Occupy Together

[kdögg]

I have to applaud Holls for asking some questions up there. I'd like to see more of a response, since I'm more in her boat than Occupy's about this.

Here in Wisconsin, we like to think we Occupied before Occupy was cool. We've got mutual villains in the two movements, some similar aims...

We put fifteen elections on the ballot which otherwise wouldn't have happened, not necessarily taking out the big puppet but managing to retake the state senate for a check & balance against him.
Our delegations at both parties' national conventions pretty much had front row seats, and Romney picked a Wisconsinite as his running mate.
We've got the same group of diehards holding the Solidarity SingAlong in the capitol every weekday, who never stopped, who are still getting arrested.

We didn't win outright, but we've made some gains and we're still at it... so I have to get Holls' back here:

Why the hell hasn't Occupy actually done anything other than introduce a percentage-based catch phrase to the cultural lingo?

I'm not asking because I dislike you.
I ask because y'all disappoint me.

Sincerely,
A guy who held a sign reading "Reaganomics failed! We can tax the top 2% again!" at a state budget protest, in a movement which produced some tangible change, six months before Occupy was a thing.

A 17" by 29" space lit by a 250 hps has produced enough tomatoes for two familys for two years. This eliminated total buying of spaghetti sauce and tomatoe sauce . This is 17" deep 29" wide and the plants grow 4' tall 4 plants total. power used is less than a microwave oven.

Also there is a farmers market in NYC as well as a huge fresh sea food market. Been to both. Has any one else ?

[flanzo]

Sept 19, 2012 16:34:10 GMT -5 @arlenefavreau1 said:

A 17" by 29" space lit by a 250 hps has produced enough tomatoes for two familys for two years. This eliminated total buying of spaghetti sauce and tomatoe sauce . This is 17" deep 29" wide and the plants grow 4' tall 4 plants total. power used is less than a microwave oven.

Soooo...you want us to live on tomatoes?

Sept 19, 2012 16:36:37 GMT -5 @arlenefavreau1 said:

Also there is a farmers market in NYC as well as a huge fresh sea food market. Been to both. Has any one else ?

I go to farmer's markets every week, they're great and the fruit/vegetables are so much fresher than something you get in a grocery store. Those farms aren't located in the city, though, and while there are more than 200, I think, it's still not enough to feed the entire city.

A wide range of fruits and vegitables can be grown in small spaces. All it takes is imagination and effort and you can grow any amount of any vegatable anywhere you want . I'm willing to bet alot of places have a basement instead of dead storage space you could use it for indoor gardening. I know there are stables in NYC where you could raise a calf . If you were to split the cost with another family you can raise a calf to a 500lb cow in less than a six month period.

[flanzo]

Sept 19, 2012 19:02:22 GMT -5 @arlenefavreau1 said:

A wide range of fruits and vegitables can be grown in small spaces. All it takes is imagination and effort and you can grow any amount of any vegatable anywhere you want . I'm willing to bet alot of places have a basement instead of dead storage space you could use it for indoor gardening. I know there are stables in NYC where you could raise a calf . If you were to split the cost with another family you can raise a calf to a 500lb cow in less than a six month period.

Basements in NYC are used for either a living space or a machine room.

And I have to admit, I am not aware of a place where I can timeshare a cow, do you have a website or something for that?

there are stables in NYC after all there is a wide range of horse drawn carrages in NYC.

And you would'nt be timeshareing you'd be renting stable space for the sole purpose of paying alot less for food of much higher quality than any store will ever provide .

[Fiddler's Green]

Sept 19, 2012 20:03:09 GMT -5 @arlenefavreau1 said:

And you would'nt be timeshareing you'd be renting stable space for the sole purpose of paying alot less for food of much higher quality than any store will ever provide .

aaaannnnnddd this thread now confuses me more than the Mafia thread.

What exactly is it about producing your own food and not buying it from a national super market chain do you find confuseing? After all isnt the occupy movement all about busting corperate greed? What better way to bust them than not buy there products.

