Occupy chants

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Eric Verlo

OCCUPIED DENVER- So we got a little bored with Saturday’s march, the white-bread marchers being kept to three chants, (99%, Democracy & Our Streets). Parade marshals insisted procession not overtake a fat woman in a wheelchair, preventing the march from stretching out and disrupting any more than two blocks at a time, effectively handicapping the march! For respite we got some giggles by greeting some third story well-wishers with this variant: “OUT OF THE WINDOW, INTO THE STREET!” Absent on Saturday were anti-imperialists to mix it up, which prompted me to inventory chants to remember to bring to the next events.

Ain’t no power like the power of the people
’cause the power of the people don’t stop! –Say what?

Si, se puede! (Because “Yes we can!” is now Obama’s)

WE ARE the ninety-nine percent, (and so are)
YOU ARE the ninety-nine percent, (and so are)

Show me what Democracy looks like.
This is what Democracy looks like!

Off of the sidewalk into the street!

Stop watching, start marching!

Whose streets?!
Our streets!

Hey Wall Street, it’s not a pretty picture
The poor get poorer and the rich get richer

The POLICE ARE the army of the rich.

More anti-police:

From Denver to Greece, Fuck the Police!

Oink oink bang bang, everyday the same old thang.

One bullet, one pig. One bullet one pig.

African-American Voice

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Steve Bass

Occupy! is a movement that has arisen “in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice.” It’s a phenomenon, perhaps more that a movement. The state of the world, and of the human race has grown so imbalanced, so deeply dysfunctional, so painfully self-absorbed by malign tendencies that suddenly we humans passed a threshold beyond which our tolerance could not continue. So we spilled out into the street to demand attention to the aggressive imbalances we’re all forced to live with every day, be they economic, racial, nationalistic, religious–the nature of these distinctions is far less important than our weariness of the game we’re caught up in involving the necessity to grind down our fellows in order to keep our own heads above water.

We Occupiers are as diverse as the face of the entirety of humanity. And we’re tired of fighting a losing battle against the self-centered ideology gripping so many of the world’s institutions and interaction. We’ve come together to do something about it , even before we have any clue just what to do. We American Occupiers are coming at this thing within our established framework as a nation committed to law and Constitution, and struggling to absorb the idea that Occupy is not an American phenomenon, even though it stems from ideas we’ve been accustomed to supporting as Americans for a long time. We’re weary of the gap between our ideals, the underlying philosophies of equanimity expressed in our founding documents, and our collective expression in the real world. We’ve come together, now, to splay all our discontent out in the open, to figure out our commonalities, and to demand both a reckoning and a rectification. We Occupiers are convinced that the time has come, that we Humans stand at a crossroad in our history, and that we must finally learn to live cooperatively, or lose our place in the history of a small planet in a cosmic sea….

The Great American Hero

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Steve Bass

America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses. –Woodrow Wilson

Our understanding of history shapes our perception of the present, and informs our actions in the moment. This post, for example, is given additional flesh by the eviction of Occupiers from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan last night by forces directed by 4.0 × 10-8 percenter Michael Bloomberg, one of the richest guys in the USA, and probably in accord with Federal direction. Zuccotti Park is a “Privately Owned Public Space,” (POPS), and that odd status has no doubt been notable in current discourse. Across the USA and elsewhere, including here in Colorado Springs, governments at various levels have utilized no-camping ordinances and public park hours to harrass Occupiers, often to such extremes as to soundly demonstrate some of the protesters’ most salient points. So what is the history of “property,” and how does it pertain to the Occupy Movement?

We citizens of the USA are virtually without foundation where historical discussion is concered, unless we educate ourselves beyond the standard drivel so ineptly foisted in our direction by teachers bound by our disastrously faltering public indoctrination system, mislabeled “education.” We learn a sanitized verion of our own history, and the European history from which ours so largely derives, focused on patriotic and Euro-centric hero-worship rather than on the genuine and controversial currents that have effected societal changes at various junctures in world history. We often become enraged when these inane presumptions are questioned, as i have personally witnessed when service veterans have come unglued when protesters suggested they ought not to have been engaged in foriegn adventurism for resources, or when Occupiers have come near to blows over rights or priveleges the foundations for which they often demonstrate but scanty comprehension.

The story of Christopher Columbus and his noble and brave explorations of a frightening unknown quantity for the lofty purpose of betterment of the human condition, followed immediately by even more noble American colonists’ successful efforts to throw off the shackles of monarchical tyranny culminating in the sacrosanct US Constitution is ingrained in our collective psyche like a Freudian complex. The quote from the nearly deified US President Woodrow Wilson at the top of this page is meant to illustrate this phenomenon. Wilson said some things that seemed to spring from a font of humanity, but he was demonstrably a heinous racist and an elitist, encouraging reestablishment of the KKK, turning US finances over to the Federal Reserve, propagating celebrated treaties he subsequently ignored, and intrepidly belittling any expressor of opinion contrary to his own, among other public sins. Columbus filled his own journals with tales of religiously inspired avarice as he gleefully reported his intent, and execution of his plan to conquer the lands and subjugate the peoples he encountered. The US Constitution, while serving to codify some dignified and egalitarian principles, was still seen as some as an instrument of avarice in its formative days, as has proven to be the case with Adam Smith’s doctrines when handed over to naturally acaricious men. Even the highest-minded of US founders–St. Jefferson springs to apperception–firmly established racist, misogynistic doctrine and elitism by excluding all but white, male land owners from the earliest US political process. Those Founders also knew themselves to be limited and allowed the mechanisms for change to exist within the document.

The land owners so favored by the Founders above had been granted holdings either by monarchical fiat, or by purchase from those granted such holdings. Subsequent years were full of similarly motivated action, wh en”pioneers” once again ennobled by our propagandist history strode across North America claiming everything in sight by perfectly legal Homestead acts and the like, and killing or subjugating anyone not European, male, and white, assuaging their consciences with the absurd “moral” doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Many US citizens, usually white and of European descent, have blithely sloughed off Native American claims to the land here as anachronistic, habituating themselves to the notion that a couple of generations represent a lengthy historical stretch. “Indians,” many of whom don’t experience the epoch between, say, the gleeful rape and resettlement of their great-grandmothers as very lengthy at all, advocate for the removal of white Europe from “their” lands. This may not be anachronistic after all, but it has indeed become impractical, and it is no more nobly motivated than the insistence on Americans, or anyone else, to scarf up resources, such as but not limited to land, to which no human being enjoys a more legitimate claim than any other.

The uproar in Zuccotti Park last night is based on laws that derive from the notion of public versus private property. The Banks we Occupiers have been railing against hold the threat of eviction from private property over the specious doctrines of land ownership in this and other countries. The spats in Colorado Springs over tents, where they belong, and who belongs in them derive from the same set of doctrines, which i hearby proclaim to be bogus, in my opinion. The bad habit of human beings to either grovel or dominate is yet another matter.
One can follow the tendency to dominate and conquer, along with the development of Divinely appointed land control in western culture at least as far back as the dubitable stories of Hebrew escapades in the Levant, supposedly ordered by a loving god to kill, pillage, and rape in order to spread their doctrine of light. Ahem.

While the recalcitrant problems of aggression and slithery competitve spirits, as well as our quickness to condemn one another’s mere habits lead us deeper and deeper into an environmental cul de sac, we continue to pursue failed doctrine. The USA has, in apparently actual fact, presented the world with a still viable political framework within which to effect the sort of massive changes necessary for everyone involved, and it may well be our saving grace, if we acknowlege and rectify its initial errors and subequent abuses. Lots of thinking will be necessary. It’s awfully difficult to conclude that genuine unfettered Anarchism is likely to produce a civil society. Laws are not intrinsically bad unless they’re bad laws. Few really believe Libertarian suggestions that unregulated exploitation of natural resources can lead to anything but irredeemable destruction akin to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the impending collapse of our fisheries.

Did you notice how comfortable my use of the term “our” felt, applied to a natural resource in that last sentence?
Capitalism and the American Constitution found themselves on private property ownership. Some things belong intrinsically to individuals and groups. Marxism denies any right to private property at all and kills innovation, in the argument of McCarthy’s legacy. Marx and Lenin were motivated by historical factors as well, even if their doctrines were no more effective at legislating kindness than ours have been. Most of us will agree that our bodies ought naturally belong to ourselves–the person whose consciousness centers in that particular body–and yet many of our laws belie that acceptance even now that we’ve abolished open slavery. We’ve built a gigantic and Byzantine body of law here in the US, and in countries all over the world, based on principles of subjugation and rapine that are in actual fact now fully anachronistic, using justifications that are fully mythological. The conquering of neighboring lands and their parceling for sale for personal enrichment, using armies fed a long and patriotic line of shyte about motives is simply not sustainable any longer. We can continue to fight over detritus after we, (by which i mean everyone and not just Europeans or Americans), collapse the entire playing field, or we can recognize our errors and take on the extraordinarily difficult prospect of admitting fault and rectifying our relationships with one another both here in the US, and everywhere else. Some things belong to everyone.

