Sending a message

After four and a half hours of marching and chanting in 45 degree temperature, hundreds of occupiers at a picket circle in the port of Oakland roared at news this morning from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that the blockade had succeeded in ending the day’s first shift of port operations.

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Breaking Through

When New York City’s mayor ordered an assault this week on Liberty Square, the story played like a script only the 1% could write: Michael Bloomberg, a Wall Street media baron worth $18 billion, who spent $50 million of his own money and rewrote the law to win a third term in office, sent in a thousand cops to trash a library, close a kitchen, shut down an occupation and arrest hundreds in the name of “unsanitary” conditions in the park.

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A New World

What it is, the demand the 1% can’t comprehend, is us. It is the individuals and villages, the cities and peoples across the world who are seeing each other on the far side of appeals and petition. It is the world we are becoming.

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No list of demands

We are speaking to each other, and listening. This occupation is first about participation.

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Occupy Wall Street Movement Births Newspaper

Last Saturday, prior to the thousands-strong march of Wall Street protestors attempting to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, which ended in some 700 arrests, the first edition of The Occupied Wall Street Journal hit New York City’s streets. Within three days, all 50,000 copies had been snapped up and distributed by volunteers throughout the five boroughs, leading to another print run Tuesday ahead of the paper’s second edition, which comes out Friday.

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Participatory Budgeting Gains Steam in San Francisco

When Mayor Ed Lee ventured across San Francisco’s 11 districts this spring talking with residents about what to cut and what to save from the budget, he won praise for opening what some called a new era in fiscal discourse: giving people a more direct say about where their money is spent. But what if, rather than the mayor in the driver’s seat, it was the community itself that presented, weighed and voted on district budgets? The idealistic notion under consideration in San Francisco, sometimes called “participatory budgeting,” hands decision-making power for budgets to the residents of neighborhoods and whole cities.

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