[iamthehorn]

There's so much confusing about you Arlene.

ok I guess I just don't communicate well enough.

[flanzo]

So you propose that we rent stable space that's currently being used to raise cattle in?

No I prepose you continue to purchase your grocceries at the store because its easier.

[Lowerdeck]

Oh I can tell stories from Monday.

Actually, let me say this first. Arlene or whoever you are, what in the hell are you talking about? Farmers markets? Urban gardening? The thread wasn't just derailed, it wound up in the Hudson River.

Now I figure you love yourself some serious Tea Party, and need to rabble rouse in the most flaming leftist topics on the board - but not cool. 90% of your posts in recent are here or the Election thread, and well... we know what eventually happens to people who do that type of stuff.




I got to get back to Holls and Kdogg's comments.

Sept 17, 2012 14:18:02 GMT -5 holls said:

Sept 17, 2012 12:29:17 GMT -5 flanzo said:

Sadly, while I like some of the ideals behind the movement, I haven't seen much growth in this regard.

LD, you've dedicated the last year of your life to this cause. I haven't followed it closely enough to discern what measurable results this has had. So tell me: besides people getting arrested (which can have negative fiscal repercussions solely to themselves, not to the establishment against which they protest) and the media coverage of Occupy events, how has this movement altered the country's political landscape?

The only things I can see are:

1. Increased mainstream cognizance of the terms "1%" and "99%"
2. Increased collective hatred toward concentrated wealth-holders
3. Perpetuated a "all banks & corporations are bad" mentality

But how have those things POSITIVELY IMPROVED the political landscape? From your perspective, as someone who's been entrenched in the movement, how has ANY of this has been worthwhile? Have any corporate policies changed? Have unions successfully negotiated better contracts for their members? Has this been a game-changer for the labor movement in any way at all?

A year later, how has this movement effected positive change? I'm genuinely interested, because from my perspective, I'm simply not seeing it.

Occupy in terms of the political scene is quite an oddball. It's a mixture of long time veterans of activism, anarchists, new activists such as myself, some organized labor, communists and socialists, and an assortment of disenfranchised people. Homeless and LGBT are in Occupy at much higher rates than what you find in the general public.

We do carry a lot of stereotypes: that we heart Obama and Democrats, that we don't have jobs and just want handouts given to us, that we just break things and have a knack for getting arrested, that we don't shower, etc... Most of them are either flat out wrong or greatly exaggerated.

If you follow the evolution of the movement just by the mainstream (corporate) media, we're near death and all we seem to do is get arrested. That's all that is ever fixated on: OWS not going anywhere, stirring trouble, and getting locked up in droves. We all know that Fox News is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and is heavily biased towards an extreme right wing agenda. But the other networks aren't innocent either. CBS is owned by Viacom, NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast in majority, and ABC is owned by Disney. Univision is in partnership with ABC, so I consider it the same. In the before times, you never saw conglomerations of media interests held by so few companies. Nowadays six companies control about 90% of what you see on television - or at least what's not religious based. All of them have become very powerful due to de-regulation efforts within the last 15-20 years, which Occupy opposes staunchly. Occupy basically comes out and states that the entire system is flawed and needs to be changed, but that gets ignored because it's not in the media's best interests to tell that story. So then it becomes about scruffy kids sleeping in parks and getting their donkeys handed to them by cops all around the country.

Based on what I seen on Monday and early Tuesday, the MSM once again inaccurately portrayed a story involving OWS. I'm not entirely surprised by that. Every major TV outlet in the NYC market said that a few hundred to maybe a couple thousand protesters shown up, and gave emphasis to the high arrest count. The crowd estimate is very low. While not as big as events from last fall or Mayday this year, whatever the news said - the number was really 5x to 10x higher. And the total number of arrests include more people than just protestors. It also includes independent journalists, photographers, a volunteer legal observer, street medics, and even innocent bystanders.

