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Occupy Sandy: Occupy Wall Street Helps Storm Victims | The Nation

Occupy Wall Street and 350.org have teamed up with Recovers.org, a disaster relief platform, to help coordinate response to Hurricane Sandy. OWS states on its website that they are launching support pages at Recovers.org for individuals to give help or post a need. At the interoccupy.net hub, users can make financial donations to victims, volunteer their efforts or locate an emergency shelter.

OWS has called on anyone with “experience in or tools for medical and psychological services, electrician work, plumbing, construction, financial or legal services, debris and tree removal, childcare, transportation, senior services or language skills” to sign up at one of three current sites in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Red Hook in Brooklyn and Astoria in Queens—all of which are along the waterfront and experienced flooding.

Drop-off points have been established throughout Brooklyn where people can drop off candles, flashlights, batteries, water, food, or other amenities, RT.com reports.

In New York City, 750,000 people remain without power, large areas are still submerged under water and at least eighteen people have been killed, including the daughter of New York Communities for Change’s Executive Director Jon Kest. Jessie Streich-Kest and Jacob Vogelman were killed when they went outside to walk their dog during the storm.

Occupy volunteers started their effort in the Lower East side and have been moving through New York’s five boroughs, along with members of 350.org and Recovers.org.

Individuals who want to get involved in the effort are encouraged to use the hashtah #SandyVolunteer, or if they are in search of assistance, #SandyAid. Interested parties can also use the Occupy Sandy Relief NYC Facebook page. To receive text alerts for volunteer opportunities, text @OccupySandy to 23559. (Image from Facebook/OccupySandyReliefNyc)

via www.thenation.com

Maintaining Our Fidelity to Occupy: One Year Later « enaadoug

More than a year ago, Occupy encampments sprung up across the country from Boston to Oakland. Anyone who was there during the opening days remembers the carnival atmosphere, the mutual flowering of ideas and the feeling that anything was possible. But now the encampments have been dispersed, the momentum of Occupy has stalled and fatigue has overcome many activists. In times when the horizon is not easily pointing to victory, how are we to maintain our fidelity to the ideas of Occupy? What we need now is a renewal of the pledges we made a year ago and the organization of those truth into a vehicle capable of a struggling against all the manifestations of injustice that capitalism produces.

When Occupy began, it seemed to confirm what Lenin said about revolutions being “festivals of the oppressed.” There was the lively music, painting and games that were being played in the camps. It was almost like we were all free from exploitation, alienation and the other social bonds characteristic of capitalism. The great truth of Occupy was that we did not have accept the division of the world between the haves and have-notch, but that we could envision a future beyond capitalism. For those who were at Occupy during its opening days, it was a miraculous experience where we made life-long friends and where we made pledges to change the world.

“Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what happens in the day after, how our everyday life has changed or is to be changed.” The radical academic Slavoj Zizek said these words last year at Occupy Wall Street. These words ring true following the dispersal of the Occupy camps and as the festive atmosphere has worn off. Those of us who stayed committed discovered the often grueling life of activism with its meetings, demonstrations, and patient explanation of our principles to those not involved. That commitment has often been wrought by activists in the face of state power and violence, a media geared against us, our family and work obligations. For many, the strains of commitment have led to fatigue and burn out.

The engagement to change the world and build a new future is undertaken in the face of evil. In this context, we can give a fairly succinct definition of evil. “Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me,” says the philosopher Alain Badiou. Evil to the activist is what would take the energies of our struggle for a new world free from exploitation and would divert it back into the decayed and dying institutions of capitalism. This means accepting a reformed capitalism as our only horizon or participating in elections that only elect war mongers and the lapdogs of big business, who promise only crumbs of ‘reform.’ Evil is ultimately to believe that our present social order is permanent and to forget the truth we learned last year: we can imagine and bring to birth a new world where the needs of all come before the profits of a few.
And if that is the truth, then how do we efffectively organize to bring it into being? Occupy has been involved in struggles both during and after the loss of physical encampments whether for social justice, against austerity, or in support of striking workers. The organization of truth will require not just the free flowing democracy characteristic of Occupy, but disciplined cooperation in our struggles.

