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…
Category: Essays & Letters
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…
Goals for Occupy Portland
by John Springer To successfully change America, the people must win control over our government. It is government where the changes must ultimately happen because government sets the rules that all the rest of us live by, whether we are stock brokers or stockroom clerks, bankers or barristas, corporations or small businesses or homeless. Corporations…
The Creeping Death of an Elitist Notion
by Lester Macgurdy You don’t need to be wealthy to be elitist. In fact, you don’t even need two nickels to rub together. The 99% are just as prone to elitism as the 1%. Despite the wide economic chasm separating us, we’re all still endowed with the same psychological building blocks. What does every bullied…
Perspectives of an Anarchist
by Cascadian Joe The media loves the word “anarchist”. To them, anarchist means a group of people all wearing black who break things. It makes for great media coverage. Sometimes they’re right, but most of the time they’re wrong. Here is a simple writing that will attempt to explain what the Anarchist believes about the…
How to Infiltrate and Destroy a Political Movement
by Lester MacGurdy When we think of infiltrating and destroying a movement, we assume that means attempting to bring about the immediate end of the movement. This is a naive perception of the actual mechanics of infiltrating and destroying a popular political movement of the people. Why would CIA, FBI, etc. want to destroy OWS?…
Writing About Horizontal Structure Becomes “Structureless” When We Write About It
by Adam Rothstein As a member of the media, as a contributor to the linguistic and philosophical discourse emerging from the Occupations, and as point-of-contact for The Occupier, I’m constantly confronted with one of my main frustrations throughout the two months I’ve been involved in this Occupation: I can’t stand writers who write about the…
