-Violent Protesters

By Nick Turse, AlterNet

Posted on October 27, 2011, Printed on October 27, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152890/cops_blame_occupy_wall_street_for_surge_in_shootings%2C_city_wastes_money_policing_non-violent_protesters

The Occupy Wall Street protests and the new mini-society that has formed in Liberty Square in Lower Manhattan, continues to tax the city’s budget.  Recently, it has also sparked howls of protest from top police commanders who blame OWS activists for an increase in gun violence across New York City.

High-ranking police commanders told the New York Post that they attributed a surge in gun violence – the number of people shot in the city spiked 28 percent in the last month – to the fact that special NYPD task forces have been diverted to the protests.  “They are always used when there are spikes in crime as a quick fix. But instead of being sent to Jamaica, Brownsville and the South Bronx, they are in Wall Street,” an unnamed top cop told the Post.

As reported by AlterNet last week, the New York City Police Department has already spent more than $3.4 million on overtime hours as a result of the Occupy Wall Street protests.  Over the same span of time, the NYPD has arrested around 1,000 people associated with the movement.   

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Zoltan Grossman - Rise of the Planet of the People

Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/27-3

by Zoltan Grossman

I first heard about Occupy Wall Street in August, when I visited my former home of Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after protesting in the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda against 13% pay cuts for state workers, and being impressed with the energy and creativity of the protesters, I attended the Democracy Convention nearby. Some of the speakers at the Convention were inspiring, but others were repeating the same vague rhetoric and tactics I’ve heard for many decades.

As I was doodling, a young speaker mentioned that Wall Street would be occupied starting September 17 (Constitution Day), and I sat bolt upright. It took only about two seconds to understand the rationale of Occupy Wall Street, so most Americans would be able to grasp its message without complex explanations. Americans have historically put on great marches and uprisings, but have rarely stayed in one place to make their demands. OWS seemed to draw from the examples of past occupations in Manila, Beijing, Belgrade, Kiev and Cairo.

Above all, spreading occupations around the country and world would mobilize our home communities, rather than expecting us to spend time and money to travel to (and be repressed in) a central place. We could educate our own local towns and cities, and they could show support by joining and bringing food and supplies. So far, I have been just as impressed by the Occupy movement back in my current home of Olympia, Washington, as I have been of the mass protests back home in Wisconsin.

The 10-Year Delay

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Chip Ward - Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick

Posted on October 27, 2011, Printed on October 27, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/

Nature Is the 99%, Too 
By Chip Ward

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park?  What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip.  In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.

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