Surviving Progress


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Our mental software is ill prepared for the technological experiment humans have unleashed on the natural world … but it’s not too late to update the program. If you haven’t already, check out this award-winning documentary inspired by Ronald Wright’s 2005 book, A Short History of Progress.

URL: http://survivingprogress.com

Spiritual Insurrection

The ultimate culture jam.

by
Adbusters

From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet?

Spiritual Insurrection: The ultimate culture jam
Emilio Morenatti/AP Images

This article is available in:

We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.

And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?

Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.

In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

#OccupyOakland

Live stream from the nonviolent Occupy Movement in NYC and financial districts around the world.

#OccupyOakland via @OakFoSho

Live stream from the nonviolent Occupy Movement in NYC and financial districts around the world.

Pre-emptive strike

Move your money.

From Adbusters Blog

When the G8 meet in Chicago in May, it will be a major moment of truth for the global economy.

Already there are all sorts of ideas percolating – Robin Hood tax, banning high frequency flash trading, a true cost economy, bio-economics – that will lead to reform of the global financial system.

But in the meantime there is something we can all do to set the stage for #Occupy Chicago, and that is the personal action to move our money away from the big banks.

It’s easier than you think. You find the credit union in your town or city that you like. You make an appointment. You tell them, “I would like to leave my bank and join your credit union.” They say, “you got it, we’ll take care of it.” It will be the most pro-active hour of your week.

On February 1st if you haven’t already taken the opportunity, join these Canadian rabble-rousers to move your money.

Move Your Money Day Canada: February 1 / Move Your Money Project

Engineered Inequality

“Winner Take All Politics” authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson discuss Washington’s preoccupation with the economic concerns of the 1% at the expense of the rest.

Tactical Briefing #25

Showdown in Chicago.

From Adbusters Blog

Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

CANG8.org / ChicagoMassAction.org / Occupy Chicago
Adbusters / Facebook / Twitter / Reddit

Hobsbawm on Occupy

Capitalism is making humanity obsolete.

From Adbusters Blog

Legendary British historian Eric Hobsbawm discusses the “pathological degeneration” of capitalism today.

URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9682626.stm

Occupy Davos

Capitalisms’ Cinderella’s Ball.

From Adbusters Blog

This years’ World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, marks the start of the perennial capitalist meet-and-greet summit season.

The economic equivalent of the Oscars, the WEF is a time for the 0.1% to celebrate the achievements and successes of free-markets, and to discuss how to keep the crumbling ship from running ashore; it’s also a time to get in a few good runs on the slopes, deep tissue massages and a soothing hot tub session on the 99%’s dime.

Nestled in the picturesque Swiss Alps where the melting glaciers are deceptively intact and the hotels serviced by an army of invisible temporary workers, approximately 2000 global elites discuss everything from redistributing their obscene profits (a.k.a philanthropy) and environmental sustainability, to forecasting new areas of expansion and the future of capitalism.

On this latter note, delegates will be treated to a special brainstorming session on corporate capitalism’s forecast led by the wisdom of Bank of America CEO, Bryan Moynihan. Then to jazz things up, there will be several roundtable discussions with social media and internet hotshots, Facebook and Google, on how the revolutionary elements of web organizing can reinforce market growth.

Gag. Why hasn’t a stink bomb already gone off in this place?

Here is the latest on the Occupy igloo’s outside the Davos security permitter.

Globalizing Dissent


See video

The Occupy movement has taken much of its inspiration from Spain’s “Outraged” movement. What lessons does Spain have for Occupy now?

Via The Real News. Transcript of the interview available here.

Demand The Impossible

The historic task ahead.

From Adbusters Blog

This article first appeared on Socialist.org

THE PAST four months of the Occupy Movement have brought the American left to new heights. For the 99 percent, who represent the vast majority of the world’s population, the Occupy movement was long overdue.

Occupy has been a podium from which muzzled mouths have made a militant microphone. From this platform, we have mic-checked the 1 percent, and finally, it seems that we have found a voice of our own.

As with any movement, Occupy has fostered an internal debate about what tactics are necessary to take the movement forward. It’s an important question that requires careful consideration of the relation of social forces at play, the existing support outside of the movement and, perhaps most importantly, what possibilities lie in front of the movement–that is, the tangible goals the movement can set for itself.

Some Occupiers feel strongly that the movement should demand absolutely nothing from the economic and political system it’s rising up against. After all, the argument goes, the strength of the Occupy Movement thus far has been its potent indictment of the ruling class, coupled with its refusal to make any discernable demands or empower any official spokespeople.