This post is largely about bad history, and partly about the failure of both Capitalism and Communism. I’ll be putting it up lacking a certain amount of flesh in order to have it in place. The natural aggression inherent in confronting some of the subject matter contained requires some additional referenceing, which i’ll add later. The characterization of both systems as failures could be entirely specious if i were unprepared to offer alternatives. This is not the case, and i’ll be addressing the whole kit and caboodle, whatever that means, at greater length in the future. The best suggetion i’ve come across thus far is from Henry George, and i hope you’ll investigate. But even if you don’t i hope you’ll give this the thought it warrants. My ideas are unlikely to be the best out there. Look around, though. The one’s we’re working with now are bullshit.

More links are forthcoming, but the take on history expressed here is largely indebted to Howard Zinn’s “Peoples’ History of the United States,” and James E. Lowen’s critique of history as taught in public schools, “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

As NYPD destroys Occupy Wall Street, Americans get their own 9-11 moment, a state terrorist attack on their liberty.

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Eric Verlo

UNOCCUPIED WALL STREET- NYPD goons put an end to the Zuccotti Park OWS rebel base tonight. Shall we declare it official, this night of the Occupy Wall Street Smack-down, that images of riot police are now ubiquitous as American Pie? Officer unfriendly closed the airspace, created a no-witnesses buffer zone, drove news crews away under threat of revoking their press passes, and razed the camp, tents, electronics and all, Occupy Denver Thunderdome smash shit up style.

Calls are going out for YOU to occupy your streets. And the day after tomorrow, November 17, is a General Strike. Unless principles of nonviolence [to Capitalism] dictate you may not resist consumerism.

Birth Pains

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Steve Bass

Apologies to readers not at hand or interested so deeply in Colorado Springs’s silly affairs.

Last night , it appears more cops were called in to arrest or press charges against one of our own, Jack Semple, by one of our own, the identity of which latter individual seems muddled to some extent. It’s simple enough to determine that Jason W. and Kristie W. are the only individuals that have any sort of legitimacy, however dubious, for cop-calling, but we all know from experience that the cops possess a grasp of nuances like this one below a genuinely operable threshold. Some have been bandying about terms like “tyranny,” “hater'” and other such inflammations. I’ll note that, though Jack and Jason will serve as specific personifications for this piece, others have made alignments according to the differences described. More than one observer has noted the inanity of all this, both from here in Colorado Springs, and from afar. Holy mackerel.

Our unique, permitted status has presented problems left to fate at other Occupy locations. Jack Semple has, no doubt, insisted on performing behaviors of at least somewhat scurrilous foundation. To the best of my knowledge, no “rules,” or even “guidelines” have been adopted by the overall group “Occupy Colorado Springs, ” which i must insist on noting to be separate by definition if not in spirit from “Occupy Colorado Springs,” the permitted entity. Last Thursday, (9 Nov), a rather large and representative group of us agreed to adjust wording in our set of rules to reflect their nature as guidelines. Neither rules nor guidelines have been accepted by any consensus, to my knowledge. Jason has proffered the notion that other groups are more stringent in enforcement actions than ours has been, though no set of guidelines for either enforcement or encouragement have been adopted. Most of the sets of guidelines i have been able to dredge up from other sites online have been heavy on terms like”respect,” and “mindfulness.” Jason’s assertions that “the group” reached a consensus on the permit are unfounded, which i know because i myself with others in agreement objected to the permit on the grounds that the law it was meant to skirt is bad in the first place. There was and remains a group of like opinion in opposition to supporters of the permit–a predictable scenario, in light of the hasty disregard for consensus building at the start.

Jack has, in fact, “pushed the envelope” in his approaches both in GAs and in independent action, as have other group members, including at times, me. Jason has also pushed envelopes, and though his responsibility is unclear at certain points, he has it seems signed tickets and pressed charges in the two incidents involving mavericks in “his” tents. No small number of OCS participants have observed the detrimental effect of the behavior of both Jack and Jason. Jack has stubbornly insisted on proceeding without consensus, and given the leaderless, undefined nature of Occupy! worldwide and here, no real authority exists to prevent his behavior. Jason has stubbornly insisted on proceeding without consensus, and given the leaderless, undefined nature of Occupy! worldwide and here, no real authority exists to prevent his behavior. Hmm.

Jack has proceeded from his insistence on peace and love to his own occupation of places and resources to which his claim is at best undecided. There exist legitimate questions concerning what belongs to whom on our street corner, and it seems to me Jack’s self-installation as the Robin Hood of Acacia Park has been a detriment to his own stated motivation. At the same time, Jason’s insistence on a rather dictatorial approach based on his status as permitted signatory is at odds with the consensus model in general, and the overall spirit of Occupy!

Other than vituperative ad hominem attacks between both parties and their adherents, hardly communicative of either loving or peaceful sentiment, very few of the actual issues have been addressed. It must be granted that Raven, yet another aggressively expressive player in this little conflict, has the backing of fact in that those few consensus agreements to have been adopted have been soundly ignored by Jason, who must be named personally in this given that his name at the top of the permit and that he has apparently issued questionable edicts and instructions to “security” people. Some bits of definition have remained untouched to our detriment, for example, the fact that the tents in question were demonstrably in place well prior to the magical creation of the permitted entity, “Occupy Colorado Springs” by the City’s placing that name on the permit. Another example is Jason’s admonition to some complaining against his actions to come participate in the securing of the site. I can speak only for myself on this, but even though i have regularly helped build, supply, secure, clean, etc, i have not signed a waiver, so my welcome is in some ways disingenuous, leaving me to believe “permission” to enter tents is a matter of fiat. I’d love to spend regular nights at the Park, but as much as i’ve promised to do so, i’ve been stymied by the fact that it becomes necessary to abandon sleep entirely and pace the sidewalk all night, with no option for relief. I’ve found the prospect more detrimental to motivation than i’d initially imagined.

With or without this foundational uncertainty, it’s clear that the permit, or at least its handling in our group, has been the focus of a great deal of friction, as may well have been anticipated. The permit can be a good thing if utilized correctly. It allows us, for the time being, to Occupy the corner without fear of pepper gas wielding police bulldozing the site with their spiffy new urban assault vehicles we all know they simply must find some justification for owning. It’s also been the source of an authoritarianism bearing an awfully clear resemblance to at least one strong aspect of the problems that brought Occupiers to the streets in the first place. It’s also clear that the one truly solid consensus–to avoid calling cops in non-violent scenarios–has been ignored. There seems to be a lack of awareness of the fact that chair-swinging wrasslin’ moves and police action are no more prone to building consensus than impulsive disruption of group thought processes. The permit itself may well be a casualty of insistence on bad behavior from each quarter.

I simply can’t believe we in CSprings are the only Occupy outpost wrestling with these very fundamental matters, even if we have an unusual factor in the mix, especially with the introduction of a “security” guy from out of town crowing about tent-slashing escapades.

None of this will kill the Occupy Movement. We all seem to be in agreement that our time for ignoring the issues that brought us together has come to an end. The abrupt gathering of millions–no shit–of disgruntled citizens across the entire planet is an expression of the expiration of patience over an unjust, unkind, and self-servingly dictatorial status quo. A renewal of perseverance and, yes, patience while we learn to manage some very intractable problems with our common natures is necessary if we are to avoid actual bloodshed in this existentially unavoidable conflict. We’ll learn this, or we’ll die.

Practically speaking, no amount of voting or “telling” will solve the problems at hand. To an extent, events are proceeding in a predictable fashion. I suggest we consider with grave lucidity what a consensus process really is, and learn to abide by those few clear points of consensus at which we’ve come to agreement. Some discussion of broadening the list of permit-holders took place at the Thursday GA. If the permit holders in place are too burdened by liability to allow themselves to be governed by consensus, this question should be examined in detail, with consideration for alternatives. If the permit represents its own final word, then it seems unlikely consensus is attainable, and it will likely become a moot issue when it disappears, which will occur on our present course. If permit holders insist on arbitrary decision-making based on the dictates of the permit, we must recognize the equally sovereign nature of OCS (Permitted) in juxtaposition with OCS the leaderless movement gathered in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. That is to say, if consensus is ignored, it is done so on an individual basis, and the permitted OCS separates itself from the Movement to the extent to which it is able. We’re still forced by the fact that we have no choice but to learn to cooperate. In the meantime, let us not neglect the many deeply compelling reasons for being together, or the various projects our self-identified membership have undertaken, particularly internal educational projects which appear especially crucial.

