Tag: ideas

Once Hopeful — Reports from Rio+20

Portland Occupier Kari Koch has made her way to Rio +20 in Brazil as part of the Grassroots Global Justice delegation. There is a UN Conference on Sustainable Development happening, which is based on false solutions and exploitation. She is attending the People’s Summit with workers, peasants, indigenous folks, and movement leaders from around the world.…

Occupy Will Be Back

This article originally appeared at Truthdig. By Chris Hedges In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next…

The Whole World Stops Watching

This article originally appeared on the Portland Radicle. By Mike and Emily Occupy is dead. Its original incarnation has reached its memetic peak, and it cannot re-create a spectacle akin to that of last fall. Mainstream media, crucial to popular awareness of Occupy Wall Street, has made the judgment that if Occupiers can’t force it…

How Not To Be a Union

This article originally appeared at Counterpunch.org. By Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer Unions were originally built on the principle of solidarity. Workers soon realized that as individuals they were powerless when trying to defend their interests in relation to their profit-maximizing employers. But when they were organized and stood together, their combination gave them the…

Celebrating Our Interdependence on Summer Solstice

By Liam Doherty-Nicholson The Occupy movement has been and continues to be a diverse array of beneficial experiences for me and for so many others.  At first the movement was something of an angry, fearless yet vulnerable cry out against oppressive forces.  The hope was that those who were suffering from similar oppression would flock…

The U.S. Labor Movement at the Crossroads, in the Crosshairs

by Shamus Cooke The labor movement had better do some deep soul searching, and fast. Although the defeat in Wisconsin is the horrible end to a local drama, the corporate winners hope to turn their victory into the beginning chapter of a national novel. The opening sentence was perhaps written recently in San Diego and…

The Real is on the Rise

This article was originally published on UMFNYC. When we took over the Vietnam Memorial on May 1, we were surrounded. We were surrounded on all sides by the infrastructure of this world, all that sustains it beyond its expiration like a giant life support system: the buildings that house corporations, the surveillance cameras, the police,…

It’s Only An Apocalypse When the Zombies Fight Back

This article was original published on The State. by Adam Rothstein Before I even finish writing the phrase, “zombie apocalypse”, there is a good chance you’re horrified—by culturally over-determined boredom, rather than by monsters. The fantasy of the zombie outbreak is becoming ploddingly dull, fired into our crowded consciousness again and again, like rounds from…

Flash Encampments

This article was originally published on Adbusters. Hey all you wild cats, do-gooders and steadfast rebels out there, Our movement is living through a painful rebirth… “There has been a unfortunate consolidation of power in #OWS,” writes one founding Zuccotti. “This translates into ideological dominance and recurring lines of thought. We are facing a nauseating…

Imagining the Post-Occupy Social Movement

by Shamus Cooke If one were to honestly assess Occupy’s current strengths and weaknesses as a movement, confusion must be the inevitable result. This is because Occupy is not one movement, but an umbrella term that encompasses several different groups that have varied aims, organizational structures, and gaping theoretical differences. Occupy may not be dead,…