Artist Ray Voide -- a former Marine who has been with Occupy DC, living in the park for 11 days -- displays his portrait of the park.

In the aftermath of the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucotti Park in New York, the OWS protesters at Occupy DC in McPherson Square on K Street in Washington DC remain committed even more resolutely than before.

Rose, a protester who lived at OWS-NYC for a month before moving to Occupy DC three weeks ago, is confident that that evicted Occupations will re-occupy, and that they will continue efforts to model the building of self-sufficient horizontal communities. She finds Occupy DC more suited to that community building because the space is larger, the occupiers fewer, with more grass and less wind. She said a greenhouse is planned and dental care is now available three days a week.

Another more recent occupier, artist Ray Voide who has lived in the DC area for more than 20 years, has been camped at McPherson Square for 11 days. As a former U. S. Marine he says that if any occupation has the right to exist, it is the one here in Washington DC. To break up Occupy DC would send a message to all Americans that their rights don’t mean anything, he added. He believes that the protesters have already accomplished a lot by getting people to talk about issues of inequality and the role oversized corporations play in politics — putting those issues in the public eye and letting people come to their own conclusions.

I know most faculty, much less students, will not have time to read the Student Success Task Force Draft that various people in CA are proposing to “reform” community colleges. My general impression is that, with a few exceptions, the measures proposed will be harmful to the poorest and bar them from college by assuming they aren’t making an effort if they cannot succeed within needlessly early deadlines even if they are learning and growing. It is also assumed that every student has a computer. So to illustrate the way it works, I imagined applying it to another realm: the public library. Here is my report.

Reserving Libraries For Those Who Can Make Best Use of Them: those with time, skills, and money

A citizen in Tunis shows off a memento of his first free and fair vote. Creative Commons / Freedom at Issue

Tunisia has just held the first free elections of the Arab Spring, nine months after the fall of former President Zinedine el Abidine Ben Ali. There are also feverish meetings, summits galore in Brussels and elsewhere to save the Euro. Then there are the questions around Col Muammar Gaddafi’s death. I guess news in the US is headed by President Obama’s announcement that the last American soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of this year, drawing to a close an eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 US troops. Over 10,000 Iraqi troops and police, and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

But there’s another event that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been dominating your foreign news headlines. Well below the radar screens of all but the most fanatical ‘world-watchers’. A general election for the Swiss parliament.

I’m a convinced democratic. Lower case – a believer in democratic values. As a non-American I wouldn’t hazard a comment on US politics here. My Swiss daily newspaper had a cartoon of a Swiss couple walking past some of the many posters that mark our campaigns, and the man’s saying ‘the only country in the world where we vote to change nothing’. As a dutiful citizen, I read through the 32-page booklet that I got through the post of ‘spicy recipes’ of the different parties for the Federal stew that makes Swiss politics, ending with a real recipe for Engadine barley soup.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the ubiquitous hacktivist (dis)organization Anonymous is celebrating Halloween by threatening to expose the members of Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.

My little county, Rio Arriba, in northern New Mexico, has long been overrun by drugs because of this cartel. The guys on the left are not drug kingpins. They are ranchers. And they are seriously put out with the cartels.

Rio Arriba County suffers the highest heroin and polydrug overdose death rates in the US. A few months ago, a beautiful local mountain lake was befouled when a plane flying low to avoid being detected by radar crashed into it, spewing cocaine, fuel, and bodyparts into the water. Nobody knows who was in the plane.

Our rural Hispanic and Native American youth are being systematically plied with drugs by Mexican and Californian gangs to entice them to become mules. We have watched our teen drinking rate creep upward. Children as young as 12 are now addicted to heroin.

I couldn’t be happier that Anonymous has taken on the cartel. However, I wonder if bloggers everywhere will suddenly find themselves targets in a new kind of war. I know how quickly those kinds of wars can sneak up on you.

CROSS-POSTED AT Native American Netroots

Creative Commons / Adrian Kinloch

This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.

The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”

• We want to replace a society based on selfishness and materialism with a society based on caring for each other and caring for the planet.

• We want a new bottom line so that institutions, corporations, government policies, and even personal behavior are judged rational or productive or efficient not only by how much money or power gets generated, but also by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, environmental and ethical behavior, and how much we are able to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement the grandeur and mystery of all Being.

• To take the first steps, we want to ban all money from elections except that supplied by government on an equal basis to all major candidates, require free and equal time for the candidates and prohibit buying other time or space, and require corporations to get a new corporate charter once every five years which they can only get if they can prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. We call this the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution (ESRA).

