Tag: OWS

Mar 03 2014

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Post Occupy Analysis by Diane Gee

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay is in part a reply to AoT’s “No, you don’t want another OWS”– I agree we don’t need another, but not entirely with the author’s reasoning why…)

People who were involved with Occupy Wall Street have an understandable emotional attachment to what they experienced within the movement.  In fact, for many in this age of electronica and isolation, it was their first experience in ground level activism and social work.  People cooperated, they exchanged food, medical services and felt unity. By sheer numbers, they managed to enter the concept of the one percent versus the rest of us into the National dialogue. That cannot be underrated.  

In any discussion of what is next, we have to look with an unemotional, analytical eye at whether or not Occupy was or was not a success.

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Jan 26 2014

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: No, you don’t want another OWS by AoT

There’s been a common theme lately of calling for a new OWS. I would be overjoyed if all of these calls were in fact calls for a new OWS. But they aren’t. I want to make clear that this isn’t necessarily an attack on people making these calls. They make them for different reasons, and those reasons are often reasons I agree with. But, they are in fact calls for a completely different movement, one that bears little if any resemblance to OWS. I’m going to go through the common refrains of what “the movement” needs and my responses to them.

Let me say first that I think that people really mean that they want another successful and visible social movement when they say they want another OWS they really . I’m completely on board with that, I want another movement with the energy of Occupy. The problem is that the things that made OWS successful are exactly the things people are calling to change.

Mar 02 2012

WWL Radio #143 NOAM CHOMSKY 3rd Interview!



Listen to Noam Chomsky and Diane Gee live on WWL Radio Friday, March 2nd at 6pm ET!



Listen live by clicking the link icon below:

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PhotobucketMuch has happened since we last spoke with Noam Chomsky in April of last year!  Then, we pondered the Arab Spring, and now the seeds of that revolutionary mindset has spread the the US and manifested in the Occupy Movement.

The possibility of intervention and attack of Syria and Iran have ramped to new heights.

And?  The silly season of electoral politics is in full fetid bloom.  

I have so much I want to mine his brilliant mind about, and only an hour in which to do it!  

I hold Noam near and dear to my heart as a friend and am, as always, honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with him on WWL Radio.

The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!

Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. Chat is monitored during the show, so make yourself heard.

Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left

Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm ET, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….  



WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!

Feb 10 2012

WWL Radio #140 Handwringers, Hedges and OWS



Listen to Diane Gee live on WWL Radio Friday, February 10th at 6pm ET!



Listen live by clicking the link icon below:

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PhotobucketHolding out Hope still?  President McHope just bent over for the Religinazis, and while thus positioned, gave a reach around to the Bankers on foreclosures while deepthroating the Super Pacs.  

Still think that Electoral Politics mean a damned thing?

The time to Occupy is now more than ever.  It is far past time to remove the sham of Freedom and have a People’s Revolution – perhaps a Jeffersonian Revolution ala a Bolivarian one.

Then we have poor misguided Chris Hedges wringing his hands so hard he broke his Rosary over a broken window while applauding Greek Riots.  Puhhhlleeeez.  

Plenty to rant about tonight, my friends.  I’m ready to roll!

The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!

Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. Chat is monitored during the show, so make yourself heard.

Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left

Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm ET, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….  



WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!

Feb 07 2012

Perspectives On Hedge’s “Cancer in Occupy”

There’s one thing they tell you when you start a cancer treatment schedule, sitting there in wide-eyed horror and shock. “I know this all seems unthinkable right now, but believe it or not, it will soon just become your routine.  Your new normal.”  Anyone who has lived through childhood abuse, or been in an abusive relationship will tell you the same. “Well, most of the time he was nice,” they will say, “its just sometimes it got really scary or bad.”  There has been reams written about co-dependent behaviours already, both personal and societal.  Me?  I think mostly its a matter of acclimation. Its the conversation you have about TV on your way to chemo, and the new meals that become routine; creating food the cancer-stricken might possibly eat.  It kids playing soccer among the rubble where the bombs just fell. It learning your new wheel chair. Or learning to read in Braille.  I say it a lot.  “It is what it is.”

