Arun Gupta - How to Rebrand Occupy

By all measures the Occupy movement is a powerful brand. It has thousands of spin-offs such as occupy our homes, occupy money, occupy the hood, occupy gender equality and occupy the food system. It has powerful name recognition, snagging “word of the year” honors in 2011. And now ardent supporters are manning the ramparts to defend its integrity.

Adbusters, the culture-jamming magazine that helped spark Occupy Wall Street, is accusing unions and liberal groups clustered under the banner of the 99% Spring of tarnishing Occupy’s sterling name. Launched in February by groups like Greenpeace, the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream, the 99% Spring announced it would train 100,000 people in April for “sustained nonviolent direct action” against targets like Verizon, Bank of America and Walmart.

These groups, bellowed Adbusters in an online missive “Battle for the Soul of Occupy,” are “the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades.” Adbusters fingered MoveOn as one of the primary saboteurs of Occupy, and linked to an article in Counterpunch that claims the 99% Spring “is primarily about co-option and division, about sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down its radical politics, and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 ‘good protesters’ to overshadow the ‘bad protesters.’”

Read More:

http://www.progressive.org/rebrand_occupy.html

Occupy Wall Street May Day Protests Begin With Dancing Cops, Blocked Traffic, Barricades

Gothamist's Christopher Robbins is currently out reporting on the various demonstrations, marches, and direct actions today—for up-to-the-second May Day reportage, follow along with him on Twitter and the #M1NYC hastag. A morning rally at Bryant Park turned into a march through midtown (mostly on the sidewalk) and Times square, with an estimated 350-400 activists converging outside the Chase bank on Sixth Avenue and 50th Street. Here are some updates from the across the field, from Robbins and others:

Read More:

http://gothamist.com/2012/05/01/occupy_wall_street_may_day_protests.php#photo-1

‘Media for the 99 Percent’ Challenges Corporate Media with Joint Coverage of May Day Protests Nationwide

This year, International and Immigrant Workers’ Day, May Day, will usher in a spring of protests fueled by the rise in anti-immigrant legislation and enforcement, a lopsided economic recovery that favors the few, and a reemergent Occupy movement poised to challenge corporate power.  

If past coverage is any indication, corporate media will not tell the May Day story accurately or with depth or analysis. That’s why more than 25 independent media outlets belonging to The Media Consortium are collaborating to provide coordinated, national coverage of May Day events from around the country.
 
Calling themselves “Media for the 99 Percent” (www.mediaforthe99percent.com), these diverse outlets will offer a live TV and streaming broadcast, an interactive map, breaking news reporting, and coordinated social media coverage across their sites, reaching a combined audience of more than 50 million Americans.

“With this May Day collaboration, independent media will show that live national coverage can reflect the breadth, diversity, and complexity of the American people,” says Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, executive director of The Media Consortium.

Read More:

http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2012/04/26/%E2%80%98media-for-the-99-percent%E2%80%99-challenges-corporate-media-with-joint-coverage-of-may-day-protests-nationwide/

Danny Schechter - Are You “Spring Trained” For May Day?

Listen to Danny on "The News Dissector" every Friday at 1pm (Eastern Time)

Our Own Stand Your Ground Message, 1894

...Let the winds lift your banners from far lands 
With a message of strife and of hope:
Raise the Maypole aloft with its garlands 
That gathers your cause in its scope....
...Stand fast, then, Oh Workers, your ground,
Together pull, strong and united:
Link your hands like a chain the world round, 
If you will that your hopes be requited.
When the World's Workers, sisters and brothers, 
Shall build, in the new coming years,
A lair house of life -- not for others, 
For the earth and its fullness is theirs.
Walter Crane, The Workers' Maypole, 1894

New York, New York: When you hear the term "spring training," most of us think baseball, but, this year, it has a different context because the Occupy Movement has appropriated the term to describe educating and preparing activists for non-violent nationwide protests and a hoped for general strike slated for May Day 2012 this May 1.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-You--Spring-Trained--by-Danny-Schechter-120423-2.html

Slavoj Žižek - Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done... Next?

What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the center, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? 

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

"They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time."

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the "occupied" places. 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.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next

Danny Schechter - Here We Go Again in The Battle for The “Soul” of Occupy; Fear of Co-optation Leads to Self-Destructive Polemics

Perhaps my problem is that I live in too many worlds at the same time, while many political eras live in me. That may be why I responded so negatively to a recent polemic wrapped up in a poetic communique from AdBusters, the culture jammers in Canada, who do so much good work (and often so creatively) battling the consumption virus promoted by big corporations many of us have grown to despise.