However, by taking direct aim at the relationship between capital and the state, Occupy has raised the issue of class struggle in the U.S. That gauntlet having been thrown, the question in front of the movement is how to advance the interests of its class: the 99 percent.

In a sense, Occupy has diagnosed the ailments of the American political system, but hasn’t yet prescribed any cures. Having raised the level of political awareness, the movement must now fashion class consciousness into political action.

This task cannot be accomplished by maintaining a dismissive attitude toward the 1 percent and the state that represents them, or by failing to articulate demands against them, but by equipping ourselves with the political tools necessary to develop our movement.

To the ruling class, Occupy has been aggressive, but maddeningly oblique. “What are the demands?” Who are the leaders?” the fat cats of high finance ask. Occupy’s tactics have certainly been effective: the ruling class stretched itself thin to receive Occupy’s attack, overcompensated violently and exposed its ideological flank.

The legitimacy of the system failed, revealing its true nature. The democracy of the 1 percent is a sham; their police are but armed mercenaries. Their rebuttals to our encampments: Sanitation! Safety! Security! They are pale cover words for: Repression! Repression! Repression still! As if we are to believe that suddenly they care for the people who live every day of their lives in squalor and crime.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE OCCUPY Movement should be least concerned with what the 1 percent thinks of us, and only concerned with what the 99 percent thinks about us. And to this end, we do need demands, not to explain ourselves to the 1 percent, but rather to anchor Occupy in the daily lives of the people whom we aspire to involve in our movement.

The exposed hypocrisy of the ruling class has provided us with a blank slate. We can leverage the capitalist state’s claims to democracy against their determination to squelch free speech and the right to assembly. We can fashion the violence of the police into a tool revealing the true nature of the armed thugs “policing” our streets.

The state is the executive board of Wall Street, but Occupy is the anvil of the people. We can build our base. We can craft a culture of the 99 percent to counter that of the 1 percent. We have the ability to forge our movement into a hammer that can shape a new reality.

But what is needed to advance our movement to these bold new positions? Again, Occupy’s tactics have been effective so far, but we must anticipate that the ruling class will adapt. The coordinated repression against encampments nationwide speaks to this–as well as the 1 percent’s penchant for answering a challenge with blunt force.

Just as we must continue to challenge the 1 percent, we must also do so on a radically inclusive basis with concrete politics rooted in our daily lives. This means formulating demands and crafting slogans. However, some feel that to propose demands is only to legitimize the status quo. Take, for example, the arguments put forward by Deric Stingh in a recent Occupy Chicago DIY publication The Supplement:

Some of us have spontaneously conjured reformist schemes trying to divert us back into the very status quo we rebelled against, speaking in the voice of the Masters, “The Occupy Movement needs to have a set of concrete demands.” By doing so, we will “explain” and “justify” to “mainstream America” our actions. This is fatuous, a false prerequisite and a reflection of the poverty of imagination. These reformist schemes have been expressed in seemingly innocuous forms like “Tax the rich” or “Where’s our bailout?”

This, however, is a misstep made all too often in the movement. We can draw new people into the movement not just with our opposition to the 1 percent, but also with a message that has the potential to resonate within the awakening consciousness of the 99 percent.

In the U.S., the Occupy movement has attracted a vast layer of supporters who are not yet involved. What is needed to activate them? Politics! Not in the abstract. But concrete. With demands we can demonstrate to all the soulful refrain of the Paris Commune: “Our interests are the same.”

Furthermore, the demand of “Tax the rich” implicitly operates beyond the scope of this current capitalist economic system. This demand represents a dialogue of wealth redistribution beyond the scope of the 1 percent’s project of capital accumulation.

Likewise, the rallying slogan of “Where’s our bailout?” directly calls into question the bank bailouts of 2008 and begs the question of why the 99 percent were expected to sacrifice under this tremendous recession, while those responsible for crashing the economy have raked in billions of taxpayer dollars.

“Where is our bailout” is a fair statement in favor of both wealth redistribution and for a just and equal society. After all, let’s consider what kind of government would enact these demands: a government comfortably ensconced in the pocket of the 1 percent, or a government of the people?

This isn’t a question of asking for table scraps from the 1 percent–this is about taking a stand on issues that directly impact our lives. Giving the proverbial bird to the existing power structure in the face of unbearable living conditions the world over isn’t enough at the end of an equally unbearable day.