Photobucket There’s a flip side to this too. As my husbands 6’1″ frame dwindled to 130 or less pounds, as his hair fell out?  He avoided mirrors like the plague.  Its like the restaurant you no longer frequent because its where your ex-girlfriend and her new man hang out.  Its like changing the channel every time that commercial comes on, with Sara McLoughlin singing and all the abused animals cover your screen.  Its refusing to look at the reality of what homelessness, starvation, or what the ravages of War truly are.  Its the pictures of children struck by depleted uranium you never really look at for long. Put even more basically?  Its blocking someone on Facebook who has been cruel to you. You compartmentalize the bad away, and let normalcy be created by routine – and you  just avoid the damned mirrors.

You see?  Mirrors tell the truth.  Mirrors belie the little boxes in our psyche that say everything is normal. So we veil them.

I like Chris Hedges.  He is what he is. I’m not even remotely insulted he used the cancer analogy as a fresh cancer widow.  

What I find particularly offensive after giving it a night of thought?  Is Hedged opining how a few kids in black pajamas breaking a window has become an unthinkable Cancer to bringing the Public Sway on board to the “treatment” that Occupy is trying to apply to the REAL CANCERS of our Society.  The Cancers that have become both our “normal” and our “mirror avoidance.”

Jan 21 2012

Spiritual Bath

Anybody still home?  Lamestream talks about Obama singing something and there was this other big flap about Eye of Newt’s open marriage wife.  Yeah, well I’m not into kiddie porn either.

It’s snowing.  The pretty fluffy kind too.  It’s my daughter’s birthday, the one into horses so the girls are out shopping for tonight’s meal.  The cat is watching the birds on the back deck and I have these weird thoughts.

Jan 06 2012

WWL Radio #136 US Views from Abroad – and A Broad



Listen to Diane Gee with special co-host Eric Knight live on WWL Radio Friday, January 6th at 6pm ET!



Listen live by clicking the link icon below:

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PhotobucketTonight, Eric Knight – British citizen and regular of the Links for the Wildy Left facebook page affiliated with this show and blog –  joins me as honorary co-host to address Occupy, Class War, the Police State and the Idiocy of our mutual “exceptionalism” in foreign affairs.

Eric is a scathing wit, brilliant man and all around great conversation.  He has worked in publishing and marketing, been active in the Human Rights and Justice Campaign, is a drummer who has run with the rockers, hobnobbed with the Princess of Wales and Maggie Thatcher, and supports the reintroduction of the guillotine for both of our War Criminals. He is on his way to Pakistan as an NGO diplomat working in an advisory position on education, and to promote diplomacy between their two countries, a trip for which he has agreed to be our foreign correspondent.

It will be refreshing to see our own Kabuki from a very sympathetic to the “people” man, who shares our absolute disgust with the events occurring around us.

The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!

Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. Chat is monitored during the show, so make yourself heard.

Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left

Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm ET, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….  



WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!


Jan 01 2012

Occupy Wall St.: Happy New Year, We’re Still Here

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

“All week! All year! We’ll still be here!”

“Whose park? Our park!”

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The New York City Occupiers took back Zucchotti Park a couple of hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve despite the presence of NYPD and private security:

About 100 people arrived at the park at about 7 p.m., according to witnesses, and someone put up what was described as a small multicolored tent, about two feet tall, made for a child. Two young girls, who were at the park with their mother, began playing inside.

Though the New York City Police Department had officers fanned out throughout the city for the holiday, there were police officers lined up across the street from Zuccotti Park, at the ready alongside private security guards. They stepped in.

Police officers and security guards, who stood at the ready across the street, told protesters to remove the tent, saying it violated rules issued by the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties. Meanwhile, an officer and a guard blocked other protesters, and at least one reporter, from entering the park. Some people disregarded their instructions and squeezed through the spaces between metal barricades along other parts of the perimeter.

That number swelled to over 500 by 10:30 as text messages and signal went out across the city. They draped the piled barricades with Christmas lights and the lighted Christmas tree was wrapped with the Occupy Wall Street banner as the OWS “bat signal” was projected on the side of a building. As the protesters were chased from the park, they took to the nearby streets, drumming and chanting as they marched. Most of the arrests were of demonstrators who were obeying police directions or walking peacefully on the side walk. Many of the protesters and others not involved in the demonstration were “kettled” into groups then arrested for obstructing pedestrian traffic or for moving as directed by the officers. Even legal observers and the press were again arrested and threatened by the NYPD. The observer from the National Lawyers Guild was later released.

