Just released —the latest Tactical Briefing (#34) from Adbusters
Flash Encampments: Occupy morphs into a new model!
Hey all you wild cats, do-gooders and steadfast rebels out there,
Our movement is living through a painful rebirth… “There has been a unfortunate consolidation of power in #OWS,” writes one founding Zuccotti. “This translates into ideological dominance and recurring lines of thought. We are facing a nauseating poverty of ideas.” Burned out, out of money, out of ideas… seduced by salaries, comfy offices, book deals, old lefty cash and minor celebrity status, some of the most prominent early heroes of our leaderless uprising are losing the edge that catalyzed last year’s one thousand encampments. Bit by bit, Occupy’s first generation is succumbing to an insidious institutionalization and ossification that could be fatal to our young spiritual insurrection unless we leap over it right now. Putting our movement back on track will take nothing short of a revolution within Occupy.
The new tone was set on Earth Day, April 22, in a suburb bordering Berkeley, California when a dozen occupiers quietly marched a small crowd to a tract of endangered urban agricultural land, cut through the locked fence and set up tents, kitchens and a people’s assembly. Acting autonomously under the banner of Occupy, without waiting for approval from any preexisting General Assembly, Occupy The Farm was notable for its sophisticated preplanning and careful execution — they even brought chickens — that offered a positive vision for the future and engendered broad community support. While encampments across the world were unable to re-establish themselves on May Day, this small cadre of farm occupiers boldly maintained their inspiring occupation for nearly four weeks.
In Minneapolis, a core of occupiers have launched an Occupy Homes campaign that is unique for its edgy tenacity. “What is unusual, in fact utterly unprecedented, is the level of aggression and defiance of the law by these activists,” a spokesperson for Freddie Mac, a U.S. corporation that trades in mortgages, told a local paper. “Over the past week … the city has tossed out protesters and boarded up the house, only to see the demonstrators peel back the boards and use chains, concrete-filled barrels and other obstacles to make it more difficult to carry them away,” the article reports. Last Friday, police were so desperate to prevent a re-occupation of the foreclosed home that they surrounded the house with “30 Minneapolis police officers with batons” and “over two dozen marked and undercover squad cars and a paddy wagon.” Occupiers responded by laughing and signing songs… joyous in their struggle to elevate the home into an symbol of democratic resistance to the banks.
In its own sweet way, our movement is now moving beyond the Zuccotti model and developing a tactical imperative of its own: Small groups of fired up second generation occupiers acting independently, swiftly and tenaciously pulling off myriad visceral local actions, disrupting capitalist business-as-usual across the globe.
The next big bang to capture the world’s imagination could come not from a thousand encampments but from a hundred thousand ephemeral jams… a global cascade of flash encampments may well be what this hot Summer will look like.
Meanwhile, tents are up once again in Tahrir Square and youth from Quebec to Auckland to Moscow to Oakland are rising up against a future that does not compute.
Stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith … Capitalism is crashing and our movement has just begun.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
![occupyallstreets:
Scahill: Obama Has ‘Murdered’ People With Drone Strikes
Upset over President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and continued usage of drone striking throughout his administration, The Nation‘s national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill called the commander-in-chief’s actions “murderous.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, Scahill argued for the justification of labeling President Obama’s decisions to authorize the strikes as “murder,” specifically the drone attack on al-Qaeda America figure Anwar Al-Awlaki’s son in Yemen in 2011 recently covered by PBS’ Frontline.
“If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people, and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they’ve murdered those people,” Scahill said.
“If you go to Yemen where I was, and you see the unexploded cluster bombs, and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do, of women and children that represented the vast majority of deaths in the first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen, those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from al-Qaeda in that area. There’s only one person that’s been identified that had any connection to al-Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike.”
“And the U.S. tried to cover it up and say it was a Yemenize strike. And we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraus conspired with the president to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It’s murder, it’s mass murder. When you say, ‘We’re going to bomb this area because we believe a terrorist is there,’ and you know that women and children are there, [then] the United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe women and children are there. That’s murder.”
Scahill added: “The most dangerous thing that the U.S. is doing, besides murdering innocent people in many cases, is giving people in Yemen or Somalia, or Pakistan, a non ideological reason to hate the United States, to fight the United States. Non-ideological reasons, meaning personal vendetta, is much more powerful than, ‘We hate your freedom, we hate your McDondalds, we have your Christianity, that’s real to them.”
Source](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m50qp10z7Y1r4vpxio1_500.png)