Nothing about this is going to be simple. We will not be solving the problems of the World in a couple of weeks from our Acacia Park vantage. These issues represent the selfsame internally conflicted bits of human nature that have caused us to develop the drastically and fatally flawed social constructs we have come together to oppose. Breathe deep, kids. Learn to love Jack Temple and his half-cocked impulses while he learns how to manifest peace and love without starting a fight. Learn to love Jason Warf, C.J., and Rick the Tent-Slasher as they learn whatever it is they’re learning. Learn to love even me as i continually throw thought-wrenches in the cogs. Turn your most critical eye inward, because as i well know of myself, the only way to change the world is to enlighten ourselves to our own flaws and start right there.

Or stock up on bullets. You can find me standing in the Light without any if they start to fly.

Defined:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/consensus?region=us
A start at the notion of consensus-building:
https://www.msu.edu/~corcora5/org/consensus.html?pagewanted=all
A couple sets of Occupy guidelines:
http://occupydc.org/about-us/guidelines/
http://c1ecolocalizercom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2011/10/occupyguidelines.jpg

Self-named snake in grass Jason Warf presses charges against Occupy Jack

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Eric Verlo

OCCUPY COLORADO SPRINGS has an asshole problem, fortunately it’s just one asshole, and it’s not Occupy Jack Semple. Colorado Springs Occupiers passed a no-snitch policy Tuesday, in line with Occupies nationwide, but that doesn’t stop Jason Warf, as permit holder for his personal “occupy” franchise, from calling the police on activists trying to make the Acacia Park encampment about more than Warf’s media-whore ego. Fellow occupiers are forbidden to speak and act as anything other than solitary individuals, whether addressing City Council about the 1st Amendment, or answering media questions about what they hope to achieve with OWS. Whereas Jason Warf, self-officialized spokesman talks only about divisions and who’s not part of his movement.

So now Warf has called the police on four-times arrested Jack Semple and is personally pressing charges of trespass, for infringing on his city permit, the same charges he’s filed against Raven Martinez, and an unverified number of others. If the GA can’t fire Warf from his own permitted movement, we can repeal his Occupy license. The city may be okay with granting Jason Warf a permit to muck up real protest, but I’m certain that Occupy Wall Street would pull any permit he thinks he has for his pro-Capitalism, pro-war, pro-police snitch camp.

PS. BTW, the asshole reference was to Mr. Warf’s circulating a memo of instructions of how to rid protest movements of assholes. It was a guideline for snitching basically, but some of the methods of confrontation seemed like they could be used to address Warf, especially if HE thinks they are commendable. Unfortunately the ultimate “intervention” step was already attempted without success, his shit smells that good. BTW P2, Jason Warf dubbed himself a “snake in the grass” when observed sulking far off in the park, videotaping what he considered the transgressions of others. Can someone send me a large photo of Mr. Warf which we can use for a warning poster? And please no pics of anuses.

Whose streets? Occupy Jack spreads COS occupation to parking spots!

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Eric Verlo

OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS- Why stop at protest tents? Jack’s got a protest car, now there are two. Two cars used by Occupy Colorado Springs have now been booted for not paying their way alongside Acacia Park. No homeless allowed, so no homeless cars allowed. The plan? Occupy Cars! Activists are sleeping in shifts, occupying these cars to prevent them being impounded. Did you watch yesterday’s video of the Saturday arrests? Jack Semple is a rockstar. If you can help Jack and his fellow occupiers, figure out something, they can use your help. They’ve already got the outrageous ideas, it’s the run of the mill support that will turn the tide.

Fear and Loathing in Colorado Springs

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Steve Bass

Those readers following the Occupy! Movement in its many forms around the world and in Colorado Springs will be glad to hear that Tuesday culminated a difficult week for us here with a resolution of many contentious issues, and an overall commitment to unity.

The subject matter behind this particular post is closely associated with the Movement in general, but it’s more a humanity thing than an Occupy thing, overall. I hope i can get the associations to make sense, and that readers will restrain themselves from developing the erroneous notion that this is meant to be a pitch for some sort of religion. It’s not.

I went to the Municipal Court in Colorado Springs to enter a plea of “not guilty” to the charge of camping on public property because of actions executed as a part of Occupy! Actually, i was camping on public property, to put it quite plainly, and the idea behind the plea is that the action does not engender guilt even if it violates a silly and badly unAmerican, (read, “oppressive,” if we’ve become a little unrecognizable in this regard), statute. A couple dozen supporters made it to the courtroom with me, and raised enough ruckus to get Municipal Judge Spottswood W. H. Williams to threaten them all with contempt charges. The whole thing was kind of a lot of fun, really. Made me feel a little like Hoffman or Hayden, in a much smaller sense. There comes a first time for everything, and this was my first visit to a courtroom during which i was able to feel utterly unencumbered by the dark nature of my own action that had led me there. My deepest thanks to all the OCS members and especially Dennis Apuan, who put his political credibility on the line to stand with us, and brought a good deal of patriotic weight to the room as State Rep for the fine soldiers of Fort Carson.

The hearing was only that, after all, and after entering the plea, we scheduled a pre-trial conference with the City Attorney, for 22 Nov, at which a government lawyer will make me an offer i’ll most assuredly refuse and we’ll schedule a jury trial. I’ll keep you news hounds posted as things progress.

The point to this post, though, is an underlying root to the no-camping ordinance, as well as to most of the woes of the day: The Fear.

Most of us don’t acknowledge the Fear because, well, it’s scary. Instead we get angry, or attempt to maneuver ourselves into a position to control uncontrollable factors like society or competitive economies. We eschew cooperation because we’re afraid of our fellows. We make assumptions about others’ behavior and how it will effect us. We bewail the corruption of society, and begin looking over our shoulders for the punishment of God, or black-clad mercenaries coming over the horizon to herd us into frigid winter FEMA camps. We worry about hunger, poverty, inglorious death. We develop elaborate political systems and foment revolution in order to establish “security” of dubious credibility. Look around. These tactics have not ever worked after attempting repeated, redundant permutations, and there is no reasonable expectation that they ever will.

The Fear has driven all this cutthroat competition. It’s what motivates folks to be sure they have more, more, more. It’s what causes us to petulantly demand our right to burn as much gas in our Hummers as possible, and to constantly engage in useless commerce. It motivates the lowest guy competing for some crappy job at Taco Bell just as surely as it motivates conspiratorial Rothschild backroom bankers. It motivates us to enact stupid, oppressive no-camping ordinances when someone that scares us becomes visible, oh my! We’re all deathly afraid of some horrible outcome, like someone else getting our stuff, or scaring tourists away, or enjoying some habitual pleasure we find repugnant.

The Fear is irrational! What’s the very worst that can happen to us in this life? We die? We find ourselves incarcerated or tortured? Consider, if you will, that we live our little spans, maybe a hundred years or so at the outside limit, surrounded at both ends by an unfathomable mass of toroidally twisted, multi-dimentional Eternity that not one of us will ever grasp while we live. What possible fear can be valid under this circumstance other than that we fail to live according to our own perceived Truths? I say “perceived” since only those afflicted by the Fear are afraid to examine those truths for the errors all honest thinkers know to exist within our own perceptions. If I knew my own blind spots they wouldn’t exist, right? We don’t even know what we’re afraid of mostly, though we can usually list a few if we set ourselves to the task. No one is to blame for his or her own irrational fears, especially cultural fears such as seem to be more or less universal. Many have been established by the direct influence of media that may well have been designed by nefarious folk for exactly the purpose of invoking unfounded fears in various populations. OMG! Now i’m making myself afraid! Not really–but what to do about the Fear?

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,” reads a certain religious text, (1 Jn 4:18, for those with a source fetish like me). I won’t be digressing into a religious sermon here. The principle holds without the doctrinal baggage surrounding it in the context in which it nests. No matter how evil the Ideas we oppose as Occupiers, or as human beings in general, they can’t overwhelm a spirit of love. No matter the spiritual foundation or lack thereof, love can dissipate greed, fear, disappointment, embarrassment, and in fact any of the various bases for the secondary anger response we are all prone to manifesting in situations as apparently dire as the one we’re seeing now. As much as i can plainly see the bogus nature of the moves made in, say, the financial industry, (inseparable from other key industries at a certain level), applying some genuine empathy causes a mental process that can not end in hatred or vengefulness. Look guys like Greenspan or Geitner in the eyes next time you see them. They’re deeply miserable, and completely trapped in their own Fears. When it all collapses, i really hope they’re still available so we can feed them a plate of food, even if we can’t resist the temptation to ask, “What the fuck were you thinking!?”

We can’t fight fire with fire here. Battling greed with more greed, as some seeking to restore an “American Dream” involving bigger slices of a rotten pie seem to do. Revolution only spins us in circles: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” We always seem to find ourselves standing in the same spot we started, except standing in pools of blood with fewer resources after every revolution we’ve ever effected. We don’t have these options any longer. The planet is in a condition that will not permit us to continue on the deeply ingrained, competitive course we’ve followed for so long. Learning to love, to let go, to tolerate, to work together for our futures which are common whether we like it or not is the only way out of this. It’s not easy, only necessary.

