My (and Guattari's) impression of the "Occupy Movement"

Well, the occupy movement is indeed about contradicting and sidestepping the corporate system and its enablers, the latest being that stupid chancellor at UC Davis… and of course, Michael Bloomberg… among many many others. OWS is about connectedness and community. That the 1%ers are so afraid of OWSers is interesting and irrational because the movement shows what happens when connectedness and humanity work to show us humans what we’re really all about.

I don’t see that they are afraid of anyone or anything. The protests are mere speed bumps. They are not hitting the 1% where they can feel it. where are the national boycotts? Where is the selling of their stocks from 401ks? Etc etc. you can’t hurt the corporations at all by saying they are bad, you have to stop using their products and owning a part of them.

Here here!

They’re crapping their pants right now. Most of the chaos factors are just waiting for something to trigger the actual insurgency. Meanwhile, we come and post here in patient anticipation and to divert ourselves.

Oops… hehehe

The hard issues of address are extremely complicated, yet in desperate need of neglected attention by the United States representatives.

United States Code, Title 12
Specifically:
Sec. 21 - Amend to require current National Banks which were previously facilitated under Sec. 21 to be thereafter reviewed by the Comptroller of the Currency into restructure which appeases the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for acquisition into Chapter 3 of the same Title.
Sec. 321 - Amend to require all banking institutions to become members of the Federal Reserve System, and no longer an option. All National Banks subsequently become State Banks, Banking Associations, Federal Reserve Banks, or Trust Companies, and as such become regulated by Title 12, Chapter 3, Federal Reserve System.
Sec. 324 - Update penalty values for falsified or erroneous information.
Sec. 326 - Remove financial burden of bank to Federal Reserve for examinations and establish regular fiscal examination of all Banks (members of system) and conducted in regular rotation, not bound by fiscal rollover dates, by a new division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for exclusively such action and not to be tasked with any further responsibilities than those established in Sec. 326 alone.
Sec. 328 - Repeal
Sec. 329 - Amend to change requirement of capital stock to require either capital stock or that capital stock of party enterprising for membership as a bank to have been found as successful potential, by the Comptroller of Currency, in short term growth after start-up.
Sec. 341 - Amend to remove First and Second powers (permissions to become corporation) and amend Fourth power to only be permissible as a specific natural person or persons that is the direct representative, or representative board of directors on behalf of the shareholders, of rights , property, and identity of the bank in the given court of law or equity.
Sec. 352 - Amend to state that the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will…rather than “may”.
Sec. 374a - Update penalty for violation

United States Code, Title 1
Sec. 1 - Amend to remove corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, and joint stock companies from the inclusion of “person” or “whoever”, and replace with a requirement that such identities must list natural persons or person of whom is the direct identity and holder of natural rights of the entity corporation, company, association, firm, partnership, or joint stock company.


If you translate the protests into applicable action within legislation, then this is what it would translate to in essence.
It is a task of which no simple address is achievable by the imagination.
Instead, it would consume the senate and congress alike for considerable time and likely be the subject of debate and readdress for the better part of the coming decade should such actions be taken.

It was a given that the committee was going to fail it was set up to do so. No one is crapping their pants because the wealthiest still have their products being bought by us. Paying taxes won’t even dent their fortune. all can live in the height of luxury for the rest of their lives as can their kids and grandkids and great grandkids. Oh my they might lose a billion or two, such a shame when they have 10 times that much in future revenue and in accounts. If the Gov’t were to come to me and say that they were taking half of my 8 billion dollars i would be fine it might hurt a tad but, really? seriously I still have 4 billion dollars… How could i really be hurt?? Noone is crapping their pants, as long as we are there to purchase things from them. period.

online.wsj.com/article/AP72d08a2 … 8f471.html

youtube.com/watch?v=DJIx-khmKJ0

Oh my!

Who said people are waking up?

read… the… OP…

goddamnit

By the way, anybody interested in a Karl Marx pin for $3?