In New York City, the NYPD's role is essentially spread fear and intimidation to control OWS. The more people you arrest, the more likely people stay away. The more people you beat up and harass, the more likely people stay away. The more cops you throw out on the streets for OWS events, it's so intimidating that people stay far away. All weekend long, you seen "white shirts" (supervisors, lieutenants, etc...) pointing to random people and within a minute having their hands in zip ties. A reporter for the Boston Phoenix was arrested, singled out by a white shirt for paying too much attention to the police, and then got roughed up in the process. A day trader from Connecticut took a picture of the arrest, and he ended up in the same police van a few minutes later. That's how out of control things got down there.

I and a few others in the Hartford delegation personally saw three people singled out by a white shirt and arrested for reporting near Zuccotti Park and not having the "proper credentials". The city and the NYPD give out press credentials to outlets like Ch. 2/4/5/7 and newspapers like the NY Times, Daily News, Post, and Newsday. If you don't have that, then you're essentially considered not a member of the press and subject to arrest. If you report on something the NYPD doesn't like revealed, they can have liberty to remove the credentials and therefore have reporters subject to harassment and arrest themselves. So you see groups like WCBS being good, falling in line, and basically reading off NYPD press releases and showing some street punks getting shoved into paddy wagons.

I would say the majority of Occupiers have a love-hate relationship with Democrats and flat out hatred of Republicans, especially the Tea Party. Many people in Occupy dislike or just flat out hate Obama, which has lit a fire underneath the ass of the Dem Natl Committee to pay more attention to the middle class and working folk of the world. I would argue the Green Party has significantly gained more attention simply because it raises awareness to many issues Occupiers speak of, that and Jill Stein is seemingly at every major Occupy related event. (I've met her twice, and know she was floating around NY on Monday.) You see Senate candidates talking with OWS language, especially Elizabeth Warren up in Mass. and to a lesser extent Chris Murphy in Conn. And then you see tiny third parties with strong ties to local Occupy groups - half of Occupy New Haven for example is supportive of the Party for Socialism and Liberation now, and have strong ties with the PSL chapter in New Haven.

Organized labor was a significant role in Mayday events, and I saw some as well on Monday. Some labor groups speak in tone with the Occupy message, but don't necessarily trust us. Groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are heavily supportive of OWS and even use Occupy events as a de facto recruiting and information spreading tool.

What positive have we made? For starters, we have significantly increased attention to corrupt banking practices and to those who helped tank the economy thanks to deregulation. We'll probably see Elizabeth Warren become a US Senator. Americans for Prosperity (a Koch Brothers group) is scared of us, to the point where they are having a rally against OWS tomorrow in Times Square. We have been fighting against housing foreclosures nationwide, keeping families in their homes and not getting the rug pulled out from underneath them by huge banks. Millions moved their money out of the giant corrupt banks and into local banks or credit unions. (I dumped my last account with BoA and moved it to a credit union.) You even saw Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum start complaining about the overwhelming affect of money in politics, and how it's buying elections for the highest bidder. For as sluggish as the economy is, and Obama not being that popular - the fact that Occupy has highlighted bad business and corrupt/greedy politicians has probably sank Mitt Romney's chances indirectly. In New Hampshire and to a lesser extent South Carolina, we OWNED Romney and made the inequality gap the huge issue in the national dialogue. Or until abortion and gay rights got thrown back into the mix as a distraction.

There have been some successes and changes as a result of OWS. A lot of which most people probably won't see or recognize (in the short term). But if this keeps hold for years to come and people pick up on it, it can have serious impact. Or I hope so anyway.



That get everything?

[Vw'ndeadchick]

^

[Lowerdeck]

There's probably a couple more things I can add to this on the top of my head.

