Le déversoir
HackingOccupyingIowaAnonymous is out with a video that says both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt and calls for a shutdown of the Iowa caucuses.
This is separate and distinct from Occupy Des Moines, an OWS offshoot that is currently planning protest actions surrounding the caucuses.
Via the Des Moines Register:
But Occupy Des Moines leaders say there’s a difference: The Iowa group’s planned sit-ins at presidential campaign headquarters are not intended to shut down the Iowa caucuses, they say. Rather, they want to target presidential candidates and big-moneyed corporations that activists say are pulling the strings behind the scenes.
While there are similarities between the groups’ beliefs, they are separate, Occupy Des Moines participants emphasized Sunday.
“I don’t like it one bit,” former Rep. Ed Fallon, a Des Moines Democrat and participant in Occupy Des Moines, said of the video on Sunday. “It doesn’t fit with my definition of Gandhi- and Martin Luther King Jr.-style nonviolence. The core of nonviolent action is truth. And if you are doing everything you can to be truthful, then you should be up front and transparent. No distorting of your voice or hiding.”
(Source : futurejournalismproject)
The Occupy Movement and the New Public Space - Nate Berg via The Atlantic Cities→
Nate Berg asks a valid question — should we have publicly usable space set aside for special purposes in our cities, and which groups could occupy for whatever purpose? — but I think his answer blunts the purpose of protest, like Occupy Wallstreet:
Nate Berg via The Atlantic Cities
There is no blank slate autonomous public space. But maybe that’s what we need: a space empty, unowned and ungoverned but by the public that chooses to use it as needed or desired. Stripping the governmental public of its stewardship, this public space would exist under the watch of the public of people. Those people – whoever they are and in whatever numbers arise – could decide that this public space should be a place to express disfavor with the financial system, or they could decide that it should be used by homeless people as a campsite. Or it could host a rave or a parade. It could be a gathering place or showcase for the concerns and triumphs of a given city or community or neighborhood, uses which would develop organically, and prosper or be replaced as needed or desired by the public. Petitioning the government would become petitioning ourselves.
Admittedly idealist and utopian, this new form of public space would also be a new form of citymaking, one that embraces the continually changing nature of a city and its people. A space like this would act as a thermometer of the ideological or political fever within a community, flexible and nimble and as open to change as to good ideas. As opposed to a park that’s built for a specific type of interaction with space, this new public space would be able to play host to the variety of desires and intentions the public may have.
This demand for a new type of public space hasn’t been explicitly stated by the occupiers or by their opponents but rather by the entire situation, from 360 degrees. Cities still aren’t sure what to do with the movement’s campsites because they’ve challenged the accepted concept of using public space. It seems we all know they can’t be doing this in parks, but can’t they? Shouldn’t they be able to? For now, within our current system, the answer is no, or sometimes maybe, but not forever. Creating this new sort of truly public space may be just as insurmountable a challenge as dramatically changing the world financial system. But like the Occupy movement’s call to rethink the way that system works, this may be a mechanism to change the way we think about what we as a public want and need from our public spaces, and what exactly public should mean.
Occupy Wall Street and other related groups are protesting our situation, now, in today’s cities. The intention is to cause a disruption of business as usual, and to initiate that constituent moment, as Jason Frank terms it, where the attempt to speak out against injustice becomes a legitimate ground for political authority.
Berg’s proposal is perhaps for a future someday, when our institutions are more bottom-up, or we aren’t confronted with such a stark boundary between the 99% and the 1%. And make no mistake: the use of our shared space in cities is completely controlled by the 1% and their machinery.
Les insurgés sont à Paris et ils prennent la ligne 3.
#occupyladefense
(via somuchbeautyindirt)
(via faatmatiu)
Virginia Police Arrest Photojournalist Documenting Occupy Richmond Crackdown
Ian Graham, who was shooting for RVA Magazine, explains via the magazine’s Web site:
I was there to photograph the police dissemble the occupation, and therefore what many call the trampling of the first and possibly second amendments. The people assembled in a (literal) public square, were paid lip service to by local authorities, and on the last morning of October, the local police were forced into thuggery by an order from on high. Again, I was not at Kanawa Plaza to make a political statement, I wanted to take some pictures… and instead, I got arrested for crossing the fucking street. The official charge is of trespassing. There were people on both sides of the crosswalk where I was arrested, and none of them were arrested. But none of them had cameras, either.
Image: Screenshot from a CBS video of Ian Graham getting arrested.
(Source : futurejournalismproject)
![futurejournalismproject:
Networking: Strong Ties Bind Transnational Corporations
A new study analyzing transnational corporations demonstrates the power a core group of 1,318 companies has over the global economy. The most powerful, not surprisingly, are banks.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, explores the network of transnational corporations — including who owns who among other economic relationships — and further discover that a super-connected 147 companies control 40% of the wealth in the total network.
(These “super-connected” companies are represented by the red dots in the image above. The “merely” very connected are in yellow.)
Via New Scientist:
[The study] combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations…
…John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”…
…Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.
Image: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the global economy. Dot size represents revenue. New Scientist via PLoS One.
Study (PDF).](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltqkewOVEP1qedj2ho1_500.jpg)
Networking: Strong Ties Bind Transnational Corporations
A new study analyzing transnational corporations demonstrates the power a core group of 1,318 companies has over the global economy. The most powerful, not surprisingly, are banks.
The study, conducted by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, explores the network of transnational corporations — including who owns who among other economic relationships — and further discover that a super-connected 147 companies control 40% of the wealth in the total network.
(These “super-connected” companies are represented by the red dots in the image above. The “merely” very connected are in yellow.)
Via New Scientist:
[The study] combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations…
…John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.
Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”…
…Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.
One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.
Image: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the global economy. Dot size represents revenue. New Scientist via PLoS One.
Study (PDF).
(Source : futurejournalismproject)
Global ‘Occupy’ protests run gamut
As the anti-corporate protest movement Occupy Wall Street went global this weekend, it led to conflict in rough proportion to the economic problems of each country, from tear-gas and arson in debt-crippled Italy, to peaceful consensus and free sandwiches in comparably well-off Canada.
Police and protesters fought openly in the streets of Rome, a political hotspot in the Eurozone debt problem, where solidarity is strong for Occupy Wall Street and the indignados of Spain. Vehicles were torched, roads blockaded, a bomb detonated, and a church’s statue of the Virgin Mary smashed to bits.
Twenty-thousand marched in Portugal’s capital Lisbon, according to reports, another of the near-bankrupt so-called PIGS of Europe, with Italy, Greece and Spain.
In London, police warned protesters in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, near the stock exchange, that their presence was “illegal and disrespectful,” but opted for “containment” over confrontation.
In New York, where protesters have grown from a downtown park into a microcosm of an underemployed nation, burdened with bad debt, and resentful of banks who pursued profit to economic collapse, thousands marched on Times Square, and nearly 100 people were arrested. Even more were held in Chicago, and 46 in Phoenix, as the Occupy movement took hold nationally.
But in Canada, where Adbusters magazine in Vancouver became the wellspring of the movement this summer by publishing the first call to “Occupy Wall Street,” all was more or less calm.
Photo: Protesters wear pig masks and business suits at the Vancouver Art Gallery at the Occupy Vancouver protest in Vancouver, on the weekend. (Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)
