Henry Rollins - Occupants (w/ Thurston Moore)

Henry Rollins, author of "Occupants' (Chicago Review Press), discusses the book with Thurston Moore at McNally Jackson NYC on Oct 14 2011.
http://henryrollins.com/
(Thanx Joly!)

Let's play dress ups...

Time Lapse of Occupy Wall Street in Times Square, 15 October 2011

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Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street

Last night I was arrested in my home town, outside an event to which I had been invited, for standing lawfully on the sidewalk in an evening gown.
Let me explain; my partner and I were attending an event for the Huffington Post, for which I often write: Game Changers 2011, in a venue space on Hudson Street. As we entered the space, we saw that about 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters were peacefully assembled and were chanting. They wanted to address Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was going to be arriving at the event. They were using a technique that has become known as "the human mic" – by which the crowd laboriously repeats every word the speaker says – since they had been told that using real megaphones was illegal.
In my book Give Me Liberty, a blueprint for how to open up a closing civil society, I have a chapter on permits – which is a crucial subject to understand for anyone involved in protest in the US. In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" – requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment. One of these made-up permit requirements, which are not transparent or accountable, is the megaphone restriction.
So I informed the group on Hudson Street that they had a first amendment right to use a megaphone and that the National Lawyers' Guild should appeal the issue if they got arrested. And I repeated the words of the first amendment, which the crowd repeated.
Then my partner suggested that I ask the group for their list of demands. Since we would be inside, we thought it would be helpful to take their list into the event and if I had a chance to talk with the governor I could pass the list on. That is how a democracy works, right? The people have the right to address their representatives.
We went inside, chatted with our friends, but needed to leave before the governor had arrived. I decided I would present their list to his office in the morning and write about the response. On our exit, I saw that the protesters had been cordoned off by a now-massive phalanx of NYPD cops and pinned against the far side of the street – far away from the event they sought to address.
I went up and asked them why. They replied that they had been informed that the Huffington Post event had a permit that forbade them to use the sidewalk. I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks; even film crews must allow pedestrian traffic. I asked the police for clarification – no response.
I went over to the sidewalk at issue and identified myself as a NYC citizen and a reporter, and asked to see the permit in question or to locate the source on the police or event side that claimed it forbade citizen access to a public sidewalk. Finally a tall man, who seemed to be with the event, confessed that while it did have a permit, the permit did allow for protest so long as we did not block pedestrian passage.
I thanked him, returned to the protesters, and said: "The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don't block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so. Please join me if you wish." My partner and I then returned to the event-side sidewalk and began to walk peacefully arm in arm, while about 30 or 40 people walked with us in single file, not blocking access.
Then a phalanx of perhaps 40 white-shirted senior offices descended out of seemingly nowhere and, with a megaphone (which was supposedly illegal for citizens to use), one said: "You are unlawfully creating a disruption. You are ordered to disperse." I approached him peacefully, slowly, gently and respectfully and said: "I am confused. I was told that the permit in question allows us to walk if we don't block pedestrian access and as you see we are complying with the permit."
He gave me a look of pure hate. "Are you going to back down?" he shouted. I stood, immobilised, for a moment. "Are you getting out of my way?" I did not even make a conscious decision not to "fall back" – I simply couldn't even will myself to do so, because I knew that he was not giving a lawful order and that if I stepped aside it would be not because of the law, which I was following, but as a capitulation to sheer force. In that moment's hesitation, he said, "OK," gestured, and my partner and I were surrounded by about 20 officers who pulled our hands behind our backs and cuffed us with plastic handcuffs.
We were taken in a van to the seventh precinct – the scary part about that is that the protesters and lawyers marched to the first precinct, which handles Hudson Street, but in the van the police got the message to avoid them by rerouting me. I understood later that the protesters were lied to about our whereabouts, which seemed to me to be a trickle-down of the Bush-era detention practice of unaccountable detentions.
The officers who had us in custody were very courteous, and several expressed sympathy for the movements' aims. Nonetheless, my partner and I had our possessions taken from us, our ID copied, and we were placed in separate cells for about half an hour. It was clear that by then the police knew there was scrutiny of this arrest so they handled us with great courtesy, but my phone was taken and for half an hour I was in a faeces- or blood-smeared cell, thinking at that moment the only thing that separates civil societies from barbaric states is the rule of law – that finds the prisoner, and holds the arresting officers and courts accountable.
Another scary outcome I discovered is that, when the protesters marched to the first precinct, the whole of Erickson Street was cordoned off – "frozen" they were told, "by Homeland Security". Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.
The police are now telling my supporters that the permit in question gave the event managers "control of the sidewalks". I have asked to see the permit but still haven't been provided with it – if such a category now exists, I have never heard of it; that, too, is a serious blow to an open civil society. What did I take away? Just that, unfortunately, my partner and I became exhibit A in a process that I have been warning Americans about since 2007: first they come for the "other" – the "terrorist", the brown person, the Muslim, the outsider; then they come for you – while you are standing on a sidewalk in evening dress, obeying the law.
@'The Guardian'