There's kind of two schools of thought within the Occupy movement. There's the New York and the Oakland. The Oakland, predominantly found on the west coast, is the much more aggressive and radicalized. The west coast puts out some big scale actions, like the port shutdowns last fall to support union dockworkers. The west coast also heavily features black bloc anarchism, much more likely to engage and fight back against police rather than do typical civil disobedience tactics. Oakland, Los Angeles, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle are a different animal than the rest of the country.

Within Occupy, there are very very many agendas and issues on the table. Even within nearby Occupy groups, the focus of the different groups widely varies. And in large cities like New York and Boston, you see small groups each tackling several different things at once.

New Haven: had the physical encampment by far the longest, and somewhat divided after eviction. Heavily shows up to major actions in other cities, and gets arrested in frequency and higher ratio to other occupy groups. The most radicalized group in New England, excluding the anarchist types in Boston.

Hartford: Early on had infighting galore. Focus on banks at first, then ALEC, now mostly focuses on Monsanto and GMO food issues. Heavily supports GMO labeling efforts in Connecticut. Anarchist wing vanished once Turning Point Park was evicted.

Western Mass and Vermont: isolated from the rest of the region, decent amount of small groups. Focus on environmental issues predominant, especially the Vermont Yankee nuclear station.

Worcester: ravaged by infighting, power grabs, and interpersonal conflicts. Went dormant over summer, restart likely by mid October. Focus (before collapse) primarily on fighting home foreclosures in association with Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team. Besides that was split between environmentalists, community education, and tin foil hat wearing crazies.

New Hampshire: ravaged by infighting and split between numerous factions - geographic and political. Free State Project (think Ron Paul supporters but nuttier) tried to hijack, then got pushed out. Liberals and Free Staters both have those who are upset with Mark Provost. He rubbed many the wrong way for going on a power grab and ego trips. Personally I don't have a problem with him, he's smart and does a TON for the movement. But I can see where people have concerns.

Providence: got the city to open a homeless shelter in exchange for leaving Burnside Park. Supports Verizon workers in Rhode Island to get a fair new contract. Strongly opposes state funded bailouts of Curt Schilling's failed company and other tax incentives to other ventures. Wants Brown to pay property taxes to the city, which would bring millions more to city coffers.

Maine: I've only met a few people in Portland, so I'm not quite sure what they're doing up there. I did go to their protest in March outside an Obama fundraiser, they have a pretty decent sized out that way.

[Lowerdeck]

empirestatetribune.com/?p=7654

An informal poll on who Occupiers support in the election. Who the hell picked Romney? And it's evidence there's a lot of angry people in the realm of OWS. Vermin Supreme got 10% support, enough said.

[LoveLuckLaughter]

LD, I'm very proud of you for your continued involvement in OWS, and I am glad that you have had the opportunity to stay involved. Our's fizzled out so fast.

The greatest accomplishment that Wisconsin, and OWS and the Arab Spring and the world wild Occupations have had is in giving people a sense of empowerment. Often times we feel very helpless in the shadow of those in charge. Often times we feel voiceless despite the fact that, at least in our country, we have elected officials to be our voice. Fortunately we have reached a tipping point all across the world as the margin of disparity has become so tremendous that it is catalyzing action. Complacency has allowed us to look past the tension that inequality creates for long enough. As long as we can wake up and drink our clean water, and afford gas to drive our cars 2 blocks to the grocery store, and have a beer and get laid, most of us are content enough to continue walking the line, despite the fact that the cliff is in clear view.

However, as we start hearing the shouting in the streets, it wakes us up out of our stupor and we start to realize that the water we are floating in has started to boil. Because we see that others have become just as uncomfortable and are speaking up, we feel that we can too. Eventually it spreads into other "Occupations" or movements, and we feel that our voices have resonance now and so we speak up. Occupy Monsanto is going to have a real impact on Prop 37 in California. I think that small victories like that will serve as fuel to the fire and will set a real example for how tangible results can be accomplished.

I realize that we have become a culture of instant gratification, but I ask you to keep in mind that the Women's Suffrage movement started in the 1840's and we did not obtain the right to vote until 1920. The Civil Rights movement lasted over a decade. Changes in inequality do not happen overnight. One year is nothing.