I can’t tell anyone how to save anyone else, or how to convince the next guy that any of this is true. I can’t even describe the mental processes that led to these conclusions. All i seem able to do is to proceed in the direction the thoughts lead, as they come to me in a fashion that very often seems external. Examine the assertions that continue to spill out of me at 2 in the morning like this. Notice with joy that there seem to be many others reaching similar conclusions: Things are terminally fucked up and only Love can save us. If it turns out that we’re not saved, that the whole human experiment is doomed to fail, i’ll breathe my last breath in the knowledge that i walked the talk spoken by all my heroes in tongues long lost to history, or new today, or unspoken yet understood by common nature. I don’t think i’m alone. I don’t know how to be afraid of that.

#Occupy Colo. Springs Municipal Court

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Eric Verlo

OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS- Attention local media, if you’re looking for authentic spokespeople for Occupy Colorado Springs, you need look no further than today’s front row. Holding the big sign is first arrestee Steve Bass, to his right: three times arrestee Iraq vet Jack Semple, arrestee Amber Hagen, arrestee Raven Martinez, and arrestee Thomas G.

Also pictured, former Colorado Congressman Dennis Apuan, Occupy founding member Jon Martinez and Socialist activist Patrick Jay. Not pictured, Joel Aigner and Hossein Forouzandeh who were speaking at a UCCS occupy teach-in.

Here’s a video of the Saturday arrests of veteran of Fallujah Timothy “Jack” Semple and Amber Hagen of the 7-11 incident. Worth the watch. ROCKSTARS!

Mark your calendars, upcoming arraignments are scheduled November 21, 29 and 30.

Raven addressed the Colorado Springs City Council today on the unconstitutionality of the no-camping ordinance being enforced to curb the Occupy protest. Here’s what she said:

As a citizen of the United States, one has a given right to life, liberty, & property. These rights are protected by both the 5th & 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

In Bolling v Sharpe, The Supreme Court interpreted the 5th Amendment’s due process clause to include an equal protection element.

The 14th Amendment states:

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of LIFE, LIBERTY, or PROPERTY, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Knowing that sleep is a necessity of Life, every American citizen has a right to sleep, regardless of status.

“HOMELESSNESS” is considered a status.

The camping ordinance ultimately denies one the right to sleep, therefore the right to live, based on their status. How many people have been arrested for setting up a canopy, with blankets & food, to take a nap or have a picnic on public property.

Now if a homeless person sets up a canopy, has blankets and food with them, will they be told to take down their canopy under the current camping ordinance? If so, then the ordinance is based on status, therefore unconstitutional.

If not, then it leaves too much discretion in the hands of the individual law enforcement officer, making the ordinance over-broad and unconstitutionally vague.

When one is homeless, where can that person sleep? If they set up to sleep on Public property they would be violating the current city ordinance, they will be told to leave and told of a shelter to go to, being their only alternative. This amounts to incarceration in the shelter without a violation of law having been committed. This also violates ones right to due process in that it allows for arbitrary enforcement.

When you criminalize a non-criminal act of necessity, you greatly increase the possibility of that person committing other crimes, as well as decrease that persons ability to obtain employment.

State v Folks, No. 96-19569 MM found that a city ordinance which punished innocent conduct, such as sleeping/camping on public property, violated the defendant’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, which is protected under the 8th Amendment.

I ask you to look at the constitutionality as well as the long term effects of such an ordinance, it starts a domino effect that negatively impacts an already hurting economy.

How much does it cost in tax payers money to pursue such a case?

We have to have change! If we want a better economy and overall society, then the government, Federal, State, & Local, must change the way they conduct business. Criminalizing acts of necessity is business, not a way to protect our American citizens.

“Definition of Insanity: Doing the same thing over & over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein

Pass a new ordinance to repeal the current one.

Professor Roy Casagranda: Why late Capitalism is a very serious mistake.

Posted on November 8, 2011 by NMT

OCT13 teach-in at Occupy Austin. Starring Roy Casagranda, Political Science Professor, Austin Community College. Yes, the lecture is one hour and sixteen minutes, you’ll get a semester’s worth, just watch it.

Do we need to speak truth to power? The powerful already know the truth. They bank on it.

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Eric Verlo

So that much hasn’t been made clear to you with Occupy Wall Street? Common citizens are coming together across the globe, without need to apprise each other about Capitalism’s ravages. Does anyone still doubt these crimes are fully premeditated? SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER may still be a laudable dare, but let’s not pretend it’s revelatory. Today netizens are being asked to petition congress to stand down its attack on Net Neutrality, because apparently the public’s freedom on the web might be something lawmakers are overlooking. Playing this speak-truth-to-power charade simply renders the public complicit in perpetuating untruth, that the actions of our corporate government, media and capital class are not absolutely, mendaciously callous and deliberate.

George Who?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Steve Bass

This is a paper from some time ago, well prior to the advent of Occupy events. Henry George wrote from a sensibility one rarely finds expressed so explicitly today. The modern reader should note that Christian underpinnings in no way disrupt either the reasoned logic or the passionate humanity behind George’s arguments. Follow the links! Many Occupiers have promoted education, the deeper aspects of which are rarely available in 3 page tracts….

For Eric Stephenson
16 February 2009

George Who?

It seems peculiar that in 2009 no one has heard of Henry George, if only for the fact that during his prime a hundred years past his was easily one of the most recognizable names on Earth. Just a journalist really, George’s hardscrabble upbringing, his early experience in the business world, and maybe just a little OCD inspired him to craft an entirely new approach to economic theory. Its publication very quickly garnered him international acclaim, respect, and supportive friendship from many of the greatest figures of his day. Many, encountering his work for the first time today, would no doubt label him a Commie, particularly given that George’s work followed Marx and Engels’ by three decades. This misinterprets George. His thinking split the difference between Adam Smith and the Communist theorists in many ways, sharing common ground with both camps but firmly establishing his own territory. His work deserves a second reading.

George was born in Philadelphia, September, 1839, to a family headed by a hardworking but low-budget printer. By providing the Church cut-rate printing services, George’s devout father enabled Henry to garner a relatively high-standard primary education from the Episcopal Academy. He left home after high-school seeking his own way, and after a brief period of adventuring, found himself in San Francisco where he joined the Printer’s Union, following in his father’s footsteps after all.

George lived a poor man’s life–same as any tradesman at the height of the Robber Barons’ power–until an editor at the San Francisco Times came across a piece he had written and left lying around. He accepted an offered staff writing position at $50 a week, which seemed a princely amount compared with his father’s $800 a year. He traveled quite a bit for the Times, and in 1868 on assignment in New York City first encountered the squalid conditions surrounding and adjoining vaunted islands of luxury and power that would inform and undergird his writing for the rest of his life.

Having gained considerable respect as a newsman and a fair amount of seed-money, George and a partner, William Hinton, established the San Francisco Evening Post in 1871. George unabashedly used the paper as a human rights platform until 1877, when, some say, powerful railroad interests against whom he had written since his SF Times days shut the Evening Post down. Quickly landing a government post through highly-placed friendships he had developed, he used the leisure time it afforded to produce his magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, and published it in 1879. George moved to New York in 1880 and promptly left for England and Ireland, touring there to support Irish land support. By the time he returned, his life had changed forever. Progress and Poverty had made him a celebrity (de Mille 1-152).

George’s political economy laid out in his roughly 600 page book begins with his assertion that Smith’s approach established private land ownership as the foundation of economic and social structure, referring often to “the sacred rights of private property” (Smith, par. 1.11.79). So far few would argue, but George figured this skewed, and brazenly wrote that, “[t]he great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the intellectual and moral condition of a people….[I]t necessarily follows that the only remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property” (295, 391). He argued that as a foundational natural resource there is no basis for sequestering land in private hands. He proposed to hold land in common and allot it to users for as long as they needed, for whatever production they could derive from it, and the holder would pay tax, (rent), on its assessed value until relinquished. The holder and any capital or labor involved would keep whatever profit came from the working of the land, and the public would base taxation only upon the land itself. Note that this negates both income and capital gains taxes. (During George’s prominence, no federal income tax existed in the United States). George insisted the extensive system described philosophically in Progress and Poverty, and rather more technically in The Science of Political Economy, would adequately supply the government’s fiscal needs without additional taxes while simultaneously encouraging entrepreneurship and curtailing development of a landed class.

Marx, whose seminal works came before George, but close enough that both wrote from the surrounding milieu of the Industrial Revolution, addressed similar problems. He and those following took the matter to a deeper extreme, however, allowing for no private ownership of either property or capital. Marx expressed a well known hostility to capital. The familiar Communist adage, “Property is Theft,” represents a drastic condensation from Marx’s arguments that labor always seems to wind up on the short end of dealings with those holding either land or capital (Marx, chap. 6, par.2). Like George, Marx chafed at the inequities this arrangement produced, especially with the exacerbations of capital lording over labor, which industrial development had completely disassociated from the land producing the wealth. “The means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up,” says Marx, “were generated in feudal society,” (Marx, and Engels 1848, chap. 1, par. 21).The Communists implemented a far more radical seizure of all private property, including both land and capital, consolidating it under a central federal power (chap. 2, par. 75). Contrarily, George felt that capital deserved its due, and sought to rectify the problems he saw by implementation of a more enlightened “single tax.”