Our task should not be to succumb to the belief that capitalism is the only future. We need to renew the pledge that we made a year ago to build a new world free from the miseries and inequities of this one. To do that, we will need to expand the fight to challenge all the manifestations of cruelty, violence, exploitation, and oppression that are ingrained with capitalism. Our ideal should be to become tribunes of the people, able to bring forth the linkages between each particular struggle to the overall system and point a way forward to a new horizon.

via enaadoug.wordpress.com

Revolutionary Action #6 – Production Coordination Councils | Systemic Capital.com

Revolutionary Action #6 – Production Coordination Councils

All worker-owned cooperatives of 50 or more employees shall have membership in, and choose representatives for, a local, regional, national or industry specific (dependent on the scope of production or service) Production Coordination Council.  One cooperative may have representation in one or more PCCs, if there is a justifiable reason to do so.

The purpose of the council is to set, monitor and assist the accomplishment of production or service goals, facilitate the coordination and use of resources, present plans to the state bank for funding, and other tasks to be specified.  Several different plans are to be developed by the representatives, and presented for approval, via the direct democracy process, at the local, state, regional or national level.

It is the responsibility of the worker cooperatives to follow the plan developed by their respective Council(s) to the best of their abilities.  A disregard of the process or bad-faith participation (determined by review) could result in fines or property seizure.

via www.systemiccapital.com

Frankenstorms and climate change: How the 1% created a monster

There is little doubt that freakish and unnaturally-assembled storms are a taste of what the future holds under an economic system that has “interfered with the tranquility of domestic affections,” galvanized the forces of nature into a fury of clashing dislocations as we pump ever-more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere and industrial filth into our lungs.

The riptides of climate change are beginning to tear at the fabric of our biosphere as the earth’s climate system lurches, in ungainly and lumbering jerks, from the relatively dormant and benign stability of the last 10,000 years, toward a more volatile, violent and less hospitable new climatic state previously unknown to human civilization.

Alluding, therefore, to Mary Shelley’s great work of gothic horror through the appellation of Frankenstorm for the confluence of Hurricane Sandy and a cold front is, in many ways, quite apt.  Particularly as Shelley herself offered a symbolic criticism of the inner dynamics of capitalism and class society in Frankenstein, captured in the quote above, as the conflicted Victor recounts his tale and the uncontrollable forces that he has unleashed as a result of his compulsion to continue with his project, despite the warning signs that are proliferating around him.

The obsession that took over Victor, his growing alienation from the world, which makes him forsake friends, family, even sustenance, is echoed on a global scale by the unquenchable thirst for profits of the global capitalist monster, which eats through our lives and our planet in search of fresh fields for exploitation and growth.  The fact that Victor’s uncontrollable quest consumed him in its flames when his creation turned against him won’t stop similar warning signs preventing capitalism eating itself — and taking the rest of the planet down with it.

via climateandcapitalism.com

Hedging communism « An und für sich

Yesterday Interccect hosted a lecture by Jodi Dean over her new book The Communist Horizon. It was my first time meeting Jodi in person after many years of online interaction, but more importantly it was a great lecture.

One thing that came up frequently in the Q&A was the issue of how we can know that advocating communism won’t lead straight to the worst excesses of Stalinism. She had addressed this question already in the lecture — saying, for instance, that the very existence of the question shows that we “know better” at this point and that there’s no reason to assume that history will repeat itself in exactly the same way — but she also admitted that part of her theory is that there can be no absolute guarantees in politics, so that tyrrany is always a danger to some degree in any political formation.

I was pretty satisfied with her answer, but the insistence of the question made it clear that some people needed more. That’s why I am announcing an exciting new financial product that will provide peace of mind to those who are interested in advocating communism but worried about the risk: Stalinism Insurance. In the event that a totalitarian dystopia emerges, the policyholder will get a generous payout to help them escape. We also offer a “Get Out of the Gulag Free” certificate to be presented to the authorities in the event of a purge, and we are currently cultivating relationships with literary agents to help our policyholders sell their memoirs.

Please do not hesitate to contact me about setting up a payment plan.

via itself.wordpress.com

Debt as power | openDemocracy

A debtors' strike is about using the power that debt gives to people to demand concessions.

There are, however, obvious difficulties. To begin with, the stigma that debt holds must be overcome. The idea of refusing to repay a loan seems offensive. If you sign a contract, it's your moral - not to mention legal - duty to pay it back. However, this misses the fact that debt is a political, and not a personal, issue.

Climbing private indebtedness is the outcome of a deliberate strategy on the part of banks and a wilful impotence on the part of government. Banks developed, sold, and lobbied against the regulation of corrosive debt instruments. They cannot, then, demand that the rest of the population bleed so they can maintain their practises. When the creditor-debtor relation is seen properly, as a socio-economic arrangement, negotiation becomes a fact, as well as an economic necessity.

