This is a deep, complex and fascinating read.

…#ows is effective not just because it is an idea whose time has come, but it is also an organizational system best suited for today’s sociopolitical environment. It needs to be robust enough to work in all kinds of communities, and it must survive the kinds of dramatic changes it seeks to enact.

…#ows prefigures the kinds of sociopolitical and technical systems its members envision. It is decentralized, self-organizing, and nonhierarchical. I do not think anyone is in a position to predict what #ows will ultimately accomplish.  But if larger segments of society become self-organizing systems, we will certainly be living in a radically new kind of society.

icancstructures:

Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation analyzed twitter associations of Occupy Wall Street tweets and found a viral, highly decentralized network of individuals. They…

Mayors Bloomberg and Quan, and Chancellor Katehi, consider yourself added to the list.

foolonyou:

Indictment - Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra

Was listening to this on my way to work today. Wish I could find a decent sounding clip with the full song.

After yesterday’s decision by one level of government to deny public funding to a public institution and another level of government to pump public money into a private business venture, I’m feeling the occupy folks.

On a related note, Mayor Stephen Mandel has no sense of irony.

Prof. Marc Bousquet who teaches English at Santa Clara University wrote an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Sympathy for Eichmann,” in response to an article in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal about the evolution of police tactics in various kinds of demonstrations.

That’s the sense I was looking to convey Lt. John Pike’s attitude was not merely casual. His actions were banal.

 CONAN: The - some might say that the comparison to Bull Connor and cattle prods took it to another level. You, though, go even further. You cite Adolf Eichmann, the Nazis, by reference to Hannah Arendt in her famous essay on the banality of evil. But when we’re going from, OK, an outrage, somebody spraying students in the eyes from three feet away to the Nazis?

BOUSQUET: Well, that’s, you know, I’m so glad you raised that point because most people get Hannah Arendt exactly backwards. I mean, the point of Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann, which not everyone agrees with, but what is most persuasive and what is most enduring about Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann in Jerusalem is not that Eichmann is a master villain but quite the opposite, that Eichmann is an ordinary person, that Eichmann is very much more like Baldwin’s Alabama trooper or very much more like Davis’s own Lt. John Pike, that he’s an ordinary person, that not particularly bright, not a master villain, not horrendously ideological, although certainly ideological but not horrendously so, and someone who, in other circumstances, might actually have simply been an Alabama State trooper and not the architect of the Final Solution.

The point of individual responsibility is salient as this caller, aformer police officer and current campus police officer points out.

[KEITH from Gainesville] …Obviously, with my background, I’m going to tend to want to side with the officers, but I was - somebody came up to me who knows my background last night and said it’s not about whether they can legally use the force because law enforcement policies make it so they can legally do what they did, but was it a humane thing to do? And having been sprayed with this stuff, it’s inhumane. And having been placed in the position of making that difficult choice, do I conduct a search - my particular case was a search - or do I refuse and take the consequences? That, in certain circumstances as a law enforcement officer, you may have to choose to place your job at risk in order to do what’s right. That’s not fair, but it’s what you signed up for. [emphasis added]

But the last point is the best.

BOUSQUET: Personally, I think that the issues here are ultimately much larger than those of the officer. I think we have to hold the University of California system responsible, and I think we have to hold administrations across the country responsible for the larger clampdown on the Santa Cross(ph) campuses, both for faculty and students.

Ultimately we need to have a conversation in our colleges and universities, and on the national state about how and with what goals are protests policed.

More evidence of the militarization of our police.

Matthis Chiroux

Political writer, anti-war activist and Afghanistan War veteran

Posted: 11/17/11 04:51 PM ET

The NYPD are up to something a little more vile and tricky than ordering baton-wielding police goons to charge recklessly up Manhattan streets, beating every man, woman and child in their path. ‘Snatch and Grab’ operations are currently being employed against Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park.

“They keep pushing into the crowd in formations, grabbing people, and then withdrawing,” said Eric, a college student who wished not to share his last name, from Zuccotti Park over the phone. “They’ve done it three more times since you left.”

During the police operations he spoke of, Eric was struck in the groin, pushed to the ground and cracked across the shin with a nightstick. “I had my open hands in the air the whole time,” he said. ” I wasn’t threatening anyone. They just beat everyone unfortunate enough to be around this one guy until they drug him out.”

These operations do not strike me as random. What the police are engaging in looks like a military crowd control tactic called ‘snatch and grab,’ something I practiced in training on various occasions in the military. It consists of a dual process of intelligence gathering and target extraction. Leaders or agitators within the crowd are identified, after which a line of soldiers, usually in a diamond wedge, push into the crowd so that one or two soldiers in the rear can grab the identified agitators and remove them, thus ripening a crowd for dispersal. Often times, cameras are used to identify potential targets.

As a veteran of street demonstrations in New York, I’m no stranger to police surveillance at protests. However, this morning was the first time I felt these cameras were part of a real-time tactical strategy.

read more

The banksters strike back.

 

By Jonathan Larsen and Ken Olshansky, MSNBC TV

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

The memo also suggests that Democratic victories in 2012 should not be the ABA’s biggest concern. “… (T)he bigger concern,” the memo says, “should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

Two of the memo’s authors, partners Sam Geduldig and Jay Cranford, previously worked for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Geduldig joined CLGC before Boehner became speaker;  Cranford joined CLGC this year after serving as the speaker’s assistant for policy. A third partner, Steve Clark, is reportedly “tight” with Boehner, according to a story by Roll Call that CLGC features on its website. 

Jeff Sigmund, an ABA spokesperson, confirmed that the association got the memo. “Our Government Relations staff did receive the proposal – it was unsolicited and we chose not to act on it in any way,” he said in a statement to “Up.”

CLGC did not return calls seeking comment.

Looks like some movement is striking a chord.

read more

Documentally speculates about the need to Occupy the Internet. He also talks about Diaspora, which he thinks G+ copied.