A few germane observations present themselves for discussion. Smith, George, and Marx all expressed notions we might call idealist—Utopian even. Each sought to solve timeless conundrums with an incredibly optimistic approach. Jaded 21st century readers might consider any one of them painfully naive, in retrospect. None of them had the advantage of the hindsight we enjoy, however, and fruitlessly denying the problems each pointed out in his broader work does not help at all. Smith wrote when, fresh from the collapse of European Feudalism, land served as the key to wealth of any kind, and still viewed as an unlimited resource for the grabbing. The vast inequities the Industrial Revolution had abruptly produced vexed George and the Communists. None of these could have predicted today’s technological, information based economies, with the problems they addressed dispersed over the entire planet. Today, the rate of separation between the “Haves” and the “Have Nots” poises to exceed the conditions affecting either set of writers.
George did not design a perfect system. Neither, as amply demonstrated by both history and current events, did Smith or Marx. Henry George thoughtfully and humanely addressed a terribly intractable matter in human affairs, however, and deliberately allowed for future thinkers to expand his work. His work deserves contemplation as we forge into a new century fraught with uncertainties. Our present crisis may help encourage just that.

Works Cited

De Mille, Anna George. Henry George: Citizen of the World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950.
George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. 1898. New York, New York: The Robert Shalkenbach Foundation, 1979. 17 February 2009

Marx, Karl. Wage-Labor Capital. 1849. 17 February 2009

Marx, K. and Engels, F. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848. 17 February 2009

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. Edwin Cannan. 5th ed. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1904. 17 February 2009

United States Department of the Treasury. Fact Sheets: Taxes. 17 February 2009 (This link is obsolete).

All in

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Steve Bass

When i first set out to write this blog i had no intention of writing about geopolitics, or anything any bigger than my own little world, or to develop any sort of readership at all, let alone to kick up international interest. Who knew? Since the time i started, Adbuster’s Occupy movement has overtaken the whole world and i’ve become a part of it, along with apparently millions of fellow humans dissatisfied with aspects of the concentric and overlapping political systems that govern and control the minutiae of our daily lives. Occupy has struck a chord that resonates well beyond what seems to have been its original intent as well.

Adbuster asserts in its campaign web-page opener that, “we vow to end the monied corruption of our democracy,” speaking, one assumes of U.S. democracy, even though Adbusters is a Canadian publication founded by Kalle Lasn, an Estonian. Adbusters itself claims to be a, “global network of culture jammers and creatives,” and that their Occupy is, “[i]nspired by the Egyptian Tahrir Square uprising and the Spanish acampadas.” One should note that Adbusters is a non-profit organization with aspirations and effect well beyond the confines of the magazine at its core.

Many of my dear intrepid friends struggle mightily with the unavoidable nature of the movement in which we all participate. Occupy Colorado Springs, (OCS), has garnered a fair amount of attention both because of its early acquisition of a city permit to camp on the sidewalk, and for its fragmentary infighting. Strong personalities have clashed fairly spectacularly for what scale we’re dealing with here, and precisely the same arguments are on display at Occupy web-pages all over the U.S., as well as abroad. Here, many patriotic, nationally oriented players have concentrated on addressing the U.S. Constitution and the influence of corporate interests in Washington, D.C. politics. Others have been caught up in causes of personal concern as the “focus” of the overall movement has grown more and more diffuse. The bickering and difficulty in reaching consensus has been frustrating but, i suggest, not unhealthy or out of place.

Adbusters, following ques from the Middle East and Spain, deliberately set off a “leaderless” movement, and has fastidiously avoided taking hold of any sort of control of what has developed since, refusing even media interviews for fear of exercising undue influence. Occupy remains a leaderless movement. Various groups and individuals have issued lists of demands; the one linked there, “is representative of those participating on this [particular ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Facebook] page.” We Occupiers have much common ground, which has served well to bring us all together, and will continue to serve as we gather to discuss and bicker over issues and particulars. There is plenty to differentiate amongst us as well, on individual and other categorical bases, but we have recognized, more or less, an essential humanity that has us willing to stand in freezing temperatures if we live in the northern hemisphere, and subject ourselves to the slow, often painful process of learning to live together.

Some among us, as we have seen right here in Colorado Springs, are very uncomfortable indeed with the amorphous nature of the Movement. We have seen splintering, censorship wars, general Assemblies that devolve into shouting matches, and the development of personal animosities. These phenomena are repeated on a grander scale throughout the Movement while observers gloat over the imminent dissolution of Occupy unity. Neither we Occupiers nor the Movement’s detractors ought to be misled by these birth pains. Our situation as humans, or for that matter any other creature inhabitant of the Earth has been rendered fully untenable by humans competing for dominance. The upheaval we engage from our Colorado Springs street corner, or from squares in Manchester, Belgrade, Cairo, and etc. is the natural response of rats in a corner. Were it not for the fact that we humans indeed possess reasoning capacity beyond a rat’s we really would be screwed. Fortune, or Divine providence, or evolution, or whatever mechanism or mechanisms turn(s) out to be true has granted us the tools that, utilized with empathy at every turn may–just may–allow us to work our way out of the massive pickle in which we’ve put ourselves. Nothing about this will be easy, quick, or for most, especially comfortable.

The Movement is leaderless. This is an existential fact. No matter how strenuously individuals attempt to grab hold of reigns, or to turn them over to others, there is no authority behind the Movement other than the profound spiritual authority of its essential Idea. The financial disparities that we have focused on here in the U.S. are real, and the supra-national bodies that control our government with full directive power are the same bodies that separate people from power in every nation on Earth. Each issue that has arisen into the Movement’s overall consciousness, from derivative markets, to marijuana law, to camping on public property is part and parcel of the whole thing, which itself amounts to such a gigantic, lumpen juggernaut that we have a hard time gathering our thoughts around the whole thing at once. We must.

Many U.S. citizens, including some prominent in and around OCS, have expressed insistent nationalism. Muslims and Christians around the world have pushed religions agendas. Nationalism is by no means confined to the U.S.A. Our corporate, non-personal enemy and its personal, human operators are Global already, and use these divisions to our detriment! At a Colorado College faculty panel yesterday, much ado was made of income disparities and market finagling by Wall Street financiers. We can isolate our minds all we want, but we can not eliminate the fact that Wall Street, Fleet Street, Singapore, Hong Kong, the House of Saud, whatever, whatever, are already one indivisible entity, operating in opposition to any concern for overall humanity or household priorities for any of us as inhabitants of the planet, including the natural requirements of the controllers. The Idea of competition and profit has acquired an independent life of its own and has prevented even those at the top of the unwieldy pyramid from living lives connected to the most valuable prizes of all, which we humans have recognized throughout our history and recorded in odes, songs, and literature to be transcendent of politics and possessions. The statistics cited by those college economists, and the many Occupiers that mention them in speeches and lists of demands are quite real, and Americans might note that Kurdish, Nepali, and Palestinian Occupiers, for example, skew the stats we’ve been flailing our arms about here even further, and that “First World” exploitation is a very large part of this discussion, indeed.

There can be little doubt that the “Wall Street” entities in control of our various governments have planned for and directed events toward a “New World Order” for decades, if not centuries. Lots of justifiably paranoid conspiracy watchers all over the planet have done their best to alert their fellows to this alarming and unacceptable development for as long as it has been in the mix. The Vatican, a power with negative credibility in its adherence to its own doctrine, has offered itself up as a potential controller of a global banking scheme. Currently entrenched power-brokers will absolutely without question attempt to co-opt and control the current Movement. We humans are not interested in more of the same bullshit, plus the added benefit of still more bullshit! We occupiers are fully Sovereign, each in his or her own right. We are leaderless by design, which is the natural development of the abject failure of our leaders, and in fact of the failure of the very foundation of our interaction amongst ourselves that has developed without much direction for at least the 10,000 year span during which we have written about it. Those who resist this fact will find little more than inversely correlated discomfort in their resistance. One can deny the nature of a rhinoceros till one’s dying day, but the beast remains a rhinoceros, and the denier’s last day may well come on the day he encounters a rhinoceros.

Sovereign consensus building is not democracy. It’s something we humans have never attempted on the scale we Occupiers are attempting now. Broad-scale cooperation as a foundation is against an established competitive approach that we have fallen into by default for a long, long time. Voting one another into submission will not work, simply because we have let the cat out of the bag. We noble individuals are learning a brand-new thing, like it or not, because a rhinoceros has smashed the freakin’ house down. I, for one will not abandon the Liberty of my own Sovereignty, no matter who votes what, nor will i abandon the respect i hold for each other Sovereign in the entire mix. I recognize the differences between whatever groups or persons are in the whole wide world. Categorical observations are real, so far as they go; but i won;t be bound by them. I won’t be forced to fight against the 1% simply because i am a member of the 99%. Rather i will be fighting with every fiber of my being for the 100% of us who will ALL be trampled by the rhinoceros, in pretty danged short order, unless we ALL relinquish our insistence on control, avarice, and irresponsibility of all stripes.

