Occupy Wall Street and beyond

This video from the USA is called Noam Chomsky Addresses Occupy Boston Protesters.

Noam Chomsky, Truthout: “I’ve never seen anything quite like the Occupy movement in scale and character, here and worldwide. The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that’s already coming. That the Occupy movement is unprecedented seems appropriate because this is an unprecedented era, not just at this moment but since the 1970s”: here.

Occupy Wall Street protesters denounced New York Governor Cuomo for his refusal to extend the “millionaires’ tax”: here.

Occupy Oakland, occupyoakland.org: “We as fellow occupiers of Oscar Grant Plaza propose that on Wednesday November 2, 2011, we liberate Oakland and shut down the 1%. We propose a city wide general strike and we propose we invite all students to walk out of school. Instead of workers going to work and students going to school, the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city. All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them”: here.

Federal Judge Threatens Oakland Police Department With Court Takeover Over Ongoing Abuses: here.

If It Bleeds, It Distracts: Police Brutality Threatens Occupiers’ Bodies – and Message. J.A. Myerson, Truthout: “Perhaps it is the excitement of footage that resembles urban warfare which tempts so many reporters into pursuing the ‘protesters vs. police officers’ narrative. However, the primary effect of highlighting it is to distract from the focus of the protest, says a 22-year-old protester from Boston calling herself ‘Mom’: ‘Not only does it detract from our anti-fraudulence message; every time we have to answer questions about it, it takes away from what we came here to do, which is protest against greedy, scheming corporations'”: here.

Susan Galleymore, Truthout: “One single bicycle – and many pedaling people – powers Occupy San Francisco’s media center: three laptops, a handful of cell phones and wi-fi hotspots. It is fitting that, on the day when as many as 5,000 protested outside Wells Fargo Bank, something as simple, sustainable and ubiquitous as a bicycle video-streamed and communicated the goings-on to the rest of the country and the world”: here.

Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog: “A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing. As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America. Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news – it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s”: here.