• We want to replace the mistaken notion that homeland security can be achieve through a strategy of world domination by our corporations suppoted by the US military and intelligence services with a strategy of generosity and caring for others in the world that will start by launching a Global Marshall Plan that dedicates 1-2% of our GMP ever year for the next twenty to once and for all eliminate global poverty homelessnes, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care — knowing that this, not an expanded militarr, is what will give us security.

• And we want a NEW New Deal that provides a job for everyone who wants to work, jobs that rebuild our environment and our infrastructre, and jobs that allow us to take better care of educating our youth and caring for the aged. That’s what we are for! And you can read more about them at www.spiritualprogressives.org

Ok, it was two minutes instead of 20 seconds, but we deserve that amount of time.

by Matthew Remski

Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness.

Watch Slavoj Zizek to see how it works. Every Occupy Wall Street orator, prohibited by permit laws from amplification (and lights when night falls), stands on a box and delivers his sentences one at a time, each followed by a pause, during which the surrounding ring of listeners, perhaps 20 deep, repeats the sentence verbatim. The repeaters, unburdened by the anxiety of creation, actually improve the clarity of the orator’s rhythm and intonation as they fall into a shared pulse. Orators learn quickly that the sentences with the highest torque are simple and well-metered – from the heartbeat of Zizek’s “They tell you we are dreamers” to the rolling of “The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over.” Michael Moore had to quickly drop his just-a-regular-guy banter, which in human-microphone-land makes him weak and self-deprecating. And Cornel West pulled the oration of Southern Baptism out of another decade and firmly jammed it into the hipster ears. Everyone speaks of spirit, and love. These are no longer ideas through this media but thrusts of embodiment that ripple through the group neurology.

Some orators attract so many listeners that multiple relay rings form spontaneously. This can slow down the oration up to fourfold, as each orbit of 20-deep repeats the sentence, and each ring forms a distinct choir: more men in this one, more women in that, a clear tenor back there, and a rowdier group who always wants to clap and cheer more than the rest. The centrifuge of sentiment and meaning extends to the horizon of the physical gathering, and then meets the threshold of the digisphere, where the Twitter birds listen and then fly. In Zuccotti Park, meaning starts with a heartbeat, and then it accelerates as it flies outward. But its plodding beginning forms a natural control upon the ego-inflation so easily amplified by electricity and then distorted beyond all embodied measure.

Flickr / David_Shankbone

by Donna Schaper

Older people want to know what is next. Turns out they’re the impatient ones. Younger people don’t want to go there – they trust the process.

Everyone’s got a point. Old folks worry that without a plan, without a program, this glorious fragile beginning will remain just that. When Mayor Bloomberg gets annoyed, he’ll shut it down, we worry. If there’s a confrontation with the cops because folks get grumpy, they will shut it down. Or if the weather gets really, really bad, THAT will shut it down.

Younger people know that their tactics have sparked a movement. They figured out how to have public conversations without microphones. They’ve organized Zuccotti Park better than any of my children ever organized their rooms. They have a growing kitchen of good food, well distributed. They have also managed the sanitation problem and the recycling problem with creativity and élan. They meet ridicule with smiles and increasingly creative signs. They created a slogan – “We’re the 99%” – that is inspiring millions of older folks.

They’re the ones who created the center of gravity, and the world – the media, the unions, the politicians, the clergy – has come into THEIR orbit, not the other way around. They’ve changed the conversation of the rest of us – New York Times columnists, a Presidential news conference, countless personal interactions across the country. We haven’t changed theirs. So they worry a whole lot less. You can hear them saying, “Relax, Mom and Dad – it’s going to be all right.”

The violence vs. non-violence debate about how to build a new society with perspectives from Michael Nagler vs. Uri Avnery

This is a critical debate which evokes significant differences among secular and spiritual progressives. I hope you’ll let me know your reactions to it. I’m a huge fan of Avnery, whose articles regularly appear on our Tikkun web magazine site www.tikkun.org. And a dear friend of Michael Nagler whose writings have been an inspiration to me and many others. I can easily understand the power of Avnery’s argument, though personally I’m on the side of non-violence. Some people misunderstood the title of my last communication where I send “overthrow the Syrian regime.” Yes, but I didn’t mean violently, but instead was meaning to be supporting the non-violent struggle of Syrians against the violence of Asad and his army, and encouraging us in the West to find non-violent ways to help, like boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

Uri Avnery is leader of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement organization in Tel Aviv. Here is his piece:

To The Shores of Tripoli

Though The Bible tells us “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth” (Proverbs 24:17), I could not help myself. I was happy.