Good way to get funding

These guys wouldnt give a homeless kid a nickel for his grandma

To get slightly back on track here Pezer, here is a nice short article written by Slavoj Žižek with regard to the occupy protests and to what they are protesting:

Democracy is the enemy
Slavoj Žižek 28 October 2011 .Tags: protests

The protests on Wall Street and at St Paul’s Cathedral are similar, Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, ‘in their lack of focus, in their inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions’. ‘Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square,’ she went on, ‘to whom the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions.’

Once you have reduced the Tahrir Square protests to a call for Western-style democracy, as Applebaum does, of course it becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests with the events in Egypt: how can protesters in the West demand what they already have? What she blocks from view is the possibility of a general discontent with the global capitalist system which takes on different forms here or there.
‘Yet in one sense,’ she conceded, ‘the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians.’ She is forced to the conclusion that ‘globalisation has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.’ This is precisely what the protesters are drawing attention to: that global capitalism undermines democracy. The logical further conclusion is that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its current form, based on multi-party nation-states, which has proved incapable of managing the destructive consequences of economic life. Instead of making this step, however, Applebaum shifts the blame onto the protesters themselves for raising these issues:

[list]‘Global’ activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout: ‘We need to have a process!’ Well, they already have a process: it’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

So, Applebaum’s argument appears to be that since the global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, any attempt to expand democracy to manage it will accelerate the decline of democracy. What, then, are we supposed to do? Continue engaging, it seems, in a political system which, according to her own account, cannot do the job.

There is no shortage of anti-capitalist critique at the moment: we are awash with stories about the companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, the bankers raking in fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, the sweatshops where children work overtime making cheap clothes for high-street outlets. There is a catch, however. The assumption is that the fight against these excesses should take place in the familiar liberal-democratic frame. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control over the global economy, through the pressure of media exposure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, police investigations etc. What goes unquestioned is the institutional framework of the bourgeois democratic state. This remains sacrosanct even in the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ – the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement and so on.

Here, Marx’s key insight remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’ democracy: say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under the people’s control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of such democratic devices as legal rights etc. They have a positive role to play, of course, but it must be borne in mind that democratic mechanisms are part of a bourgeois-state apparatus that is designed to ensure the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.

The Wall Street protests are just a beginning, but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content. So we should not be distracted by the question: ‘But what do you want?’ This is the question addressed by male authority to the hysterical woman: ‘All your whining and complaining – do you have any idea what you really want?’ In psychoanalytic terms, the protests are a hysterical outburst that provokes the master, undermining his authority, and the master’s question – ‘But what do you want?’ – disguises its subtext: ‘Answer me in my own terms or shut up!’ So far, the protesters have done well to avoid exposing themselves to the criticism that Lacan levelled at the students of 1968: ‘As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.’
[/list:u]

This then is sort of contra your point here with respect to Guattari, if I may lift out a line from the above article: ‘…but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content.

System’s reappropriate, marginalize and diffuse potentials for change, revolutionary or less extreme - yet this is no argument against these potentials themselves. The extent of their potentials being made to be largely ineffective is a less than significant point when it comes to the question of whether or not these acts of resistance are justified and/or necessary in themselves.

that Lacan levelled at the students of 1968: ‘As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.’

*Jaw drops. I’ve gotta get me some Lacan.

I think this is where I agree with your disagreement, but only in the very long run. And in the long run, it won’t be the “Occupy Movement” that will be remembered as the trigger, if it is even part of the larger movement that leads to the amount of change you, me and Zizek are talking about. What will be remembered is the historical turning point of which the “Occupy Movement” is one of the subtler and more subdued simptoms. The dip in the global economy combined with a previously begun global political overhaul in the face of the even previous melt-down of the Cold War scheme, which was very rigid, is what will likely be remembered.

The reason the “Occupy Wall Street” movement obviously disgusts me beyond all of what I just said is that it is a protest framed in the same frame as the Egyptian and other, less globaly pertinent protests, but it is being carried out by a society that is well beyond the capacity to deeply question its masters, let alone the concept of having masters. And even those other protests are talking way bigger in ideology than in reality.

I’ll take one for $2 if I can also use it to open beers.