I respect their magazine and marvel at the impact they have had in helping to stir Occupy Wall Street into existence. They clearly feel a sense of ownership in the movement and act not just as the midwife that promoted the occupy idea, but as the guardians of their version of the movement’s essence, as if they own the copyright and have to defend it aggressively in the court of public opinion.

Their latest communiqué, directed to “ jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,” is offered up almost like a new commandment from the mountaintop of political purity,warning one and all “that a new enemy is in their midst that is … threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation.”

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Will-a-Fight-To-The-Finis-by-Danny-Schechter-120414-894.html

Brian Terrell - Ignoring Empire: King, Gandhi, and the 99% Spring

‘99% Spring’ has been declared. ‘This spring, we will … rise up in the tradition of our forefathers and foremothers. We will not be complicit with the suffering in our families for another year. We will prepare ourselves for sustained non-violent direct action.’ The organizers of this effort list the many economic injustices and perils faced by America today and propose to train 100,000 activists ‘to join together in the work of reclaiming our country’ with methods of nonviolent direct action ‘We will take non-violent action in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi to forge a new destiny one block, one neighborhood, one city, one state at a time.’

99% Spring will address such crucial issues as shrinking pension funds, skyrocketing student loans, foreclosures, budget cuts to schools, a poisoned environment, diminished collective bargaining rights, all ‘a result of rampant greed—the deliberate manpulation of our democracy and our economy by a tiny minority in the 1%, by those who amass ever more wealth and power at our expense.’ Some other critical matters, however, will not be addressed by 99% Spring.

Read More:

http://www.protestation.org/blog/ignoring-empire-king-gandhi-and-the-99-spring/

Dekker Dreyer - Do We Need a Stock Exchange?

Occupy Wall Street is now back where the movement began, and there are even more society-shaping questions in the wild then last October. Since the housing market crash decimated our country we’ve been examining our economy from the grassroots level up to far-reaching government initiatives. We’ve seen widespread protests against dubious banks and the financial instruments which have allowed them to plunder the national wealth. But one elephant is still sitting in the middle of the room... no few have been questioning if the very logic of a stock exchange is unhealthy in the long run. Conventional wisdom says stock markets are the best way in history to generate wealth. Some maintain that this wealth does not get redistributed to the public in any significant manner. Arguments against stock markets include the cost of entry and the complexity of the rules governing transactions.

To understand the dysfunctions of the stock market, we must understand what a stock market is. As early as the 1600s the concept of shared corporate interest was cemented in modern Western civilization when the dutch offered ownership stakes in the Dutch East India Company. The basis for collective ownership, however, may have been introduced to Europe as early as the Bronze Age. Sharing risk and resources among many stakeholders is a natural infusion of the most primitive principles of human cooperation. The concept of a publicly participatory stock market, however, is a much more recent invention.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/do-we-need-stock-exchange-1332680909

Danny Schechter - Is ‘Going Left’ Right for OWS?

For years, in the last century, when I was in school and learning about the early days of journalism, we were taught that author Horace Greeley who founded the New York Herald Tribune, was famous for saying, “Go West Young Man And Grow Up With The Country.”

One problem, as we learned recently, he didn’t coin the phrase but only popularized it. (Another media mistake involving a top dog in the media!) Indiana newspaper writer John Soule actually gave the advice in 1851, and it would serve as the mantra for 19th century “action” in the form of Westward migration.

These days, the men and women who won their struggle stripes in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements have a new mantra for action. Some who recently appeared at New York’s annual Left Forum, were sharing it with younger people, “Go Left.”

Read More:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/21/is-going-left-right-for-ows/

Danny Schechter - “Go Left:” The Season Has Changed -- Is It Time for an OWS “Spring Offensive?”

For years, in the last century, when I was in School and learning about the early days of journalism, we were taught that author Horace Greeley who founded the New York Herald Tribune, was famous for saying, “Go West Young Man And Grow Up With The Country.”

One problem, as we learned recently, he didn’t coin the phrase but only popularized it. (Another media mistake involving a top dog in the media!) Indiana newspaper writer John Soule actually gave the advice in 1851 and, it would serve as the mantra for 19th century “action” in the form of Westward migration. 

Read More:

http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/50-danny/964-go-left-the-season-has-changed-is-it-time-for-an-ows-spring-offensive