Your thoughts on the Occupy Movement?

[Nicole]

I'm sure you've seen the articles, the videos, and FB pages -

 MSNBC - Occupy Wall Street supporters demonstrate in cities from co...

Occupy Voting Booths 2012.

 

Click to here to join the Wall Street occupiers and demand real dem...

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-go...

 

Occupy Toronto

 

 Occupy Philly protesters march to Liberty Bell | Deseret News

 

What do you think about it all?

[Balder]

I heard someone on TV discussing the likelihood that the White House is helping to orchestrate at least some of the Occupy protests (there's apparently evidence that an ex-staffer has been training protestors).  But then there's this story by Naomi, suggesting the White House's opposition to the movement.  It wouldn't be surprising to me if both sides (or even more) are being played at once.

[Balder]

I've been looking around for Rifkin's views on the Occupy movement.  I found this today:

 

How the 99% Are Using Lateral Power to Create a Global Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Balder noted above:

How the 99% Are Using Lateral Power to Create a Global Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin.

"The shrinking of transaction costs in the music business and publishing field with the emergence of file sharing of music, e-books, and news blogs, is wreaking havoc on these traditional industries. We can expect similar disruptive impacts as the diminishing transaction costs of green energy allow manufacturers, retailers, and service industries to produce and share goods and services in vast social networks with very little outlay of financial capital."

And it is here we're seeing the entertainment industry trying to destroy the internet over this very thing. It is likewise obvious that the oil industry is intentionally thwarting any type of home-generated energy production. It ain't going to happen in the US, which is why Rifkin works in Europe.

 

[Balder]

Yes, I posted this article here a few posts above. 

 

Tom, thanks; I signed that petition a few moments ago.

[valli]

 

Tom, yes  ‘everything makes sense in the oil depletion story ’. Oil is the story of exponential growth, you made that link in an earlier post. Something like a barrel of oil is supposed to be abt 25000 man hours of work. (at 15 dollars an hour?) With peak oil easy, cheap energy is over. Oil depletion will be so much work, its recession to depression to the end of the privileged modern growth era. visionlogically reduced to one lingering feature – suddenlines. I saw some clips on Martensons crash course on peak oil just a couple of days ago and the story fell into place except for, why is he happier?

The transition time to new energy infrastructure , which isn’t available yet, looks long enough for the next years to be as he says without parallel ever and the transition will not be smooth. Not without some shady humor .... all of this is because of an error in basic arithmetic . overlooking the doubling/exponential  factor in growth and consumption. And as some one said, after the past couple of generations frenzy of consumption and revelry, any king would bawl for, there are the extras, borrowed on the collateral of sons and daughters, so there is someone to leave all the debt and compound interest to. resources makes brats. Something kinky about family values even before someone said

On a shadier note, what a gift collapse is to the grandest of shock doctrines. Of course as an outcome of opportunism, not a tactic. hoarding or pretending to run out of oil is not plenty enough with the price of oil where it is. But to dramatize suddenliness by pretending not to run out of oil is such a lure if I were the perpetrator. And then just think if it doesn’t happen, what wouldn’t I give to give it that so needed push…..

But since I subscribe to martensons perspective, I could also let some positivism sink in. theres no better opportunity, for all we, the touted potential ingenuity to come through at last. Er……

[Joseph]

An excellent overview from Aljazeera. Global Rebellion: The Coming Chaos?

 

"The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the 1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century".

Global social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarised accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of over-accumulation."

[valli]

Tom, how do you reconcile Engdahls reporting with Martensons assessment ? They imply radically different outcomes, that the outcomes maybe doctored to fit is another matter. Engdahl says that admitting that he was wrong was embarrassing, and consequently writes articles like confessions of an ex peak oil believer

The premise that oil isn’t a fossil fuel in the first place is an eye-opener.

[Balder]

Tom, just a note:  thank you for the regular update of perspectives here, which I'm finding very instructive and illuminating (even if also rather disquieting).

[Lol]

Excellent interview here with Arundhati Roy "The prize-winning author of The God of Small Things talks about why she is drawn to the Occupy movement and the need to reclaim language and meaning."

[Balder]

A fuller picture of what happened prior to the UC Davis Pepper Spray incident. 

[Balder]

Yes, I agree -- a lesser-force option should have been tried first.  Nevertheless, watching that, I lost a good chunk of sympathy for this particular group of students. 

[Balder]

I'm selfishly hoping a jubilee will be declared so I can get out of my life sentence student loan debt.