Remember that demands for reforms may also germinate broader, more radical platforms. Rather than dismiss them as the murmurs of sold-out activists lacking imagination, the sincere left must claim these slogans and demands for our own, infuse them with radical politics and demand greater concessions still. Will the 1 percent not concede? Then we will continue to expose them! This is our political legacy: fight for reforms to realize our collective strength and power in struggle, then continue on to actualize our revolution.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

CAN THE historic task in front of Occupy be accomplished in its current form? It cannot. This presupposes a unity that the heterogeneous ideologies that flow under the surface of the movement have yet to achieve. Occupy rests across a spectrum of politics ranging from liberal to radical, from revolutionary to reformist. Some activists are still developing their political opinions, while others carry the blueprint for a new society.

Despite this broad spectrum of views, Occupy has gone from public square occupations to attempted general strikes, from skirmishes with police to national days of action against police repression.

It is necessary to articulate demands, and grievances that are bound under a unified set of independent political principles. We cannot ignore the 1 percent–who control the media, poison our skies and seas, and whisper consumer nothings in our ears. We must topple them–they who oppress us as people of color, they who condemn us as the poor to ignorance, they who bash us as queer, they who destroy and degrade our earth, and they who have stripped us of our people’s history.

What is needed is a more potent injection of politics, reclaimed history and the fortitude to continue to fight back. We have to heal the fissures of the left–we have to scrape out sectarianism, bandage coalition and promote solidarity. When they beat us back with repression, we will return the blows with democratic organization.

The success of concrete political tactics is measurable. We can see perspectives play out, we can assess our collective actions, and we can structure our strategy to be most effective. “Going off the grid” isn’t an option; we have to face a brutish system that wants us to lose.

There are tangible ways to measure our progress–student activity, the involvement of organized and unorganized labor, and the activation of sympathetic, community support. All of this is made possible with politics.

Future Possibilities For OWS

An interview with Adbusters Editor-in-Chief Kalle Lasn.

From Adbusters Blog

Earlier this month, reporters from Canadian Business sat down with Adbusters Editor-in-Chief Kalle Lasn to ask his thoughts on what Occupy might look like in 2012. Here’s what he had to say.

Canadian Business: On the U.S. presidential election:

Kalle Lasn: Most young people, 99% of the occupiers I would say, are pretty disillusioned with Obama. We feel that he has become a kind of a gutless wonder who didn’t do what he had promised. He has disappointed us bitterly. When it comes to a choice between somebody like Rick Perry and Obama, then of course people will vote for Obama, but not in great numbers and without much enthusiasm.

I think the really interesting thing that could happen leading up to the presidential election is that there will be rumblings of third parties. Especially people in the Occupy movement are totally sick of this Coca-Cola/Pepsi kind of choice that Americans have had for so long. They’re yearning for a real choice, for real democracy, and we may well see the beginnings of a third party rising next year. Of course, I don’t think that it will suddenly challenge the Republican and Democratic parties, but it could well play the role of the spoiler in the way that Ralph Nader and Ross Perot and the Green Party have never quite been able to do.

Read the entire interview:
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/66423–interview-kalle-lasn-publ…

Ireland’s 99% left holding the bag


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Once a rising star in the industrialized world, Ireland now has the highest per capita national debt in the world – a debt to be paid by the people, not the 1% behind the crash.

Read more at Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2012/01/2012119847466…

Does OWS Have a Future?

The question mark that hangs over our movement.

From Adbusters Blog

Mike Emery is a sociology student at the University of Maine. This article first appeared in The Maine Campus.

Tuesday marks the four-month anniversary of the Occupy movement. Perhaps it’s time to ask the question: Is it working? In four months, has progress been made toward realizing the movement’s goals?

As much as I would like to be able to answer with an emphatic “yes,” reality is much less encouraging for Occupiers, who haven’t been able to maintain a consistent focus.

On July 13, 2011, Adbusters bloggers proposed an occupation of America’s financial center, slated to begin on Sept. 17. “[W]e want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” the post read.

So far, so good.

“Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices,” according to the post.

And that “one simple demand” is the problem.

That original proposal was based on the Egyptian uprising and the Arab Spring in general. The organization proposed that OWS should demand “a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

Such a commission could have had a great and immediate impact on American politics or made proposals to lay a foundation for future reforms, like the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Instead, the idea was abandoned.

On Sept. 29, the 13th day of the Occupation, the General Assembly at Zuccotti Park issued a declaration listing 23 grievances against major corporations. Nowhere did this declaration call for a Presidential Commission, or for any action, except to suggest direct democratic participation and an admonition to “[e]xercise your right to peaceably assemble.”

We have seen peaceable assembly in the months since; we haven’t seen political action.

Compare this to the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt. Protests began on Jan. 25 and on Feb. 11, President Hosni Mubarak resigned. The revolution continued, and democracy is still at risk. Nevertheless, in less than a month, the Tahrir protesters did something that the OWS protesters haven’t yet done: They gave their country an opportunity for real change. They achieved their first major goal and then moved on to continue fighting.

