Category: Essays & Letters

Theory and Practice in Occupy

by Shamus Cooke For a movement that started with one strategy and a couple of slogans, Occupy has preformed brilliantly. Having based itself on the examples of Egypt and Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement has raised the political consciousness of millions and created a large layer of new activists. But the uninterrupted string of successes of…

Bat Signal DIY

by Mungen Cakes So you want to do a Bat Signal. You want to project big ideas or fun images on the sides of homes, businesses, banks, bridges and highways (and never project on a church of any kind at any time unless you have permission). This DIY will give you the info you need…

Occupy 2012!

by Janice Leber Occupy 2012: We can and we must! We need to occupy 2012. This is our year, people. It’s a political year and we are a political movement. Let’s make ourselves known. We need to track all major candidates and show up at all campaign events. We need to be ready with important…

Caption Contest

Welcome to the first ever Occupier caption contest! If you are unfamiliar, a caption contest works like this: we give you a photo, and you give us the one-line caption that goes underneath. Points are awarded on a completely subjective basis for hilarity, political intrigue, and general fun. The comment policy applies, of course. The…

Occupy’s Valley Forge Winter – Part 2

by Arlo Stone Part Two of a two-part series. Click here to read Part One. ….As a front line Occupier in one of the aforementioned large scale and suddenly camp-less metro occupations, I too am licking my wounds at the onset of Occupy’s “Valley Forge Winter” with my brethren. We are cold, scattered, fragmented, un-unified,…

Occupy’s Valley Forge Winter – Part 1

by Arlo Stone Occupy Wall Street began September 17th. Popular? Within a month, over 1,500 cities or towns nationwide had an Occupy movement. Occupy Poughkeepsie for chrissakes. Within 2 months it was pandemic. DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Salt Lake, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Oakland, LA, every large metro had an…

The Changing Face of Homelessness

by Lana Buchanan It used to be that the homeless were the drunks and drug addicts that lived under the local bridge and people largely ignored them. In today’s world the faces of the homeless have changed, and it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore. There are still many who choose to live on the streets,…

Letter from Erin Madden

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to spend unregulated and undisclosed sums of money on elections. The Citizens United decision has led to unprecedented campaign spending by corporations, drowning out the voices of We…

Political Science 101 For Those Confused By The Occupy Movement

by Gina Ronning The Occupy movement has been a catalyst for much needed national discourse on the issues of corporate greed and political corruption. More importantly, this discourse is coming from those most affected by the actions of self-driven profiteering businesses, which have long sought to silence this discourse. However, unsustainable practices will inevitably fall…

The Declaration of Occupy Portland

by Adam Rothstein I have seen a vision of the end of Occupy Portland. It looks like a meeting with no actionable agenda, no notes, and no plan for a follow-up meeting. It is organized–maybe–on Facebook alone. And it will have the phrases “ninety-nine percent”, “unity”, and “positive” repeated upwards of twenty times each. It…