The next problem is building a movement big enough. A one-man debt strike is as useless as a one-man labour strike, but the quest for a mass debt strike may actually be more plausible. Britain's service economy has fragmented the workforce as powerfully as the manufacturing economy once harnessed it; it's only across public sector unions where there is any coherence. Debtors, however, are much more concentrated. Personal finance is dominated by the five big high-street banks, and student loans even belong to a single company.

The most significant issue, though, is that in the era of securitised finance, the debts of one bank are the assets of another. Because of that, forcing a debt write-down could well throw a pension fund into trouble. Yet that need not be a bad thing. It would shine a torch on the murky behaviour of institutional investors who serve themselves far more effectively than they do their savers. It would also force governments into a position where they have to bail people out before banks. Successive governments have used Quantitative Easing to gift cash to the banks; the same strategy could be used for restoring people's pensions instead. 

via www.opendemocracy.net

Richard Mourdock on rape pregnancies: just another part of God's plan.

Mourdock's attempts at clarification didn't actually fix this problem: 

Minutes after the debate, Mourdock was already trying to undo the damage. “Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think God ordained or pre-ordained rape? No, I don’t think that anyone could suggest that. That’s a sick, twisted—no, that’s not even close to what I said,” he told reporters—though he reiterated that he believes God determines when conception occurs. “It is a fundamental part of my faith that God gives us life. God determines when life begins,” Mourdock said. “I believe in an almighty God who makes those calls … There are some things in life that are above my pay grade.”

What's interesting about this clarification is it doesn't clarify squat. God preordains the conception but doesn't preordain the rape, or what Paul Ryan gently calls the "method of conception"? At what point does God start ordaining stuff, exactly? Does he wait until you're actually in midrape to jump in and say, "Hey, let's make this one a pregnancy, because I'm thinking this lady hasn't suffered enough." Or did God ordain the conception before the rape started? Does God give the go-ahead for rape only if it leads to pregnancy or he's cool with all rape? And one question from the pro-choice peanut gallery: If God can ordain the rape and the pregnancy that follows, why can't he also ordain abortion?

These questions may seem unserious, but if candidates really do imagine themselves as conduits for God's decisions, we need a little bit more insight into God's decision-making process. He's not speaking for himself, so it's up to the emissaries who claim to work under his authority and wish to impose it on us by law to explain. Perhaps if we really started asking these hard but important questions, we might better realize the utter silliness of letting a silent God who just happens to agree with whatever a candidate wants to believe write our laws for us, instead of sticking with that "freedom of religion" concept that the writers of the Constitution thought was such a nifty idea. 

via www.slate.com

NYPD block off whole JPMorgan building to arrest three teens - Salon.com

The entire 60 floors of JPMorgan Chase’s downtown New York office building were temporarily blocked off Wednesday so that three high-schoolers could be arrested, according to a news release from anti-corruption activists.

The students were staging a sit-in protest at the bank headquarters, “demanding full disclosure of the bank’s anonymous political expenditures,” reported an announcement from 99Rise, the anti-corruption group of which the three young people are members. “The students, who delivered a petition to the bank over three weeks ago articulating their demand, refused to leave the bank’s premises until the requested information was handed over to the public.  The bank instead chose to shut down the entire 60 floor building have them arrested,” the release read. A live Twitter feed from the group reporting on the  small sit-in noted that police set up barricades around the building, closing entrances to the public.

99 Rise describes itself as “a new anti-corruption movement to get Big Money out of American politics.” The three students have reportedly been taken to a police station in the Bronx.

via www.salon.com

Brecht Forum: Bruno Bosteels, Jodi Dean, and Astra Taylor

 

Tomorrow: Brecht Forum, 451 West Street New York, NY 10014

Brecht Forum

Launch of The Communist Horizon and Celebration of Verso's Pocket Communism Series

Discussion between Jodi Dean and Bruno Bosteels, moderated by Astra Taylor, followed by a reception and book signing.

Join Verso Books, Jodi Dean, Bruno Bosteels (The Actuality of Communism), and Astra Taylor (ed. Occupy!) in celebrating the launch of Jodi Dean's new book, The Communist Horizon, and Verso's continuing Pocket Communism series. Dean and Bosteels, with Taylor as moderator, will examine new manifestations of the idea of communism, especially in light of the Occupy movement and other forms of anti-capitalist uprising that spanned the globe in 2011 and 2012.

Discussion followed by a reception and book signing.

 

via www.versobooks.com