The Occupy movement has tried to keep organization loose – the various local Occupy protests are linked in name and in spirit but have no obligation to support a particular political agenda. This has led to political fragmentation, as each group of protesters agitates for their own particular reforms. Some of these reforms have stayed on the target of reducing corporate influence in American politics, while others branch out unnecessarily.

For example, among the 23 grievances listed by the General Assembly at Zuccotti Park, there were references to corporations blocking renewable energy, mistreating animals and perpetuating colonialism. A flyer for an Occupy UMaine rally in November stated, “The Greedy Government & Corporations should be feeding & clothing the hungry, homeless, & struggling hard working American families.”

While I applaud the various groups of Occupiers for trying to keep these issues in the spotlight as long as the Occupy movement has it, the lack of focus on one singular, powerful reform has allowed Occupy opponents to paint the movement as one of radicals and hippies, letting inattentive members of the public gloss over the fundamental idea of the protests: Corporate influence in government perpetuates unhealthy levels of inequality.

Every other complaint, every proposed reform, stems from this issue.

As we’ve seen in Egypt – where protests and grassroots political action continue almost a year after President Mubarak’s resignation – a political movement doesn’t have to stop when it achieves its first goal.

Social activism is a task that never ends. As it stands now, the Occupy movement is showing us that without focus, a social movement with its heart in the right place and international support can squander its political potential.

Mike Emery is a fourth year sociology student at the University of Maine. His political columns appear every Wednesday in The Maine Campus.

What do you think? Does our movement have a future? Can we brainstorm/network through winter and come out swinging in the Spring?

A Message Entangled With Its Form

The deeper tones of Occupy.

by
Nicole Demby

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

A Message Entangled with its Form
Senén Llanos

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

As I walk through lush Brownstone Brooklyn at night, I try to reconcile the stillness that pervades these streets with the urgency of Liberty Plaza. I wonder, did I lose touch with the beauty of the wet bluestone and wrought iron gates somewhere along the course of one of my many feverish runs to the 4/5 station to get to Wall Street?

I know that I’m young, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the quaking I feel is the strength of my own heartbeat or the earth moving under my feet. I wonder if it’s impossible at any age to have perspective from the midst of something that resembles a movement; I imagine the view from the middle of the General Assembly looks dramatically different than the one from a calmer, more static place.

Yet the quaking earth hypothesis is supported by the fact that perhaps the sight from Liberty Plaza is similar to the one a person might have glimpsed from Tahrir Square, from Madison’s Capitol Square, from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, from among the indignados in Madrid and the protests in Greece. In Liberty Plaza, occupiers’ disaffection is part of a powerful surge of global discontent, a surge that is manifesting itself in the collective realization of bodies and voices as strategic tools for communication and collective action.

Many feel an immediacy springing from a loss of stability, an affordable education, a job, a home, a pension, health insurance, that we had taken for granted. Even those who don’t face immediately precarious situations are admitting to themselves that something has been terribly wrong for some time. We watched as our government deregulated the market and then bailed out the banks whose criminal activities led to the financial implosion; as they cut the taxes of the rich while 15% of American families fell below the poverty line; as they spent billions of dollars on imperial wars that divert money away from education and infrastructure and from any real solution to avert environmental degradation. If we’ve been apathetic, its because we’ve failed to see how to act. We have learned to be wary of “Change.” We lack faith in our politicians, entrenched as they are in the impotent theatrics of the two-party system.

Yet in Liberty Plaza people find themselves confronted with a radically inclusive new platform. In the horizontality of this platform, many who are disaffected now see a means of engagement that is immediate and real. If Occupy Wall Street has failed to use this platform to limit itself to a discrete set of demands, it is because it refuses to undermine the depth and breadth of what’s wrong. OWS’s message is entangled with its form, its self-sustaining structure in which the group provides for its own physical, social and intellectual needs. Given the group’s collective intelligence, it is becoming evident that its members can teach each other as much as, if not more than any, institution can.

Much has been made of the people’s microphone. When it works, its power is immense. People within hearing range chant each other’s words to convey them to those standing on the periphery of the larger group. Each person pits herself between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener in a manner that is both self-affirming and egoless. Loudly echoing the voice of another feels a bit like cursing, a vigorous and strangely gratifying speech act.

Occupiers are learning to use their bodies in ways that break with the modes of moving circumscribed by our culture of efficiency and the near-total encroachment of privatized space. Its members are learning how to stay in one place, how to civilly disobey, how to dumpster dive, how to interrupt auction proceedings. They are also confronting their bodies and the bodies of others, the cold, the rain, the smells and needs that bodies have that we can deal with so quickly in the comfort of the office and the home.