The Demographics Of Occupy Wall Street

aboombong - Taking Blue Mountain By Stages

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Friendly As A Hand Grenade

New Malicious Program by Creators of Stuxnet Is Suspected

Funkystepz' FADER Mix

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Tracklist:
Funkystepz Feat Lily Mckenzie – Circles
Funkystepz – Transformer
DR Gonzo – Bust em up
Roska – Jackpot
Six D – Best Damn Night (Funkystepz Mix)
Funkystepz – Dirty Dutch
Canblaster – Clockwork
Friendly Fires – Hawaiian Air (Seiji Remix)
Funkystepz – Trouble
Funkystepz – XTC
T Williams Feat Terri Walker – Heartbeat (Mosca Remix) ****
Champion – Lighter
Funkystepz – Class A
Scratcha – Flute
Funkystepz – Anger
Funkystepz – Royal Rumble
Funkystepz – Bruk Out
Encore – The One (Champion Mix)
Roska – Roskallion
Funkystepz – Fizzy
Funkystepz – Jumanji
Crazy Cousinz Feat Omarion – Arch Your Back
Funkystepz – Fuller
Champion – 1994
Funkystepz – Warrior
Funkystepz Feat Lily Mckenzie – For U
Funkystepz – Tokyo Drift
Funkystepz Feat Rhian – Our Love
Duchess Feat Scorcher – All The Boyz (Wookie Remix)
Roska – Do You Believe (Ma1 Remix)
Favorite Flava – Heaven (Funkystepz Mix)
Funkystepz – You Got it
Roska Feat Jamie George – Wonderful day (Scratcha Soule Power Mix)
Funkystepz – Underground
Scrufizzer – Fizzy Flow

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Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis...

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Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie @'NewScientist'

Greece on the brink of social explosion

#OccupyOuterSpace

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Bank Of America Earnings Report: Bank Sees $6.2 Billion Profit

Family hits out at US in fury at fate of Anwar al-Awlaki's slain son

Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald 

Just utter TERRORIST!! RT @deviatar How will US justify drone killing of Awlaki's 16-yr old son & his 17-yr-old cousin? is.gd/bzSPS5

America - I am fugn speechless...

McKenzie Wark

In The Beach Beneath the Streets, McKenzie Wark set out to tell the tale of the Situationist International, a “small band of artists and writers whose habits were bohemian at best, delinquent at worst, who set off with no formal training and equipped with little besides their wits, to change the world.” Given our present historical moment, we could do worse than revisit such experiments in the everyday. As the Situationist writer René Viénet said, “our ideas are on everybody’s mind.”
I sat down with Dr. Wark in his office at the New School, where he is an Associate Professor of Culture and Media. We discussed the legacy of the Situationists for a new generation of revolutionaries, the resonances and ambiences of Occupy Wall Street, and the role of protest in the absence of politics.
In the preface to The Beach Beneath the Streets, you mentioned being part of radical political and bohemian movements as a youth.
Well, it was a bohemia of no great significance, Sydney. I’m originally from an industrial town with a great labor movement tradition, so I was fortunate to be trained by people in a town with a labor movement who still controlled the waterfront, the steel unions and things like that. I think that was a really good education to do things like covertly hand out literature to steel workers. To later have “occupied” the front lawn of Parliament House in Canberra at the age of 17 was also a wonderful thing. I discovered at the age of 17 the weird way that cops twist your arm when they are trying to move you along; you can’t not move when they’ve got your arm in that weird hold. And of course I immediately got off the steps of the Parliament House because I’m a coward, so I don’t want to oversell this, but even having a minor part in a minor provincial bohemian and political world was a really good preparation for writing about the Situationists.
How long has The Beach Beneath The Streets been percolating? I think the success of the book is that you are able to paint the picture of the Situationist milieu and give the biography of a movement, instead of reducing it to a few key players.
It took a long time to write, and there [were] a couple of abandoned book length manuscripts along the way. I never wanted to do a biography. One was arranged alphabetically like a dictionary, but it just wouldn’t write itself. There is a book length chunk of this thing that just didn’t work, so I had to throw the whole thing away and start all over again. But it’s kind of liberating to do that. It’s been going on for years and in some ways The Beach Beneath the Street is a prequel to some books that I wrote in the early part of this century — A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. These were détournements of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, respectively. I wasn’t satisfied with my footnotes to that, so this was a kind of excavation of what I thought was living and dead in the Situationist International.
The ideas that stretch across this period seem to be really congealing in your writing about Occupy Wall Street.
Even before this stuff I was interested, on the one hand, in the concept of the spectacle — which is treated as this evacuation of historical time and complete nullification of any kind of practice. There is a link there from Debord to Jean Baudrillard. On the other hand, no one reads those later chapters of Society of the Spectacle, which are about the total opposite. They are about détournements and possibly a somewhat limited notion of workers’ councils, but nevertheless certain kinds of practice. So I was always interested in moments that punctured the spectacle. In my first book I wrote about Tiananmen Square in 1989 and on the Wall Street crash of 1987. It never occurred to me that the politics of occupation practiced in Tiananmen Square could actually be applied to Wall Street. I wrote this book that’s got the two pieces, and I didn’t put them together. To the credit of David Graeber and a few other people, they figured it out that you can occupy an abstraction by occupying this place called Wall Street that doesn’t exist.
This also passes through May ’68, which was also a dual occupation. It was an occupation of the factories and parts of the Latin Quarter. But the two are never put into communication, and that’s its downfall, in a sense...

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Michael Schapira @'full stop'