Muammar al-Gaddafi was the enemy of every decent person in the world. He was one of the worst tyrants in recent memory.

This fact was hidden behind a façade of clownishness. He liked to present himself as a philosopher (the “Green Book”), a visionary statesman (Israelis and Palestinians must unite in the “State of Isratine”), even as an immature teenager (his innumerable uniforms and costumes). But basically he was a ruthless dictator, surrounded by corrupt relatives and cronies, squandering the great wealth of Libya.

This is the second half of a two-part series. Read the first part here.

Brian McLaren’s description of the problems humanity now faces is more accurate than we usually get from preachers, politicians and the mass media. But has he adequately clarified the institutional resistance that must be overcome to alter or abolish the Societal Machine that he says has become a Suicidal Machine. His largely realistic description of this Machine has a curious blind spot, which needs correction if we are to develop an effective counter-approach. His Christianity is a source of strength but also of limitation: Jesus lived in a social order radically different from ours, one that prevented him from seeing the problems we face today and developing solutions now open to us, if we can act collectively.

The Core of Jesus’ Vision

Ultimately, Jesus’ vision (and McLaren’s) is based on and limited by the idea of radical generosity. Generosity, like its opposite stinginess, is a question of distribution. It is closely related to (though somewhat different from) distributive justice, which is concerned with fairness in distribution. McLaren hardly mentions production except as the source of the goods we consume. Yet even the first “law” of Theocapitalism, Progress through Rapid Growth, is usually understood in terms of growth of production.

The modern system of production, the capital system, did not exist in premodern society; it did not exist in ancient Palestine, in the Roman Empire, or anywhere else for that matter before 1500.

An anguished confession by “President Baruch O Bema,” as channeled through Phil Wolfson:

When I took office, I had convinced many of you that I would be honest, forthright, for democracy for all, against big corporate and financial interests and would champion an economic, emotional, cultural and political resurgence and rectification after the greed and near fascism of the Bush years. Many of you thought I would bring honesty back to politics and that I was made of other stuff — good stuff. There was great enthusiasm for my administration and me and I made promises, even vows, that my presidency would be different and usher in a new era of intelligence, capability, and justice. I had spoken clearly and frequently about the environmental crisis, about international corporatism’s grip on the political system, about the need for campaign finance reform.

I have to confess: I was posturing to get elected and had no intention of doing anything but supporting the system as it was, promoting U.S. imperial ambitions abroad, supporting global finance corporatism and making sure that the rich folks I truly admired and who helped me out, many of them information age capitalists, would have their interests served. So here we are, approaching three years into my term and things are a wreck. I have to come clean.

Credit: http://feministgal.blogspot.com/2009/04/this-year-at-passover.html

by Dan Brook

In the Passover Haggadah, we retell the story of our ancient enslavement in Egypt as well as our escape from that slavery. One of the central parts of this story is the parable of the four children, who each ask their own question with each receiving their own answer.

Like the four children, there are also four citizens. We must approach each person differently, so that each can be reached where they are, while inspiring them to do more, to do the sacred work of a citizen, the job of making one’s life and one’s society better, more civil, and more just. All of these citizens can teach us something, and each of them, both actually and potentially, is inside each of us.

In every generation, we should each and all remember that we were once slaves in Egypt who escaped to become physically and spiritually freer; we should likewise each and all remember that whether in Jerusalem, the Warsaw Ghetto, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, or elsewhere, the Passover seder has been used to recall our history, strengthen our culture, discuss contemporary issues, and plan future actions.

1) The first citizen is the activist citizen, struggling for both personal growth and social change, who asks “What is the meaning of Pesach, in every way, so that we may apply the lessons to the various Egypts we live in today?” We should both teach and learn from citizens like this, joining with them in social action to make a better world, while encouraging them to learn more about the actions they engage in, thereby making vital connections between theory and practice, faith and action, being and doing.

This spring Jewish Voice for Peace (I am a founding member of the Seattle Chapter) is sponsoring a tour of young Palestinian activists to speak in over fifteen cities in the US to discuss the challenges facing Palestinian students who live under Israeli military occupation. I was fortunate to hear Mira Dabit and Hanna Qassis speak in Seattle, and I also got a chance to interview them about right to education issues in Palestine, their lives under occupation, and their hopes for a better future.