Occupy Wall Street is streamed, tweeted, posted and reposted. It is a curiosity, a screen for projection, a spectator sport, everyone’s favorite and most hated child. Yet people continue to come daily who earnestly want to join or to aid the effort. OWS has become a receptacle for the lost progressive hopes of a previous generation. Despite the attempts of some media sources to caricature the occupiers, they constitute a diverse group that is attracting even more diversity. OWS has gained the support of many labor unions and community groups. Most importantly, its existence is enabling a necessary discourse to enter the mainstream.

Liberty Plaza can also be an immensely frustrating, anxiety-provoking and chaotic space. Sometimes the chaos threatens to prevail and dissolve the whole. This is a particular risk now: as its numbers grow, OWS must become capable of incorporating interested parties in meaningful ways and must begin a real conversation about its own future. Yet in this heightened unknown many sense something uncanny, something real that feels unreal because it has been suppressed by layers and layers of banal culture, farcical politics and corporate sterility. They see a spark of true, systemic indeterminacy, in contrast to the systems entrenched by the collusion of money and power.

Occupy Wall Street is still a writhing, inchoate entity, yet it has a structure that can and must beget more structure. Its future is totally unknown, but the commitment among OWS’s ranks, the resonance of its message, and the appreciation so many feel for the rupture it presents from the status quo, assures me that this occupation will persist, whatever this persistence looks like. Perhaps the group will recognize the naivety of the dreams of its most utopian members, and compromise soon to settle on a list of specific economic demands. Occupiers are smart and knowledgeable, and have big, open ears to those even more so. More probably the occupation will continue to grow, to spread to other cities, to protest, and to self-determine, choosing to partake in a society whose structure its members believe in, rather than one corrupted to the point of disrepair.

In my more lucid moments, I know that Occupy Wall Street is a lichen that is preparing the intractable political ground for more substantive plant growth. In my dreams, however, Occupy Wall Street will evince its true self not when the media and well-meaning liberals tell it to produce a message, nor when it hands over its momentum to sympathetic, institutionalized political groups, but when the egalitarian entity it has created itself yields some kind of answer.

Nicole Demby is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn.

Corporate Assault


See video

American unions have been in steady decline for two decades, accounting for a paltry 7% of workers today. Al-Jazeera investigates the concentrated attack by mega-corporations on labor and how #Occupy Wall Street could spark revival.

Buy Canadian Tar Sands

Watch this petroleum industry funded ad that just debuted on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

From Adbusters Blog

If your jaw is still gaping, it’s completely understandable. Propaganda at its most base level can do that. Take a moment … ask yourself, who are these people? Where are their offices? How much political favor has their crude cash purchased?

Over the holidays let’s put our heads together: how can we make the people who made this ad pay a price.

What would be a tactical response of equal spectacle?

Occupy Harvard’s Latest Theatrics


See video

Unrepentant architects of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Harvey Mansfield and Niall Ferguson get a holiday visit from the Occu-elves.

#D17

Time to assemble once more.

From Adbusters Blog

2012: The Year of the Dragon

Time to assemble once more.

This kid’s got an attitude that you just can’t fix. Pepper spray. Truncheons. Gas. Confinement. Brutality. Nothing works. You tell him he can’t loiter and he pitches a tent. You tell him he can’t assemble and he brings his friends. You tell him to be quiet and he starts a mic check. You raise your baton in one hand and squeeze the trigger on the pepper spray canister in the other. You curse this kid’s existence because deep down you know you’ll have to go through it all again … and even worse, you think he might be right.

The discourse of our world is shifting. Today is the three-month anniversary of Occupy. It’s a time to reflect, to celebrate, to think about what has been achieved already and about what’s coming up next.

From pole to pole, from East to West, people are rising up! It started in Tunisia, it moved to Egypt, then to New York, and now there are rumblings in Russia and the Far East.

Let’s celebrate our successes and dream up new offensives. Out in the streets, in our homes, as we occupyxmas and as we hibernate for the winter, let’s take this day to revel in the birth and ongoing life of our movement. And as we brainstorm this winter, what do you see happening in the next stage? Share your thoughts, tactics, epiphanies, and revelations below … and no matter what … let’s come out swinging when the crocuses bloom next Spring.

Here’s to the Year of the Dragon,

from all of us here at Adbusters

The Ballerina and the Bull

Occupy Cinema collective project Anna Pavlova’s dying swan dance onto the bull.