Mark Naison: We need to have more people reaching out with love and support to the wounded children who surround us, inside and outside of our schools.
Occupy Sandy Builds on Longstanding Progressive Tradition
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Mark Naison: The Occupy Movement is making a turn to communal action and mutual aid that the most effective radical organizations in American history all employed at key points in their history.
Winning the Dream
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Paulina Gonazlez: In addition to needing to win political support for their demand, the Dream Movement identified the White House’s legal argument as the first and most important hurdle they needed to overcome,
The Wisconsin Recall
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Bill Fletcher: What is important is that the fight is taking place and that representatives of the “99%” are resisting injustice.
20 Years After the LA Riots: What Have We Learned?
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Dick Price & Sharon Kyle: What has changed in South LA — then South Central — where the flames shot to the sky 20 years ago, after an all-white jury exonerated the gang of police officers who had beaten a black motorist half to death, captured on video for all to see?
May Day Los Angeles
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May Day was observed all over the nation with marches, rallies, sit-ins and demonstrations occurring simultaneously in all of the major metropolitan areas including Los Angeles. Dick and I spent a good deal of the day in the streets of downtown Los Angeles.
Occupy Movement Recharges for 2012
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Randy Shaw: The Occupy movement could greatly benefit from choosing a similar big target that could engage activists across the world.
LA City Council Shames the U.S. Supreme Court
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On the issue of corporate personhood, is the Los Angeles City Council smarter than the United States Supreme Court? Incredibly, Yes! Last week in a huge victory for Angelenos, the Los Angeles City Council voted against the 2010 Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case that found that corporations were entitled to the same rights [...]
Blacks and Occupy: Dividing the Occupy Movement
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Carl Bloice: Occupy activists are thinking deeply about how we might incorporate opposition to racism, class exploitation, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, violence done to the environment and transphobia into the resistance of the 99%.
Two Ways to Destroy “Occupy Wall Street”
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Bruce Reilly: The classic method of the powerful to distract the masses is to get them to fight amongst themselves. The easiest one is via racism, and the other is class warfare pitting the Middle Class vs. Lower Class.
Occupy the Bill of Rights
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Stephen Box: The students who witnessed the pepper spray assault began to chant “Shame on you!” while maintaining their distance.
Maybe They Should Occupy LA’s Neighborhood Councils
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Stephen Box: Occupy LA has faced one of the most potent of enemies, an ambivalent audience, one that is most likely to respond with a tired dismissal based on aesthetics or a weary look of disbelief as issues such as unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, collapsing infrastructure and a collapsing economy are presented as a call to action.
The Occupy Movement Needs a Good Fight
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Shamus Cooke: If the national Occupy Movement fought for a massive public jobs program and against cuts to social programs by massively taxing the wealthy and corporations, the vast majority of working people would join the movement until it was capable of actually winning these demands.
Shutting Cities Down: Now and Then
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Lee Fang: The American political and economic system is falling apart. No matter who wins an election, in many cases, the outcomes are the same: well-heeled corporate interests dictate policy.
The Way Forward for Occupy Portland
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Shamus Cooke: If the Occupy Movement demanded that the wealthy and corporations be taxed to create jobs and prevent cuts to social programs, the 99% would see a movement built in its own image
50 Million Will March
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Brent Budowsky: I believe that the first big winner of the 2012 campaign is the Occupy Wall Street movement, whether or not it participates in electoral politics.
Civil Disobedience as a Strategy for the Occupy Movement
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Tom Hayden: If there’s enough people and they all sit down and say “We want to appeal to a jury of our peers, which is our Constitutional right,” that’s something that should make the decision makers take pause because I don’t think juries are going to convict these people.
Why Nonviolent Resistance Beats Armed Struggles for Regime Change
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Randy Shaw: But as much as the Left has romanticized Castro’s armed overthrow of the Bautista regime, and Ho Chi Minh’s military defeat of the United States to unite Vietnam, in most cases violence is less likely to achieve revolutionary change than nonviolent strategies.
Why Libertarians Should Not Scorn Occupy Wall Street
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Wendy McElroy: Protesters have been maced, beaten, and arrested by the police for peacefully exercising their right to free assembly and free speech. Libertarians who put their disapproval first and foremost are missing the proper emphasis.
What History Can Teach the Occupy Forces
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Tomiko Brown-Nagin: History shows that American political activism has never been limited to the form that it conventionally takes today—electoral politics. Citizens have historically employed an array of tools to influence public policy
Fuel for Occupy Wall Street’s Fire
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Shamus Cooke: Ultimately, the Occupy Wall Street protests have already succeeded. The movement has successfully re-focused the nation’s debate on who ruined the economy and who should be targeted, shifting blame away from immigrants, unions, and other groups of working people, like public employees.
Support the Occupy Movement and a New American Spring
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Brent Budowsky: I believe this new surge of all-American protest could be the beginning of a new American Spring that could rejuvenate the progressive and populist movements and win majority support throughout the nation.
Obama Paving Perry’s Path to Presidency
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Randy Shaw: When you try to understand how Rick Perry defeated Barack Obama in the 2012 election, look to the summer of 2011. That’s when Obama did almost everything possible to alienate the voters he needs for re-election. Obama began with a humiliating surrender to Republicans on the debt-ceiling deal, leaving even longtime supporters questioning his leadership.
Arab Spring: The Kings and the Presidents
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John Peeler: Just as with the fall of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe, success in Tunisia encouraged protesters elsewhere; success in the most important Arab state, Egypt, meant that success was conceivable anywhere.
Will Revolution Succeed in Egypt?
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Steve Hochstadt: Little depends on what we in the U.S. do. Our best bet is to offer support to democratic institutions, no matter who the likely winner of a free vote might be.
Janitors Protest: A Rally Against Economic Injustice or A Public Nuisance?
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Sylvia Moore: These protests were just the latest expression of outrage among the working classes across the country, who have suffered massive job losses and wage stagnation, while failing bank behemoths who wrecked the economy got bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars.
Media Mud Pies: CNN’s Embarrassing Response To FOX
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As a result of this abrogation of journalism, Americans have a depleted treasury, a rotting infrastructure, criminal healthcare, fiscal sociopathy, substandard education, a dumbed-down public, an ever-widening socio-political chasm, and idiots elected to and remaining in office for lack of effective vetting and investigation by a legitimate Fourth Estate.
What Are Teabaggers?
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Fox News promoted what was called “Tea Party Protests” which were to occur on April 15, 2009. Some called it Anti-Tax Day. It was an effort to get some traction going for the right wing to protest taxes. The name is a play on the original “Boston Tea Party” when American colonists protested the British [...]
Marriage Defined
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The 2008 election was supposed be over a couple weeks ago, but that’s not what’s happened. Three U.S. Senate seats remain undecided. Missouri, a state which has voted for the winning Presidential candidate more times than anyone can remember, is too close to call. Then there is our own now infamous Proposition 8, the California [...]
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