Not sure I understand this point of yours, could you elaborate on this? Are you saying that in the US we cannot deeply question our “masters”? If OWS does not represent such a questioning, what, in your view, would such a questioning look like? Further I would argue that the Egyptian protests were certainly more “globally pertinent” than OWS, at least thus far, since those movements led to regime change and social reforms whereas OWS, while inspiring much perhaps useful talk and debate, is not leading to any political or social change whatsoever.

I do think that individual US thinkers can question their masters and even the concept of having masters. I’m willing to bet that you have. But I don’t think it’s even a little bit possible for any social movement to develop that can do this, the only US thinkers that can do it are individualistic in nature. Why was Kropotkin largely ignored by any but individual thinkers? Same reason. Only in Spain’s communist movement was Anarchism able to surge, because it was like the Russian one but in a more sophisticated culture.

I would argue, btw, that the “Occupy Movement” is as, or nearly as globaly relevant as the Egyptian protests for the simple reason that it is happening in the world’s (still) strongest empire.

LOL dude they give millions upon millions to charities they have to for tax breaks but more to impress people.I agree they would not help one person they would look down their nose at that kid. Then again they can afford to because, they give far more to charities than you I and everyone on this forum could ever ever afford to give. They may not do it for altruistic reasons but so what, they do it. You cannot change things unless you stop funding the 1% with your spending. Do you even know who they are? what corporations have control? Go to .gov and .org look for them they will be listed in one way or another. Our government has to list the businessess and the people who fund their campaigns and donate. Also who has the primary Lobbiests. If you point a gun make sure its loaded otherwise you are just going to end up on the wrong side of the grave. These protesters are waving an unloaded gun around at shadows.

Really I believe there is no way to tell before the fact whether or not a social movement can arise out of the actions of individual questionings. Many individuals gathering together to question together, this creates a unified “front”, a sphere of common interest that might or might not gain certain momentum/s, or might or might not lead to certain influence/s. As apparently said to this effect by Lenin, we cannot know, before the fact, whether truly revolutionary political singularities may or may not arise from given social-political situations. Badiou elaborated on this regarding the “truth process” of politics and with regard to events: “true” events, breaking with the otherwise inertial stasis of present conditionality, may emerge with little or no warning, and in fact must be seen as possible ONLY in the sense that they have occurred. In other words, an political (revolutionary) event’s possibility cannot be judged before hand, simply because to so judge in this regard requires a certain prespective which would already assume or spring at least in part from some of the very situational rupturings which are literally CREATED by the event itself. Not only is it wrong to say “the event CANNOT happen” but even more so to state or imply that the event “may not happen, or probably will not happen.” We just cannot know - quite like, as Zizek is fond of saying, with regard to the post-Hegelian break, the logic of which refutes Hegelianism itself, yet testified directly to its legitimacy and truth.

So will OWS lead to global influence or lasting real change? Only time will tell. But as I have already stated, to prescriptively dismiss or relegate these possibilities unfairly and before the fact of their actual event-ual outcomes and effects contributes nothing and rather takes away much.

Yout standard for global relevancy is only or mostly only regarding the context in which the event occurs? I think it is grossly unfair and simplistic to grant OWS such legitimacy merely because it is happening in the US. Much happens in the US which leads nowhere, has no relevancy for anything global, or even national. Rather I would strongly argue that an event’s global relevancy ought be judged based on the EFFECTS which lead out from it and go on to have global influences of some sort.

If the Egyptian protest movement leads to regime change, for example, this is certainly globally relevant. If OWS fails to lead to any significant or measurable change in US or global political-social relations and outcomes, then I fail to see how OWS might be said to have global relevancy merely because it “took place in the world’s strongest empire”.

You are right. Maybe I am just looking for an excuse to even be giving the moevement my time when I have nothing to do with the US (other than living in onw of its client states).

In this we can never be 100% sure until it happens. If you are a gambling man, I will bet you that it doesn’t. $20 for every year that it doesn’t, $1000 if it ever does :stuck_out_tongue: (please only take seriously if you are a gambler, I’m not making a point with this… Well I am, but still).