Tag: occupy wall street

OWS Reads

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Our founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, has two new articles out on the Occupy Movement:  at Bookforum and at Rolling Stone. Here’s an excerpt from the former:

I’m not sure when I first felt that joy, but I know when I named it for what it was: one night lying on a sleeping pad beneath a thin blanket, hemmed in by my just-met friend Austin, a teacher of autistic children who leaves the park for work every day at 7:30 AM, and his girlfriend and her girlfriend, reading my newly acquired copy of The Pagan Rabbi by the yellow sodium light of the city’s permanent illumination. Purists call that light pollution, but filtering through the feathery leaves of Zuccotti Park’s honey locust trees, it was lovely. More than lovely; bathed in its amber glow I felt like one of five hundred little Christs, if by “Christ” you’ll allow me to refer not to divinity itself but to one of its more wholly human representations, Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ. Appreciating what’s happening in Zuccotti Park requires a mental shift akin to the one necessary to see Piss Christ—an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine—as not blasphemous but beautiful. And I don’t mean ideologically beautiful—a baroque idea one admires for the complexity of its inversions. I mean gorgeous, breathtaking and breath-giving at the same time.

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Sanctifying Wall Street

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Amy Levin: Time for an update on #religion at #occupywallstreet? This week, Sarah Posner mediated a roundtable discussion with Religion Dispatches regular contributors highlighting particular religious moments of the occupy movement. Anthea Butler tells Posner says that Occupy Atlanta’s refusal to let civil rights protestor and Congressman John Lewis speak was a reflection of OWS “becoming slaves to the ‘process'” rather than accepting inspiration. The civil rights movement, like OWS, didn’t have a “complete consensus” either, and it was inspiration, not process, that sustained endurance.

Posner then questions Nathan Schneider about the role of self-identified religious groups in the movement like the Protest Chaplains and Occupy Judaism. Posner asks whether or not these groups are necessary for the success of OWS, or if religious activists are engaged in the movement in order to “reimagine the role of their respective religious traditions in contemporary political activism.” Schneider responds that the “ordinary trappings” of religion, like rituals and ceremonies, are needed in the movement; religious groups will only be able to get so far toward their own goals inside the “self-consciously non-hierarchical, revolutionary, and disruptive” environment of OWS. Continue Reading →

Scenes From an Occupation

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Nora Connor spent the wee hours of Friday morning in Zucotti Park, waiting for Bloomberg to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Below she documents dawn in the park and the breaking news that the eviction had been called off.  Some of the images are dark or hard to see; they all convey the unfolding daily drama of occupation.

6:15 AM Zucotti Park is crowded, almost entirely hemmed in by mobile news trucks and lousy with photographers. The self-cleanup effort continues. It’s clear the pavement has been scrubbed, and the west end of the park is semi-cleared, but there are still a lot of blankets, tarps, sleeping bags and backpacks and more than a few occupiers sleeping. I’m told the consensus plan has been to shift the gear in stages to the areas of the park that are not being cleaned in order to ensure a continuous presence. It doesn’t look like that will happen in time. I’m also hearing of a plan to have a small group of people remain in the park with the rest forming a human circle around it, so I’m expecting arrests and pepper spray as of 7AM. Continue Reading →

In Praise of Capital

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Amy Levin:  Marching down Lafayette yesterday, surrounded by hundreds of #occupywallstreet protesters, I experienced what many in my shoes might call a “secular spirituality,” as we ritually chanted in exhilarated unison. “We are the 99%”–or as my cohorts and I chanted it, “you are the 99%”–occupied the street–as–stage, sending our message with powerful frequency to hundreds of passerbys. The 99% is powerful; sheer numbers matter – but chant only works insofar as the 99% become self-aware of their own 99% identity. The power then becomes contingent on a type of identification, a recognition of the self within a greater shared collectivity. Isn’t this how some define religion? Continue Reading →

Hello Daily Links

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Whattayaknow?! Mormons handle money differently than the rest of us. Same with the Mennonites, and the Jews.

Is the Fall true or just factual?  Or both?  And what does that mean for Catholicism? Or, as the always witty @danielsilliman asked via twitter, in response to this, aliens?

Charisma confuses mission work in North Korea with human rights work.  Yes, freedom of conscience should be a human right, but just dropping Christian flyers into North Korea isn’t really human rights work, folks.

Country music star Collin Raye is the new national spokesperson for the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.

Birth panels:  Conservative Catholic groups dissatisfied with the rigor of the conscience clauses in the Obama Administration’s health care bill are organizing to support Jeff Fortenberry’s “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act.”  It would “permit a health plan to decline coverage of specific items and services that are contrary to the religious beliefs of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan.”  It would expand denominational health care nationally, prohibiting patients from receiving the full range of medically sound treatments (or meaningful referrals, or informed consent) at denominational hospitals.  Four of the top 10 HMOs in the US, by the way, are Catholic.

Celebrate Yom Kippur with all the dirty hippies in Zuccotti Park tomorrow night.

Everybody’s hating on Jim Wallis and Evangelicals.  Here’s why.  (They’ve apparently forgotten what persecution does for him!)

Some good #OWS Links:  Metamovement.  Blame yourself. Is America. Everything. Continue Reading →

The Market, Warren Buffett, and the Occupation of Wall Street

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The power of consumer society works precisely by blurring the distinction between the street and the interests of financial markets.

By George González

“Do You Really Think 3000 People Are Here at This Park Today to Make a Point About Nothing Important?”–Sign written by one of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street in New York City

In his national debate-stirring NY Times op-ed, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” Warren Buffett calls for “shared sacrifice” in American public life. Specifically, he argues that current tax codes allow the “super rich,” a group he certainly belongs to, to pay into the public trust at much lower rates than the working and middle classes, who are increasingly squeezed by unemployment and underemployment. Buffett identifies this one important aspect of the disparities he, I and many Americans bemoan: the fact that income produced by wage labor is taxed at higher rates than are the financial gains made by those who “make money from money” or even off wage laborers.

As an ethnographer who tends to understand practices and ideas as dimensions of the human experience within the context of specific life-worlds (or what some anthropologists call cosmologies), the question of what causes a society to value some kinds of labor over others is exceedingly complex. I would look to social practices—not just normative ideas—in an effort to tackle such a question. Continue Reading →

For Those About to Gouge

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Mary Valle:Via Gawker, here’s a report on a man who gouged his eyes out in the middle of Mass in Viareggio, Italy.  The most impressive thing about this tale is that the priest who was offering the Holy Sacrifice, Lorenzo Tanganelli, called the paramedics who took the poor disturbed fellow away. Then Fr. Tanganelli carried on celebrating Mass even though “a lot of people had left.” I know where I want to be come the Rapture. Right in Fr. Tanganelli’s fold, as he observes the commotion, calmly, shrugs his shoulders, and keeps on with his Mass. Wall Street Occupiers? Try to recruit this fellow. I think he has some important skills. And a serious in with Santa Lucia. Continue Reading →