Live Blogging #OWS- 11/11/11

Occupy Wall Street Sign of the Day (In honor of Veteran's Day)

12:30 AM: Dallas



11:33 AM: This is so good I'm reposting ...

Watch live streaming video from fstv1 at livestream.com

11:44 AM: Matt Taibbi gets it (he's a little slow, but we like him anyway):

Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left....

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line....

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

12:07 PM: Little humor for the wonks...

What's the real difference between Brookings and AEI?
With Brookings, I need to read the study to know how it turns out.

With AEI, I don't need to read the study to know how it turns out.

2:18 PM: Colin Powell on OWS...

3:34 PM: The office cat from The Nation, Mick, passed away. Here is a slide show in Mick's honor. So sorry to everyone at The Nation for the loss - may Mick rest in peace.

4:23 PM: Occupy the Press.

4:25 PM: Good piece on lobbying and inequality.

4:28 PM: Anti-bank protests and college recruiting.

4:43 PM: A good first start, but I'm not sure it means we're winning - Occupy Wall Street, changing the conversation.

4:53 PM: I love stories about gay penguins!

4:58 PM: Occupy Homes movement - this is such great stuff.



5:04 PM: Naomi Klein on the Keystone XL Pipeline victory.



5:16 PM: Okay, here's a follow-up on the shooting death near the Occupy Oakland encampment.

5:28 PM: Inside Occupy Wall Street: How a bunch of anarchists and radicals with nothing but sleeping bags launched a nationwide movement.

Haven't read all of it yet, but it opens with a foundation myth that's false and frankly, the whole thing seems out of touch and like it was written by someone who spent a half a day there and is looking for something sensational. So, I realize it's supposedly a positive piece, but it's looking like a swing and a miss to me.

You know, I have only been peripherally involved in Geek culture, but I'm coming to appreciate why they get so up in arms when people get what seems like, to an outsider, small details wrong. It's way more than that - it's not really the details they're missing, they're missing the whole point.

7:18 PM: Banker's Choice - very important article.

9:52 PM: Michael Moore for my Mom (classic):