Each of us has a part to play, a purpose to serve. Never abandon what you know. Work hard at open discussion. Don’t be embarrassed by frustrating moments or attempt to hide your own humanity. Withdraw for a moment if you need to to prevent overboiling passions. We’re all in this together. Be patient Brothers and Sisters; this is gonna hurt some….

OWS List of Demands:
www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=157161391040462
Adbusters:
www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet
NPR:
www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins
Middle Eastern origins:
www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/apr/09/libya-egypt-syria-yemen-live-updates
Acampadas:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13466977

Denver Daze

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Steve Bass

Occupy Colorado Springs is and has been a relatively staid affair. Our biggest marches have drawn maybe 200 participants, and the street corner has been generally host to small crowds and mostly friendly or indifferent passers by. Visits from police have been just that–visits, rather than assaults, even when the HOTT Team came to arrest me early in the morning on 18 October, and the intrepid Camping Jack on two more recent occasions. We had to take steps to force them to make my arrest. Many of the core participants at Acacia Park have never been involved in any sort of political processes at all, let alone public protestations. So when several of our number traveled to Denver last Saturday to join a boisterous crowd of around 3,000 souls emotions were high, mixed, and complex.

There can be no denying the nervous air among one van load during the trip to Civic Center Park, directly in front of the State Capitol building, on the western side. Shana expressed open fear, bless her heart, and i suspect she wasn’t the only of our number of like mind. Fear was generally dispelled by the excitement of the much larger Denver crowd, though, and as we marched around downtown under clear blue unseasonably warm Colorado skies, past the Mint, the Federal Reserve Building, down the 16th St. Mall where city employees took an unscheduled break to let us pass and bewildered shoppers either stared aghast or waved and grinned in support, up 17th St. past all the towering bank centers, and finally mounting the steps at the Capitol Building in defiance of specific instruction from city and police. Throughout the march, spirits were exuberant as cooperative bullhorn operators traded various, sometimes conflicting perspectives while our horde danced and prated along the sidewalks and streets, and we arrived at the Capitol in high, expectant spirits.

There had been quite a lot of friendly cops along for the march, but shortly after our arrival at the Capitol the armored legion showed up and began tactical operations to expel the somewhat rowdy crowd from its perch. I was there with my 15 year old son, so we pulled back from the danger zone when the announcement was made waving off the “unarrestable.” Adin and i observed the obscure scuffling, complete with clouds of gas, from the Park as we waited for the valiant crew of absurdly comical drag queens “manning” the field kitchen to finish the “pimp-ass risotto” we later had for lunch, flavored by tear gas. The cops cleared the Capitol steps and formed a double-lined phalanx at the eastern face of the Park, at the street edge of the sidewalk directly across from the kitchen and the hastily erected camps. The kitchen crew struggled to put a specifically verboten makeshift canopy over their operation, so the police could be sure and find them.

The police blocked Broadway for several blocks and pushed protesters off the street into the Park and stayed in a threatening stance for some 6 hours or so, waiting for the appointed hour of 7:00p when they razed the camps, apparently according to specific orders. The clearing of the street was punctuated by violence , at least some of which was beyond the pale. Photographer and protest participant Andrew Cleres was ruthlessly shot down from his tree-stand while obviously not a threat. Frankie Roper of our OCS group was transported to a local hospital after taking a “non-lethal” round to the chest, though he was not arrested and refused treatment so he could rush back to the proceedings. Cops pulled back to the street after their initial assault and held a line for several hours while listening to protesters preaching various words ranging between, “We love you; you are US,” to “Fuck off and die, Pigs!” while awaiting word to move on the camps, which they did at the appointed hour, throwing tents, food, and kitchen equipment into a city trash truck.

The police surrounded the empty camping areas afterward, and maintained their line at the street for some time, continuing to endure some very angry expressions by riled protesters. Around 8:00p they abruptly and rather anticlimactically just left, allowing protesters to claim a victory, of sorts.

Though my observations to follow may well clash somewhat with some attitudes expressed during much subsequent conversation, much of what i witnessed at as close a range as could be was very encouraging indeed. Protesters were extraordinarily courageous in the face of a volatile situation. At odds with some other observers, i suggest cops exercised pretty fair restraint. Frankie and Andrew were both rather overworked in the incidents linked above. Frankie’s foot had been rolled over by the motorcycle he then knocked to the ground when the cops jumped him, and police had no way to know that when they got him. He was not arrested. Throughout the day, during which there were only 20 arrests reported, i witnessed numerous instances of very angry protesters attempting to engage police violently. These incidents were mostly handled by the crowd by their moving in to separate the overwrought form the line of cops, and the few moments where things escalated to actual physical levels were marked by a lack of brutality by police, and an apparently strong reluctance to arrest anyone. And again, after executing announced plans to raze the camps the cops simply left the scene.

Among the most exceptionally poignant vignettes of the day was the scene at the kitchen between the clearing of the Capitol steps and its ultimate destruction. The queer high antics persisted in good humor through the entirety of the very tense day, and the line of grateful hungry continued steadily within shoulder-brushing distance of the armored squads; life, joy, and loving community on display under duress. Many protesters repeated the suggestion to police that they are fully welcome to lay down armor and join us for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, and some cops actually did so, braving the incredulous stares of their fellows before rejoining the line. All day, though more so during the march while still in a conversational mood, police expressed support for us protesters, and reluctance to be antagonistic on their own. When they returned at the close of Park hours in much smaller numbers to match the dwindling of our own, remaining protesters knew to clear to the sidewalk and no further incidents took place. By then, new supplies had been delivered by random donors, and a new kitchen was already turning out coffee and chili dogs from an adjusted position at the park’s edge.

There remains aroused spirits from many of the variously positioned players in this conflict of Ideas. Many U.S. armed forces veterans are very angry indeed at police seen as traitorous after the incident with Scott Olsen in Oakland, (don’t forget to continue to hold Scott in your prayers, if you do that sort of thing); however I, for one, am encouraged by the dramatic differences between what i saw in Denver Saturday and the stuff from my childhood where police would just wade through crowds swinging nightsticks with brutal efficiency at whomever was within range. Further encouragement came from the shift in mood the following day when much of the tension between holders of opposing opinion among our OCS core appeared to simply diffuse on its own in the face of the sheer size and intensity of the action in D-town.

My take: I am immensely proud of all the Occupiers that participated, (including perhaps most especially my son Adin, who chose to stay right up in the thick of things with us all day long), and steadfastly protected those of our own motivated beyond restraint from overstepping propriety. We are ALL one. The human race makes up a group of 100%, even if some of us need to catch up with the notion. We have a long way to go, but we’re learning. This thing will continue to be lumpy and chaotic, but we’re getting there. Because we have to, no matter what.

DPD violence against Occupy Denver on Oct 29, filmed at gunpoint, shows first raid was deliberate provocation

Posted on October 30, 2011 by NMT

OCCUPIED DENVER- Patrick shot this video in the thick of the action of October 29, which covers the initial arrests at Civic Center Park. It unmasks first DPD raid as a deliberate provocation, sent aimlessly into thick of crowd to make arbitrary arrests. Footage begins from early moments of protesters asking police not to bring weapons into peaceful assembly, without success.

Dear Capitalism, it’s not you, it’s us. Just kidding, it’s you.

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Dear Capitalism, it's not you it's us. Just kidding it's you. OCCUPYTOGETHER- I’ve seen some wonderful signs at recent occupation actions. LOST MY JOB, FOUND AN OCCUPATION, and then there was SEPARATION OF CORPORATION AND STATE. I really love the Dada slogans which paradoxically are best appreciated in their out-of-context context. Example. GOVERNMENT BEER.

Is Occupy movement about issues, not tents? Denver learns, it’s ABOUT TENTS

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Eric Verlo

DENVER- Hundreds of police in riot gear were deployed against the Occupy campers today. Not for the peaceful march, nor the slogans they voiced, nor even activist demands to climb the capitol steps. No, the hundreds arrived with gas masks, and new batons literally out of the box, to roust a dozen protest tents adorned with Occupy Wall Street slogans. To the peaceful assembly, the sudden arms buildup could have been none other than a show of force.

Occupy Colorado Springs occupier Frankie Roper was among the first arrests. A DPD motorcycle cop drove into the grass and over Roper’s foot. He pushed the bike off, tipping it. Roper was struck by multiple pepper pellets as he ran quickly away. After being tackled by police, Roper required a stretcher and was taken to a Denver hospital.