Welcome to the United Police State of America where you can be “legally” detained indefinitely on the president’s word.

Dec 20 2011

The New Year

Allow me to dispense with that big non-event retail stores consider already over and get on to what I think is in store for next year.

Drop the Butter and Step Away from your Vehicle

Dec 18 2011

Holiday Wishes from the TSA

The police arrest you for reading the Constitution in a public space during an Occupy demonstration. Later, you get a letter saying that reading the Constitution in a loud voice, in that place, at that time, broke a small statute of the law, and therefore you will be fined $1,500. If you disagree with this assessment, you can plead your case in a letter to the Chief of Police at the station where the arresting officer works. If they don’t hear from you in, oh, I don’t know, 20 days, then they will assume you agree with the fine.

Oh, and by the way, everything in their letter is top secret and you have to get the Chief of Police’s permission to share it with your lawyer, your husband or your…well let’s say readers.

What? You have a problem with that?

So do I…

Dec 14 2011

Times Person of the Year: It Is Us, The Protesters

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It started with a 26 year old Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire sparking protests that over threw the government. The protest has spread to Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Libya, Syria, Israel, Greece, Wisconsin, Ohio, New York City and across the United States to Chicago, Houston, Oakland, Portland, and Los Angeles. Russians have taken to the streets in the largest protests since the overthrow of the Soviet Union that may end the career of Vladimir Putin. It has been a year of protests that have changed the world. And we aren’t done.

Now Time magazine has named me, you, all of us, the Protester, the Person of the Year.

History often emerges only in retrospect. Events become significant only when looked back on. No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square in a town barely on a map, he would spark protests that would bring down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and rattle regimes in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Or that that spirit of dissent would spur Mexicans to rise up against the terror of drug cartels, Greeks to march against unaccountable leaders, Americans to occupy public spaces to protest income inequality, and Russians to marshal themselves against a corrupt autocracy.Protests have now occurred in countries whose populations total at least 3 billion people, and the word protest has appeared in newspapers and online exponentially more this past year than at any other time in history.

Is there a global tipping point for frustration? Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough. They dissented; they demanded; they did not despair, even when the answers came back in a cloud of tear gas or a hail of bullets. They literally embodied the idea that individual action can bring collective, colossal change. And although it was understood differently in different places, the idea of democracy was present in every gathering. The root of the word democracy is demos, “the people,” and the meaning of democracy is “the people rule.” And they did, if not at the ballot box, then in the streets. America is a nation conceived in protest, and protest is in some ways the source code for democracy – and evidence of the lack of it.

We will take to the streets and the ballot boxes and back to the streets until we have won the “war” against the oligarchs, the banks and the billionaires.  

Dec 08 2011

WWL Radio #133 Bill Ayers Interview Today!



Listen to Bill Ayers live on WWL Radio Friday, December 9th at 6pm ET!



Listen live by clicking the link icon below:

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PhotobucketWhen the controversy broke about then Senator Obama having known Bill Ayers, my first thought was “cool, maybe his is one of us.  Since then, it is Obama that has disappointed, not Professor Ayers.

My discussion with him will strive to contemplate, contrast and compare the social movement of the 60’s and 70’s with what is happening now. I think he can, as someone who has been fully immersed in the former shed light on the latter.

Great effort has been taken to marginalize, even demonize and true socialist with any chance of influencing the dialogue in this country. While active in the advancement of progressive education, that that alone is considered too “radical” for the “educational industry” speaks volumes about how far right we have been pushed as a Nation.

Today, this nation is under a far more militant resistance against OWS activists than the anti-war activists of the SDS and WU were… I wonder, how will it survive?

I am thrilled an honored to be able to have a conversation with Bill! I am sure we shall all learn much from him.

Bill Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction. In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground. He is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar

The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!

Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. Chat is monitored during the show, so make yourself heard.

Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left

Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm ET, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….  



WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!


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