Morning Comrades! I realized late on Friday that it was the 10 year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, something that is very dear and personal to me so I will spend a little on that. Obviously, let’s kick off this week with a new playlist and I know, I know you have been hearing this often from me with these, but this one not only slaps incredibly hard but just grooves on a very mellow but exciting wave. It most likely is down to the fact that I finally booked my first vacation in 3 years this last week - no real interruption in these services are planned - but yeah. It floats on a psychedelic 70s drug flying carpet that rides into the cocaine fueled yacht vibes without ever getting lost into anything cheesy - granted there are few odd ones out that come from the Japanese trap field but generally that’s the vibe. Hit it, follow it, share it- you know what’s good for you.
For many of us, the self-imposed financial meltdown that started in 2008 and the resulting organizing, protests and realization that everything that we were force-fed to believe in order to prop up this insanely destructive and corrupt system started, earnestly, in 2009 to 2010, that ultimately led to the first Occupy Wall Street protest on November 17th, 2011. I was working a lot in New York at the time and was there a number of times and yeah, it was and remains personal, especially the lessons learned from the ultimate failure of the Occupy movement.
“In 2009 and 2010, students across the University of California occupied campus buildings in protest against budget cuts, tuition hikes, and staff cutbacks that had resulted from the Great Recession of 2008. According to Dissent Magazine, "It was in the context of the California student movement that the slogan 'Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing' first emerged."The Huffington Post noted that "During one incident in March of 2010, 150 protesters were arrested for trying to occupy part of Interstate 80 in protest of the budget cuts and tuition hikes, displaying a banner that read 'Occupy everything,' while shutting down the roadway for an hour, and were crushed by the same kind of overwhelming police force that was later mobilized against Occupy encampments across the country."Adbusters editor Micah White, who designed the original Occupy Wall Street concept, traveled to California for the protests and took part in the occupation of Wheeler Hall. He wrote enthusiastically for Adbusters about the "revolutionary potential of struggle".
The Spanish Indignados movement began in mid-May 2011, with camps at Madrid and elsewhere. According to sociologist Manuel Castells, by the end of the month there were already hundreds of camps around Spain and across the world. For some journalists and commentators the camping in Spain marked the start of the global occupy movement, though it is much more commonly said to have begun in New York during September. On 30 May 2011, a leader of the Indignados, inspired by the Arab Spring, 5.18 Movement of 1980, and June Democracy Movement of 1987 called for a worldwide protest on 15 October. In mid-2011, the Canadian-based group Adbusters Media Foundation, best known for its advertisement-free anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy, address a growing disparity in wealth, and the absence of legal repercussions behind the recent global financial crisis. Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn registered the OccupyWallStreet.org web address on 9 June. According to Micah White, the senior editor of the magazine, "[we] basically floated the idea in mid-July into our [email list] and it was spontaneously taken up by all the people of the world, it just kind of snowballed from there."
Importantly, again more on a personal level, David Graeber was one of the key organizer for and with Occupy:
Ultimately, there are plenty of reasons why Occupy failed, predominately, it was a mixture of zero intentional structure, an exercise in Western Modern Anarchism that can never succeed on a genuine threatening level as well as the thus resulting inability to build coalitions, not only in the US but across so many borders. Nevertheless, this is important and important to us. The crisis never ended, those that caused it were never held accountable, the structural crisis that is Capitalism was threatened BUT it did show the power of numbers. That is key. As i like to think, this was the beginning and it is down to us to move this forward. Capitalism is the crisis and it is up to us to end it.
With that, here are your hotshot for today, share these far and wide, share this newsletter with everyone you know, maybe think about subscribing and as always, thank you for your time and attention.