Denver police chief discusses his strategy with Colorado Congressman Ed Permutter who circulated among the front line protesters being a condescending dick. Similar MO to unidentified cowboy at left let to roam behind police lines.

Speculation about why the state needed to clear original OccupyDenver camp from state grounds, because they needed it for a police parking lot.

Good coverage in Westword, page 4.

First they ignore you then they laugh at you, Oakland’s got no further than that.

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Eric Verlo

The brutality of the Oakland Police against #OccupyOakland and Iraq vet Scott Olsen is prompting many to measure their eminent victory with ol’ Gandhi’s hopeful adage: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Apparently we’ve reached the fight stage. Yeah no. Sorry folks but teargas and nonlethal measures while dressed in riot gear is still the LAUGH AT YOU stage. You’ll recognize FIGHTING. It’s what America does to everywhere.

Occupy Colo. Springs suffers SECOND ARREST for camping outside permit

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- Tonight’s 11 O’clock arrest in Acacia Park was the second for #OCCUPYCS. As contentious GAs can attest, the self-delegated city-liaison executive-members are fighting a losing battle with a dissenting membership determined to grow the OWS protest by stressing inclusion and enlarging the encampment to beyond the city-permitted canopies.

Interlude 2

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Steve Bass

Off to Acacia Park for the night, then Denver in the morning. Occupy! is fully international. We’ll need to come to terms with that in our own countries, cities, minds, and act accordingly, cooperatively, if we are to truly build a thing of beauty without a ridiculous cataclysm. Continue to embrace Humanity in everyone! Cops and soldiers, bankers and beggars–all of us are just working the Gameboard as seems best to us at the time. Pull back. Breathe. Shine the Light! The Game’s over. Learn to Dance!

Last night Occupy Denver sheltered in igloo until DPD igloo-countermeasure

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Eric Verlo

OCCUPIED DENVER- Forbidden from erecting tents in Lincoln Park, despite cold and snow, intrepid OWS protesters took their lemons, made lemonade, and surprised authorities with a PROTEST IGLOO. So DPD drove a bulldozer over it.

Occupying an empty house

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Steve Bass

My friend Maureen gets frustrated with me because i keep slinging all this outlandish stuff at her, and as one might expect, she has a hard time getting it sometimes, and an even harder time imagining that any of it might be true or practical. I keep telling her that money is over, she keeps telling me that people use money for good things. I start hanging around Occupy Wall St. and its attendant movement and she feels alienated because she lives largely from Stock Exchange investments. Maureen is not the only one with this issue; a man appeared at our GA in CSpgs last week deeply troubled by the fact that we “haters” were trying to force his grandma to eat cat food because as he noted, “Wall Street”, that is, the package of various stock offerings available there, is owned diffusely by grandmas and retirees, penny-pinchers and wheeler-dealers all over the world. My friend and this guy are both put off by the extremely jarring nature of the realizations at hand that have precipitated huge crowds of traffic-clotting protesters into the streets. (Actually that stranger stayed for the GA and came around, while Maureen has an injury preventing her attendance, so this is kinda for her, as well as everyone else).

The issue with the money that’s causing problems is closely associated with the Global nature of Occupy! and because of that, its fragmented nature. Both issues are rendered all the more discordant to many by their perceived urgency among occupiers. We want things to change right now, not after the next bullshit election cycle, but rather before we all die when the food chain collapses. Many within the movement at hand will object to what i posit here, but there really is no way around it in my own mind, so i have no choice but to put it out there. The FED, the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, Royal Dutch, Al Rajhi, etc, etc, and their intertwined financial/military/industrial destruction machine already exist as a very solid Global beast with utterly uncontrollable and ravenous hungers. We humans are equally as Global, and Occupy! is the same. The destructive elements in this conflict as well as the creative are out of the hands of nationalistic players, and our old notions of money and its production will not save us in time. Once again, if it were gonna, it woulda.

I’ve put this educational chart up before, and if you have no motivation to look any further then i hope you’ll just go get another beer and stay out of the way. The World as we know it is a disaster, and we made it so. Don’t give me that crap about global warming is caused by dinosaur farts. We’ve dumped more toxic shit into the ecosystem in the last century than can be said to have even existed, anywhere. If Humanity can’t effect the world, like one hears on Rush, of some of those other insane programs where are all the American Bison? Passenger Pigeons? Pennsylvanians drinking tap water? Live, healthy corals? Why are so many of us completely, stubbornly ignorant of these obvious and urgent facts. It’s the Fear, of course, and it’s actually propagated deliberately by some, who fail in turn to recognize that they are trapped by it themselves. we’ll move on to the business of the Fear another time.

Plenty of accusations fly around about who caused the money crisis, the environmental crisis, and any other crisis at hand. It really doesn’t matter, and even though some players have obviously been behaving recklessly, some in succession with conspiratorial characters of some pedigree, we absolutely must give up the hatred and sort out solutions, if we want to live. There are a few links at the bottom to articles, (and one video–don’t like ’em myself), on financial and economic collapse. There are plenty more. The point is to assure you all that our monetary system, the means we’ve “developed” through haphazard mutual throat-slitting for trade and interaction among ourselves, is fucked. We can’t fix it. The “money” we’ve been passing around isn’t reflective of anything real. The “price” we pay for things has utterly nothing to do with their intrinsic worth or their scarcity in the world. This is our collective fault, not simply the fault of a couple Rothschilds and Morgans. We all scrabbled to keep up appearances and grubbed around to buy stupid shit we never needed, or even used. The numbers involved down at the FED are so unrealistic they’re meaningless, and trade imbalances and the like merely amount to spiffy terms for describing exported slavery, a kracken which is quickly coming home to roost for Westerners intent on prolonging the petro-economy for the sake of the god damn Fear. There is no money. Its value has been pilfered away by milquetoast pirates one Stewie Griffin party at a time.

The ends of the Dollar and the Euro represent terrific opportunity. Not for making more money, you dumb-ass! That’s the thinking that’s got us in this state in the first place. Some reasoned arguments exist that attempt to exonerate the financiers held up by many Occupiers as responsible for this mess. It really doesn’t matter. The people playing this game, which are all of us, have all been working at competition together ever since we began to establish societies. We didn’t know any better at the time. Now it’s apparent that the approach we’ve been taking isn’t working. If you are trapped in a mindset that insists on claiming a bigger slice of pie, or plaintively keens of the potential virtue of money if only it flows through the right hands, i’m sorry for you. Because when this all really hits the fan, you will be completely lost. We own nothing, except stuff that’s really not worth much, if you figure it in money. At some future point it may be necessary to argue these points at a higher level, because financiers are fond of obfuscation and bullshit in the literature, and hate to admit to themselves or anyone else how evilly they’ve been behaving, but soon enough the thing will collapse beyond the need to parse words.

So follow. The Earth is in the balance, because of the natural behavior of human beings when set loose to compete. Humans also have an innate drive to form societies and cooperate. The mechanisms of the old competitive game are worn, and the game is pretty much decided. We’ve already abandoned borders within the confines or the Game, only keeping nationalisms and “racial” distinctions in place when convenient to some other aspect of the Game, like the continued propagation of slavery, or the demonization of controllers of certain resources. Pull back and look a little. It’s 100% game players causing all the wars in the world, all the food shortages, all the misery. Do we really give a shit what color or religion a thirsty guy in the desert may be? Am i really worried about Iraqi invaders pouring over the horizon? Please! Even if all the current unrest and destabilization isn’t manipulated by people who thought George Orwell was writing textbooks, none of this is necessary. We don’t need petroleum, (look it up yourself fer cryin’ out loud). We don’t need to hate a bunch of desert nomads just because our shitheads set them up in business as a part of a grand scam. We don’t need to compete.

Cooperative living is so much easier and less troublesome you naysayers will be feeling really silly before this is over. It’s OK, though. It’s not so easy to see, at least for now. If it takes too long to avoid the pain you’ll see soon enough. Come see us then. What we have isn’t worth money but i am rich, rich rich! And this Manse won’t collapse, with or without money. Stay with us….

http://economiccrisis.us/
http://www.naturalnews.com/032999_financial_collapse_Euro.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26756
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16225
http://129.81.170.14/~dupre/SEEDS.pdf

Legal artistry

Posted on October 26, 2011 by NMT

(In response to questions received on another forum: “I’m curious as to why, exactly, you feel that you are entitled to stay in a public park at all?”, “What makes you feel that you are entitled to enjoy the ‘right’ of pursuing your happiness — that is, living in Acacia park — without having to contribute monetarily to the upkeep of that public facility.. Furthermore, why is it that you believe that, in the interest of effecting a change in a law which you disagree with, the best course of action is to choose to voluntarily break said law, rather than getting involved in the legal process and effecting a change in the typical fashion? After all, all that really accomplishes is an additional waste of taxpayer-funded services, in this case law enforcement.”)

I’ll reiterate again before i take this on that these are profoundly excellent questions that i think every Occupier, observer, and citizen of any country ought to contemplate deeply before entering the fray–maybe even before leaving the house this morning.

