Occupying Social Media

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is embedded within and traverses the technologies of the 21st century. Much of what OWS protests stems from a social and economic environment facilitated by new technologies. Wall Street, the physical and metaphorical site of the US stock markets, is a global interconnected enterprise – a place where, as one sociologist puts it, vast sums of money are wired around the world in seconds “at the click of a mouse” (Giddens 2000).

The Poverty of Public Art

Across America for the past quarter century or more, municipalities, counties, states, public institutions, and universities have embraced the concept of “1% for Art” and have taken it upon themselves in the spirit of humanism and civic responsibility to become the sponsors of publicly funded visual art. On campuses, street corners and barrio walls, on billboards, bus stops and freeway abutments, in derelict downtowns in desperate need of revitalization, public artworks have sprung up like cultural mildew.

Occupying The New York Times?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has the tree fallen? This is an age-old philosophical question. A similar question might have been asked of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: if a collective of demonstrators inhabit a public park to protest social and economic inequality, and no mainstream news media report it, has it happened?

Zuccotti Park Talk

Here in the church they call Wall Street, money is worshipped as bankers drink the earth’s blood and feast on her flesh. War machines of epic proportions are financed – and sent out to kill, maim, and destroy millions of people from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. Every day that bankers gather, human lives are bought and sold in the name of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and futures. They steal our children’s and grandchildren’s futures as they profit from their clever machinations.

OWS and the Class/Race Dynamic

The wintering over of the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) portends an American Spring like what has come to be called the Arab Spring. An enlarged and ennobled struggle between pernicious elements of vulture, predatory, and global capitalism and solidarities of workers, the victimized, and poor people is now such a realizable possibility that the US government is forced to scramble to restore the illusion of a sustainable economy before the weather warms and people’s hopes for equity return them to the streets.

Presentation at Occupy Wall Street*

I am honored to be here this evening.
Because you are the light of the world.
I’m not saying this to flatter,
But because we have to understand it deeply.
Your genius has been to seize upon the emerging hopes of humanity
And give them a form of realization.
Now you are on the threshold of a world-transforming process,
And you must decide whether to cross over it.

Their Crisis and Our Response*

Howard Zinn would have loved to see you all here today, and to have been part of this historical moment. He believed that we should each do the right thing regardless of whether or not it has a visible impact. When a positive impact materializes, it then comes as a pleasant surprise. But it wouldn’t happen without all the seemingly thankless work that came before.

What the Occupy movement recognizes is that the problems facing the 99% are systemic in nature. They won’t be cured by putting one or other of the two capitalist parties in office.

Occupy Wall Street and the Strikes of 1933-34

It has been a common criticism of President Obama that he raised hopes for fundamental change only to compromise too readily with conservative forces. Since he took office amid the financial crisis that began in 2008, banks and corporations have received massive bailouts while programs for homeowners and the unemployed have seemed to fall short. Underlying these criticisms is perhaps an implicit comparison to the New Deal of the 1930s, in which Franklin Roosevelt adopted programs of mass employment in response to the Great Depression.

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