Mira Dabit photo by Emma Klein

Mira Dabit, 25, was born in Jerusalem to a refugee family originally from the 1948 city of Al Lod. She has been a youth activist and folkloric storyteller for many years. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology from Birzeit University. After graduating, she moved to Ireland where she volunteered with community initiatives for three years. Back in Palestine, Mira is continuing her activism with youth and education, including the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University.

Hanna Qassis, 27, is from the town of Birzeit, Palestine. He graduated from Birzeit University in 2006 with a BA in Business Administration, and is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in International Studies. In addition to working for the Academy for Educational Development in the West Bank, Hanna is a political and youth activist who volunteers with several Palestinian civil society organizations.

At a talk at Seattle University on April 11, 2010, they both spoke movingly about the role of education in Palestine. Mira posited that education has been important to Palestinians because the loss of their land in 1948 meant that many Palestinians also lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Education was what they had left, and she sees it as a tool for Palestinians to tell their stories and educate people about their lives.

The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin.

With a Smile, Photo by Rebecca Congo

Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14″ showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity.

Photo of and by Rebecca Congo+Friend

On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

Meaningful Individual Acts, Meaningful Collective Acts

April 4^th and 5^th, there were dozens of opportunities to participate in democracy both publicly and privately. At least five activities were planned for the South Bay (Please comment and post photos if you attended one of these.)

Rebels in Bengazi, Libya, unfurl a banner declaring their opposition to foreign intervention. This photo was taken on March 1, 2011. Photo by Al Jazeera with a Creative Commons Licence

How could any right minded person be against the use of force to stop the Libyan government’s repression of dissent? Incredibly brave demonstrators take to the streets, demanding freedom, democracy, and a more equitable share of Libya’s enormous oil/natural gas wealth – and they are met savage brutality. Foreign mercenaries from far away, using the power of tanks and airplanes, assault a poorly armed but politically aroused citizenry.

For God’s sake, let’s give them hand. Enforce the no-fly zone, bomb their anti-aircraft installations, make sure the good guys at least have a fighting chance. If there is some inadvertent damage or death because a few smart bombs land in the wrong place – well, it can’t be helped. This is justified. This is the time.

I must admit that even as an almost complete pacifist I am very tempted by this line of thought. And if it were up to me – and it’s a good thing it isn’t – I would probably go along with this move.

But I also think it’s important to keep a few other things in mind. In no particular order:

1. Who are the mercenaries? We talk about stopping Gaddafi as if this crazed and vicious man were out there on the battlefield with a machine gun. No, the people doing his killing for him, who will die from our bombs, are human beings just like us. Many have taken on a terrible job, in all probability because this was a way out of the terrible social and economic conditions that plague much of Africa. Conditions into which they were born and over which they have practically no control (as we, similarly, have little control over our government’s frequently violent foreign policy, or the effects of our energy use on the world climate). When we attack Gaddafi’s forces these people will die. Do they “deserve” to die, I wonder? Let’s keep in mind that to get to him we have to go through them.

Today marks the one-month period since Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrators forced the departure of Hosni Mubarak. The popular resistance that coalesced in Cairo’s Tahrir captured the world’s attention and demonstrated the efficacy of nonviolent resistance. Since Mubarak’s exit, autocrats throughout the Arab world have scrambled to institute reforms to placate increasingly strident demands for democracy from their populations. Libya has descended into civil war as Muammar Gaddafi, the region’s longest-ruling dictator, has unleashed horrific levels of violence against pro-democracy protesters. As the region remains in turmoil and the world’s attention has become focused elsewhere, it’s worth reflecting on the feelings that were ignited by the Cairo protests.

People throughout Egypt and the Arab world, long-suffering under aging despots and their Secret Police apparata, saw what it looked like to live without fear in a society in which all truly had a stake. Egyptian-Lebanese poet Yahia Lababidi saw the protests and understood that a profound social, cultural, and psychological shift was underway in Egypt. He sent us this piece, explaining:

This was written hours after Mubarak’s frankly contemptuous last speech, and several hours before the exhilarating news of a Free Egypt, the following evening. Everyone was crestfallen that the president, who had once boasted he had ‘a PhD in stubborness’ had not announced his resignation, and rumors were circulating that things were going to turn vicious the following day. It was even suggested this was all part of the regime’s cynical strategy: to raise hopes, and frustrate them, until demonstrators lose patience and turn violent. Then, those in power, would have the excuse to fire on them: Tiananmen Square-style. I was not convinced. I believed with all my being that Love – for life and Egypt – would prevail and the peace, civility, and tenacity that marked this People’s Uprising would triumph. And so I wrote this piece…