First I should clarify what may amount to a few misconceptions wrought largely by the media of late. As has been reported I am living with dear friends who find my comfort to be a valuable thing and have extended their hospitality freely absent any solicitation on my end. J. Adrian Stanley of the CS Independent has referred to me as a “technically homeless…couch[-]surf[er],” which is true, though only by certain technical legal definitions, which are generally designed to either skirt or address issues involving benefits of some sort. I am “technically” employed as the sole proprietor of the Paint Squad, a remodeling company that has been defunct for practical purposes since the media began trumpeting a new Great Depression, and the guy i had been working with abandoned the project. For the record, i collect no unemployment, disability, food stamps, or any other money or benefits of any kind from the government. Plainly stated, i have no monetary income. This is not meant to offer ethical assessment of my situation nor to elicit sympathy or whatever, but is merely offered to add perspective to my positions, and to rectify factual errors that have made it into the mix. Bear in mind i was camping at Acacia Park not out of necessity, but to effect the specific outcome that you may observe to have been effected. Note that although hundreds of campers are now down along Fountain Creek in violation of the same ordinance, they are not at Acacia Park kicking the bee’s nest with me–they have different and rather more imminent needs than i.

I believe i adequately responded to Mark’s first question by directing him to the appropriate pages here at hipgnosis. The second is a continuation of the first, with the addenda about “contributing monetarily.” A response must necessarily involve the natures of money, property and its use, and our interaction amongst ourselves as human beings. The third involves political processes and movements, civil disobedience, and my own spiritual foundation. I hope those statements enlightens the reader on the length of this post, and Mark in particular on the reason for the time taken for its development.

Some questions in answer to a question: Who owns public land? What does it mean to “own” it? Whence the resources to maintain the land, and what does that mean? We Americans have never adequately addressed these matters, and our ethical foundation for holding this conversation will remain forever spongy until we do. All land ownership in the United States harks back to the arbitrary decrees of that series of monarchies our predecessors here acknowledged to be so corrupt that a bloody war was necessary to shed the influence thereof. Land was simply declared by powerful people to be “owned” by favored sycophants, regardless of the opinions of the contemporary inhabitants. The Founders adopted the same attitudes governing property as had been utilized by their enemies. Every piece of property in the country now, public or private, is viewed through the lens of this fact. Its “ownership” is determined by arbitrary acts of murder and fiat. It’s understandable that this is the case–effecting such jarring and massive shifts in foundational thinking is never blithely easy, though it does appear simple once accomplished.

Having had an ear to the ground for some time on matters such as we are discussing , i am alert to numerous suggestion that “we” give land back to the “Indians.” This idea is as flawed as the other, and the thinking of indigenous peoples advocating it has been corrupted by our Western philosophical bias. The only genuine option uncorrupted by avarice and murder is to revert to a state of ignorance of ownership where the land is concerned. The elaboration of this notion constitutes a genuine system of political economy and i will carry it no further here, (but will link below). This is put in the mix to allow the reader to investigate further, and to establish that the following points are argued from an academic point of view rendered at least partially moot by the actual philosophical basis for the actions in question.

Be alert, Mark, that i have not been a societal parasite. I have worked and paid taxes since the age of 12, in spite of strenuous effort to limit the absurd, onerous, and unethical share the Government has taken through any nefarious means available. Maintenance at Acacia Park is paid out of city sales tax, unless i’m mistaken, which i certainly paid when i bought the sleeping bag i slept in there, the bicycle i rode to the park, the tobacco i smoked while there. Additionally, though i have not camped there in a week or so, one might readily visit the Park and ascertain that it is in a far cleaner state than before Occupiers carved out a space there, the rest rooms were locked coincident to their arrival, and the only maintenance in evidence is a guy that comes around in the morning to collect the bags of trash the Occupiers have gathered from around the whole park, and the sprinklers which still douse the tree lawns where people are camping even though watering season is so obviously over that infrastructure damage is imminent. Regardless, and without additional verbosity, the land in question is public, and we Occupiers clean up after ourselves requiring less maintenance, not more, of the City. Opposition to the notion that smaller contributions in tax payments ought to equal diminished rights to enjoy publicly held assets, with which we are endowed at birth is quite close to the heart of the Occupiers’ battles, whether individual Occupiers have become aware of the idea yet or not. We all pay for it, both monetarily and in karmic debt, or by whatever system of spiritual balance you may care to invoke. Any Rockefeller is welcome to pop a tent next to mine.

Your final point, that is, why civil disobedience rather than ordinary action is yet another that might be expanded at length. In the interest of getting this up i’ll restrain myself from that in hopes that you will recognize that i am not attempting to be glib or brusque with you here, Mark, but merely brief. Additional commentary on all these points is both available and forthcoming. Simply enough–civil disobedience, and in fact in my mind and those of many, many others, full-blown political and ideological restructuring is necessary because no approach within the confines of less strenuous discourse has worked thus far, and people all over the planet have had quite enough bullshit. If you imagine to yourself that this business of mine, or the business of Occupy in general is about camping in Acacia Park, or the stupid camping ordinance enacted but not enforced by the City of Colorado Springs then you have badly missed some very important news. I suggest you follow the links below. Visit the Occupiers, both here and in many other cities around the whole wide World right now.

This’ll do. Ask more questions! Read these links:

I’m not angry, but, hmmm… http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

Henry George developed a system addressing this stuff. I can’t say his system is complete, and in fact, i am personally convinced our problem as humans must be addressed spiritually. That’s a topic for another moment, and it does not detract from George’s thesis: http://www.henrygeorge.org/

This strikes me as so obvious that it could be seen as a jab, and almost feels that way, but it’s still the place to go for primary discourse on civil disobedience: http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

This is obviously unnecessary, but i’ll point out once more that the reader will find an abundance of words of my own that bounce around all these topics and more. It’s all the same conversation: http://www.hipgnosis21.blogspot.com

PPCC Philo Club page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/168063276537761/

Some other discussion and reporting establishing basis: http://wwwwendolbloggercom.blogspot.com/

There’s no end. Keep looking.

Neither cold nor city ordinance stays #OccupyCS from its appointed grounds

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- 7PM Tuesday Eve and all is well, chants, drumming, and car horns midst sporadic precip. Two dozen at 7PM GA, spirits high. Tomorrow morning we’ll see how we occupy SNOW.

2AM

1, we are the people! 2, we are united! 3, the occupation is not leaving!

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Nighttime arrests continue across the country in local moves to stomp on the sparking Occupy Movement, using park, curfew and anti-homeless ordinances to thwart permanent protest encampments. Participants remind each other that it’s about issues not tents. The authorities however seem indifferent to their public raising issues, but raising tents is out of the question. Last night saw a mass arrest of over one hundred in Chicago’s Grant Park. Here’s what they were chanting as occupiers were pulled from their human chain, zip-tied and led paddy wagons on loan from the Illinois prison system.
ONE! We are the people!
TWO! We are united!
THREE! The Occupation
IS NOT LEAVING!

	LL on Owl City writes lyrics most fo…
	lizzie on The ‘success maker…
	gary cummings on Common Dreams? Or is it censor…
	kennetha on The Stiles Unit of Beaumont
	Cristian on Shlomo Sand and shattering a n…
	Vic Currier on Why should you attend the Denv…
	Vic Currier on Sovereign constitutional oath…
	Robyn KenyaStar Prui… on White Native Americans
	Debra Gill on The Stiles Unit of Beaumont
	Xaldyn on The ‘success maker…

Not My Tribe

The Myth of Middle Ground

Tag Archives: Occupy

Occupy chants

African-American Voice

The Great American Hero

As NYPD destroys Occupy Wall Street, Americans get their own 9-11 moment, a state terrorist attack on their liberty.

Birth Pains

Self-named snake in grass Jason Warf presses charges against Occupy Jack

Whose streets? Occupy Jack spreads COS occupation to parking spots!

Fear and Loathing in Colorado Springs

#Occupy Colo. Springs Municipal Court

Professor Roy Casagranda: Why late Capitalism is a very serious mistake.

Do we need to speak truth to power? The powerful already know the truth. They bank on it.

George Who?

All in

Denver Daze

DPD violence against Occupy Denver on Oct 29, filmed at gunpoint, shows first raid was deliberate provocation

Dear Capitalism, it’s not you, it’s us. Just kidding, it’s you.

Is Occupy movement about issues, not tents? Denver learns, it’s ABOUT TENTS

First they ignore you then they laugh at you, Oakland’s got no further than that.

Occupy Colo. Springs suffers SECOND ARREST for camping outside permit

Interlude 2

Last night Occupy Denver sheltered in igloo until DPD igloo-countermeasure

Occupying an empty house

Legal artistry

Neither cold nor city ordinance stays #OccupyCS from its appointed grounds

1, we are the people! 2, we are united! 3, the occupation is not leaving!