Category: Essays & Letters

The 99 Revolutions

by Nicholas Triolo Chapman Photos by Igal Koshevoy A simple lap around Chapman Square one evening turns into an extended meditation on rhythm, global resistance, and the discovery of meaning in the monotonous. Friday night. Freshly ejected from work and suffering from a serious case of the Digieye. You know what I’m talking about—dry, cloudy…

Symbolism of the Cascadian Flag

By Alexander Baretich I designed the Cascadian flag, aka the Doug, way back in the mid 1990s when I was a graduate student studying in Eastern Europe.  Though I totally love the people, cultures and landscape of Eastern Europe, I was deeply homesick for the forests of Cascadia, specifically the Willamette Valley forests I grew…

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…

If Helpers Fell From the Sky

Originally published on Occupy Newfoundland and Labrador. by OccupyNL St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador—We are living in strange times. This is an empirical fact. For confirmation go to Google images and turn safe search off. Type in anything. Note the results. One of the things that makes it all strange is the underlying value system of…

Why Occupy the Pride?

By Sarah Morrigan Since last September, the genius of the Occupy movement was to literally and physically occupy places and institutions and symbolically reclaim the people’s ownership and power over them.  In our encampments, we went one step further by demonstrating a new way of community, free from domination by the One Percent.  There is…

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…

Learning from Wisconsin

by Mark Vorpahl Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker not only defeated the recall, he did so easily, taking 54 percent of the vote. This is a big defeat for the union leadership who threw as many resources as they could afford behind this effort. How is it possible that this could have happened after all that…

Anarchists Care About Brand-Identity

This article was originally published on The State. by Adam Rothstein A panda costume, green lasers, social media manifestos. The places where one finds Anarchism in this day and age are startling. One might expect such over-determined capitalist colonizing in the form of a body spray. Even a chain steakhouse can claim “no rules” as…

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,…