Daring to Care: Notes on the Egyptian Revolution

by Yahia Lababidi

Overheard in Tahrir Square — Muslim brotherhood man to secular woman:

There was a curtain between us that made us fear each other and misunderstand each other. After spending these days here, fighting together, eating together, and bearing the cold I can see that we are not different and that we may have different ideas but we can easily communicate and respect each other

I know I’m not alone when I say my heart has been, and remains, full-to-bursting with the remarkable series of events taking place back Home. The mark, and success, of a true revolution is not merely overthrowing an old regime, but ushering in new ways of thinking and Being. Which is why it’s so uplifting for me to see so many of the false barriers being toppled: say, between men and women, whom we saw out at the protests, chanting for equality, in unison, and even praying side by side in the streets; or Muslims and Christians, who came together as Egyptians, in respect, and protected one another. As Egyptian writer Ahdaf Souief says: ‎”They said we were divided, extreme, ignorant, fanatic – well here we are: diverse, inclusive, hospitable, generous, sophisticated, creative and witty.”

It’s a sad day in Wisconsin. Yesterday afternoon in less than two hours, our Republican Senators — after insisting for a month that their union-busting law was needed because the state was broke — separated the collective bargaining sections of the bill from the financial parts and then passed it. They no longer needed a Democratic Senator for a quorum, since the bill was no longer ostensibly about finances! They unmasked themselves with this political maneuver. Now everyone can see that it never was about the money. It was an attack on workers’ rights all along. And despite massive protests last night and today, the Republican Assembly passed the bill as well.

Many of us thought Republican legislators were shoving an undemocratic bill down our throats three weeks ago. But at least they gave us six days (a ridiculously short amount of time) to think and talk about it then. Yesterday’s two hours of discussion breaks that record by a yard. The upshot of all this is that 60 years of workers’ rights have been swept away using undemocratic methods for an undemocratic outcome (there will probably be a lawsuit about the tactics). This is especially hard to take, since polls show that anywhere from 65% – 74% of Wisconsinites believe that public workers should have the right to organize.

This Sunday, I published an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal North explaining why I terminated a pregnancy at 16. I was inspired by Democratic Representatives Gwen Moore (WI) and Jackie Speier (CA) who stood up on the House floor in the middle of an assault on Planned Parenthood and the definition of rape and described their own decisions to end a pregnancy.

I intend to mail a photocopy of my editorial to the Congresswomen.

I hope every woman who has ever faced this decision will do the same. If we refuse to be intimidated or shamed, then we can’t be intimidated or shamed.

My public response, which appeared in the Journal North on March 6th follows below the jump. (Sorry, I can’t link because I don’t have a paid subscription to the Journal online).

Photo from giaitri59

I was at a recent conversation event with 16 reasonably well informed, educated people who came together to discuss the recent political unrest in the Middle East. One interesting thread in the conversation was that most of the people in the group were at a loss to understand why this was happening now or what started it. We realized that we had no cultural narrative or ideology that would explain what was going on, or how it would turn out. Perhaps there was one evolving narrative that explained some of it in hindsight though. When those in power maintain their power through fear, they can be overthrown by the population when people lose their fear. That loss of fear can spread like wildfire fueled by a combination of being inspired by others, and a belief that they have nothing to lose because of a bleak outlook for their current situation. When a system maintained by fear is teetering on the brink in an increasingly unstable situation, the efforts of single individuals can have a major impact on what happens next. That brings me to my two nominations for the Nobel Peace prize for this year.

When I see the crowds protesting against laws that would strip the collective bargaining rights of government employees, I see an apt comparison to the crowds protesting for freedom across the Middle East. Some observers – Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and New York Times columnist David Brooks among them – think that the comparison goes too far. On Meet the Press, Sunday February 27, David Gregory wanted his guests who supported the protesters to denounce the signs that compared Governor Walker to Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak and to Hitler. I agree that we ought to just leave Hitler to history, but in many ways the comparison to Mubarak is not incorrect.

It is true that the people of Wisconsin and of the other states protesting similar legislation are not ruled by an autocrat who has held power for thirty years. It is true that they are free to peacefully assemble without worry of police brutality. It is true that their complaint is with governors who have been elected recently. The similarity that I see is that people are taking to the street both in the Middle East and in the Mid-West in the United States for the sake of winning and of keeping their human rights. And human rights are not ends in themselves; rather they are means to an end. The end is a better quality of life.