Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on November 29, 2011 at 9:56pm

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in today's call.  Please review our "Collaborative Tablecloth" produced by all the participants in the Cafe Call, and then consider these questions as we continue this third round of dialogue:

• What’s the next level of thinking we need to address?
• What is missing from the picture so far?  What are we not seeing?  Where do we need more clarity?

You might also want to check out the new groups that are forming around our inquiry, a list of which can be found here.

 

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on November 30, 2011 at 7:12pm

About 20 years ago, when I was just beginning to organize marketplace models, I recruited Dan Quinn, author of "Ishmael", to join our board on a strategy to provide an online marketplace for earth-friendly goods.  Dan had just won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, which awarded $500,000 to the best idea for addressing global problems presented as a novel.  The odd thing about his novel, in this regard, is that the main character asserts that there is no solution, and we'll just have to rebuild a better world after civilization collapses.  I asked Dan how it could be that such a proposal could win, and he told me what the judges had told him: "Everybody else submitted stories about what they would do if they were in charge of the world."

So I think the "next level of thinking" perhaps is a focus on how it might be that everybody could be running the world, before we focus on our own schemes.  In the conference calls "listening" has been a recurring concern, and a value that has achieved consensus.  I'm hopeful that this local consensus will translate into action towards developing a forum where every voice that has an idea can be heard, such that everybody knows they've been heard, and so consensus made possible.  Can you imagine how we might accommodate perhaps many thousands of voices?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Robert Riversong on December 1, 2011 at 12:31pm

Perhaps by not censoring voices that make you uncomfortable?

Insisting on a very narrow realm of "civility" ensures that only the intellectual elite will be part of the conversation and ordinary working Americans will be excluded.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Deborah Hart Yemm on November 30, 2011 at 12:57am

I was only there for a little while on Nov 29th but I returned in time to look at the Collaborative Tablecloth (what an awesome concept) and just wanted to say the word AMPLIFY as representing what's next after OCCUPY, really resonated with me personally.

I highly recommend the experience of participating in these calls, even if you can not be there for the entire time.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on December 1, 2011 at 3:23pm

I agree about that resonance.  For me that means joining our voices, rather than raising them.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on November 30, 2011 at 6:37pm

There were three group harvests from our 11/29 Cafe Call.  Here is the one from "Table 1," excerpted from the "Collaborative Tablecloth" Google Doc used for the call:

1. Listen to all so as to avoid the 99 to 1 paradigm as an obstacle
2. All part of the solution - learn from the past
3. Raised awareness of our power to gather and accomplish a new
paradigm.
4. We need to model what we preach - this will be an effective means to underline the message. Listening to radical elements in the movement will overcome the extremes. We can be the change that we want in the world.
5. limits of power, acceptance of ethical boundaries.
6. How to handle large salaries needs to be taught at MBA course. There are alternative approaches that have been used in the past.
7. The bottom line is not the only criteria to guide decision making at the corporate level.
8. Credible positive alternative to present situation needs to be presented based on good researched evidence. The wisdom is already out there!
9. What should the ethics of alternative systems be?
10. World citizenship

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on November 30, 2011 at 6:38pm

There were three group harvests from our 11/29 Cafe Call.  Here is the one from "Table 2," excerpted from the "Collaborative Tablecloth" Google Doc used for the call:

1. What have we learned from this experience?
2. What is the new form of Occupy if encampments go away?Never stop, never give up
3. Find our place within the global situation
4. Let the lesson of the encampment-we don’t need to wait the consent of the powerful to build communities that work for everyone
5. Try to change consciously, continue to create environment of inclusivity
6. Understanding systemic connections of micro-macro, and restoring dignity/self-worth to human
7. Leadership—for vs against; healthy vs unhealthy; horizontal vs vertical

 

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on November 30, 2011 at 6:43pm

There were three group harvests that were drafted during our 11/29 Cafe Call.  Here is the one from "Table 4," excerpted from the "Collaborative Tablecloth" Google Doc used for the call:

1. Identify the movement’s purpose.
   1. Uncover the deception.
   2. To preserve the commons/ a livable earth.
2. Create a strategic vision & practical action plan
   1. Use symbology - pictures that speak 1000 words - use different media/senses. Keep the message simple
3. Develop diverse Occupy Tactics and Actions Plans
   1. One size does not fit all - in terms of occupy actions. Be creative - we’re moving into a whole new territory
   2. seeking other places to ‘occupy’ (more permanent residence)
      1. example: fixing up abandoned buildings, booking spaces for events/forums/film nights/discussions/councils/workshops
   3. creating occupy-events (temporary gatherings)
      1. examples: candle light vigil, hope infused symbolic actions maybe around winter solstice, direct actions to protect against foreclosures.
      2. Put occupy lyrics to Xmas carols and sing them shopping malls
      3. Ask people to put a tent in their front yard next to Xmas lights
      4. workshops on conflict resolution, building harmony in groups strengthening unity
   4. creating more live face-to-face interactions
      1. example: We can call on our congregations, other community groups or our own homes to host discussions of the issues that are being highlighted by Occupy. We might call such meetings “Amplify” Meetings. The goal of the meetings will be to answer questions and generate and expand support for the systemic changes that are called for by Occupy. In the meetings introduce and use direct democracy skills, and emphasize listening to all voices.
      2. Involve school kids and teachers at family friendly events.
      3. learning tools of council and practicing council
4. learn to listen better (emphasize more than speaking)
   1. contrastly: how to allow ‘every’ voice to be heard
5. develop a liquid democracy  http://communitywiki.org/LiquidDemocracy
   1. exploring method and implementation
   2. using technology as an aid: such as smart phones as tools to vote - degrees of agreement on proposals
   3. present plan: internal used per occupy site, then across occupy sites
   4. Identify/develop a platform & methods to enable participatory democracy. Define genuine participatory democracy.
6. ?... essential/essence: what does equality and justice and happiness really look like?  Wealth and money and wellbeing are not synomous.  True wealth is in our relationships with our family, friends, neighbors and community and Occupy is demonstrating this, even if in less than “perfect” ways.
7. ?... political power comes from unity--is the allegiance to a political party (dems) moving us to where we want to go?  do we continue to work within a broken, corrupted two-party system and try to fix it OR let the broken systems continue to collapse and get to work in building the next version of the American experiment in democracy

 

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on December 1, 2011 at 11:48am

Here is a very well-produced document from Occupy Toronto on "What Is Next for the Occupy Movement?", based on a conversation held on November 25th.

 

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on December 4, 2011 at 1:15pm

Bob Jones offered these thoughts in another discussion he initiated a little while ago, that I believe is worth picking up here:

Since the coordinated nationwide crackdown and evictions by mayors on Occupations last week,  many in the OWS movement have been asking this important question.-Where should this movement and local groups focus their time and energy to be most effective now?  

 Based on what I have read so far from various articles, there seems to be a shift from focusing on occupations to:

 

Primary- Focus on reaching "critical mass" as soon as possible. The logic is that until we have lots more folks involved across  the country, we will not be very effective at making major changes in legislation. .

 

Secondary- Focus on issues that are most important - possibly repealing Citizen's United case.

I agree with this approach but I would like to hear ideas from others.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on December 4, 2011 at 1:19pm

Here's a provocative piece out today from "conservative" NY Times columnist Ross Douthat entitled "The Decadent Left."  I think it speaks to our Occupy 2.0 conversation.  An excerpt:

The O.W.S. protesters, on the other hand, haven’t even settled on concrete political objectives. As two of the movement’s more perceptive conservative critics — Matt Continetti in The Weekly Standard and James Panero in The New Criterion — have said, many protesters seemed more interested in founding a kind of Paris Commune or Oneida Community in Zuccotti Park than in actually participating in public-policy debates.

This has led some liberals to argue that the Occupy protesters should find a way to imitate the more pragmatic efforts of unions and environmentalists. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer highlighted “the difference between the focused, agenda-driven campaign” fought by critics of the Keystone pipeline “and the free-form, leaderless one waged by the Occupiers.” Given that anti-Keystone activists succeeded (at least temporarily), she wrote, “the Occupy movement could do worse than to learn from the pipeline protest.”

But there’s a sense in which the pipeline protesters and Midwestern unions are exactly the people that the O.W.S. crowd should not learn from, if they aspire to appeal to a wider audience than left-wing activists usually reach.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few....

Whatever your politics, there’s arguably more to admire in the ragtag theatricality of Occupy Wall Street than in that sort of self-righteous defense of the status quo. Even if it has failed to embrace plausible solutions, O.W.S. at least picked a deserving target — what National Review’s Reihan Salam describes as the “moral rupture” created by Wall Street’s and Washington’s betrayal of the public trust.

Better a protest movement that casts itself (however quixotically) as the defender of “the 99 percent” than a protest movement that just represents Democratic interest groups. And better a left that flirts with utopianism than a left that adheres to the dictum attributed to Leonid Brezhnev during the Prague Spring: “Don’t talk to me about ‘socialism.’ What we have, we hold.”

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Lindsay Newland Bowker on December 4, 2011 at 3:16pm

Indeed provocative, my dear anonymous friend.

I agree completely that the one thing Occupy did in the beginning that briefly connected with the 99% was to speak broadly to the fact of social, economic and political disenfranchisement of the 99% by the 1%..

That message can easily get lost issue by issue in the fashion the traditional left fought Keystone Pipeline, for example. But it was important to stop the pipeline ( it's not actually stopped..it's still being built and is basically ready to just turn on so its not too late for Occupy to catch up. ).

Occupy didn't speak at all.  Didn't even take the opportunity to connect the dots for the American and Canadian people which they could have used their visibility to do.

I agree completely with the author that Occupy has to transcend and be apart from these traditional left wing interest groups..it has to have its own authentic voice that the 99% recognize as their own.

That is not now the case and Occupy may have lost creditbility with the real 99% to a point where it cannot reclaim any influence or truly claim to be an authentic voice of the 99%. ( That's what its 33% approval rating as of 11/16 says to me)

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page