I feel that this movement to take back the power that has been disproportionately placed in the hands of a few will continue down new and unexpected channels. It will have some successes and some failures. But I'm convinced that as long as people don't go back to their TV dinners and allow the corruption to continue, there will be real change. I hope everyone has taken their Adderall!

I feed two familys {total of 9 people } by doing the things I've described . It only cost us $100 per week for necessitys . I make sue my family only buys items produced in america . Never shop where I dont know the owner. These are some of the things I've discussed on here and have been told that I dont have relitve ideas for you so I'm outta here turn out the lights when you leave.

[flanzo]

GOD DAMMIT ARLENE IS GONE

[EAP]

another poster terrorized by flanzo.

how many you at champ?

[EAP]

why can't you just grow your tomatoes in your bathtub like everyone else in nyc and stop complaining?

[kdögg]

Thanks for the response, LD.

Following up, to you & other Occupy people here, with Socratic brevity rather than point-by-point response:

What is your one demand?

That was, after all, the question Occupy teased in the run-up to last September 17th...

[Fiddler's Green]

Sept 24, 2012 17:11:12 GMT -5 kdögg said:

Thanks for the response, LD.

Following up, to you & other Occupy people here, with Socratic brevity rather than point-by-point response:

What is your one demand?

That was, after all, the question Occupy teased in the run-up to last September 17th...

What is "Socratic brevity"? By definition if something is Socratic, it is usually batted around, drawn out through question and answer (often already known to the questioner), theorized and re-hypothesized, isn't it?

Not being a smart-ass here, just a big Socrates fan and politics guy and never heard the term.

[Lowerdeck]

One thing huh?

Where do I even begin?

[Ned]

Sept 24, 2012 19:54:38 GMT -5 Fiddler's Green said:

Sept 24, 2012 17:11:12 GMT -5 kdögg said:

Thanks for the response, LD.

Following up, to you & other Occupy people here, with Socratic brevity rather than point-by-point response:

What is your one demand?

That was, after all, the question Occupy teased in the run-up to last September 17th...

What is "Socratic brevity"? By definition if something is Socratic, it is usually batted around, drawn out through question and answer (often already known to the questioner), theorized and re-hypothesized, isn't it?

Not being a smart-ass here, just a big Socrates fan and politics guy and never heard the term.

I think he meant that he was replying to LD's response to his initial question with another singular question, rather than a several point argument addressing every facet of LD's post.

[kdögg]

Socratic in that I ask questions to advance conversation.
Brevity in that I kept it much shorter & sweeter than I would've in a point by point response I could've used.

I asked our resident Occupy guy a question originally posed by Occupy, and we all just saw the unsatisfying response.

How does a movement advance its agenda when that movement cannot even define its agenda?
^ Exactly why you guys get portrayed as a joke. Just sayin'.

[Fiddler's Green]

Sept 24, 2012 21:31:35 GMT -5 kdögg said:

Socratic in that I ask questions to advance conversation.
Brevity in that I kept it much shorter & sweeter than I would've in a point by point response I could've used.

I asked our resident Occupy guy a question originally posed by Occupy, and we all just saw the unsatisfying response.

How does a movement advance its agenda when that movement cannot even define its agenda?
^ Exactly why you guys get portrayed as a joke. Just sayin'.

Gotcha, sir. And Ned. Gracias.

Sept 24, 2012 17:11:12 GMT -5 kdögg said:

Thanks for the response, LD.

Following up, to you & other Occupy people here, with Socratic brevity rather than point-by-point response:

What is your one demand?

That was, after all, the question Occupy teased in the run-up to last September 17th...

Actually, it wasn't. While trying to be brief you could at least get everything right.

"What is OUR one demand" Which is clearly a rhetorical devise. It's really not that hard. Did it really take you a year to repeat the same Faux News line of thinking that was repeated over and over again?