Report back from Occupy Maine Summer Camp - Day 1

Occupy Maine Summer Camp got underway yesterday in Kennebunkport as campers began setting up tents, activity stations (banner painting! button making! and drumming circles, natch).  

Signs I brought along: the assephant that Occupy the NH Primary folks gave me, and the No East-West Corridor sign that my friends Abby and Fang gave me. Their friend Bozin made many of them to help us protect our state and its natural resources from the private-public partnership our governor and the CEO of Cianbro Corp. are in cahoots to build across the Maine wildnerness.

 

Some people really have this encampment thing down!

 

 

Following a terrific communal dinner, we held a GA with about 35 people participating. Hearing why everyone was there and seeing the generational diversity was very inspriring. A Norwegian artist named Una Hunderi who is traveling in the US to investigate "idealistic communities" came from the farthest away to be with us. We were also grandparents, young farm interns, and several videographers and writers. Something we all had in common -- the desire to occupy mosquitos!

  

As the GA wound down, who should arrive but a NYC contingent bringing activists from the New School to talk about resisting mountain top removal coal miming in Appalachia. It was so exciting to see the big van I've only seen in photos pull into our bucolic camping site.

 

Codepink Maine members Curtis Cole and Pat Taub posed in front of my favorite side of the first vehicle in the Occupy Caravan. There will be many more assembling over the next few days to head to the National Gathering in Philadelphia. Occupy the Roads!

Today we'll hold a Feminist GA at camp, in advance of the national one at NatGat on July 1.

Sampling Occupy Demonstrates "The People Can Have Anything They Want"

“The people can have anything they want. The trouble is they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on Election Day.”

Eugene Debs, Socialist candidate for president several times in the early 20th century, as quoted in this analysis of the effect of the Occupy movement on elections by blogger Kevin Gosztola. I've been reading him with interest since he did such a great job covering Bradley Manning's pretrial hearing, and he nails it here:

Is it any wonder why the Occupy movement is so refreshing? It has forced progressives to confront their role in a liberal class that has betrayed Americans in the past decades.

It may be that the time has finally arrived when the people do want something. Here's the crowd that turned out for the New Hampshire primary to (joyfully) express their dissatisfaction with corporate controlled "representative" government. These people want music, and they want to raise their collective voice.


Occupy can and has changed the mainstream media narrative. Reporting on a survey conducted by Pew about the growth in perception of class conflict in the U.S., the NYT made this absurd statement:

...experts said, that the groups that traditionally benefit the most economically — women, whites and those in higher income groups — seem to be the most concerned about class conflict. 

Women traditionally benefit the most from capitalism under patriarchy -- what planet is the NYT on?

A snapshot of what the people want right now -- at the inception of the year of great change, 2012.

Women occupying want a full voice, and they mean to have it.

Young people carrying the burden of education debt want relief.

The 99% want to throw off their shame and tell their story to the world.

They want to express what's on their mind using creative media like Occupy the Wall (very fun to draw on, try it).

Occupiers want to have fun challenging the financial elite's death grip on our collective resources. photo credit: Bess Adler

The people want to protest the Citizens United ruling that corporations are supposedly people, and money is supposedly a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. Occupy the Courts January 20.

People want homes. Occupy Foreclosures is seen by many as the best alternative to occupying parks and getting pepper sprayed while police throw your media equipment into garbage trucks. At least during winter in the northern latitudes. Occupy Spring!

Indigenous people want what they have always wanted: for the commons of earth, water and air to be shared not privatized. For human beings to live respectfully as guests of the Earth Mother.

A dear activist and organizer in Maine died last week at a ripe old age. Tom Sturtevant was a retired teacher who was an excellent mentor to many of us in the peace movement. He often sent news articles he thought would be of interest, and the last article he sent to me before his passing was, "In solidarity, Occupy group joins with Native Americans" from the Boston Globe's coverage of the National Day of Mourning aka Thanksgiving.

I imagine that Tom felt he could go, because big changes and connections were underway, and the 99% was finally waking up to want something.

Tom Sturtevant in front of the Brunswick Naval Air Station. He organized this protest of the fuel wasting air show last summer.

Occupy the Narrative: Inside/Outside Protest Pen at NH Primary

Nearly full moon over the encampment site at Occupy NH in Manchester. A group of us went down from Maine to join people coming from around New England and other locations to occupy the primary. We arrived in time to join the LGBT equal rights march to Veterans' Park, which was the original ONH site.

The Beacon was there, courtesy of Occupy the Light from Providence.

The Elephant In The Room was there from Occupy Boston, and appeared to be a livestream station as well as a great visual. I saw at least three other livestreamers in the course of the afternoon and evening, including a woman who said she had come from OWS.

 

Greater Boston CODEPINK women joined us outside St Anselm College where the candidates "debated" on Saturday night. Ridgely, Lois, Trish, Pat and I stood by the street with banners and pink roses. The funeral for the American Dream passed by us with candles, and then we followed them up the hill where we were all herded into a protest pen aka free speech (sic) zone by the police claiming that anyone with a sign had to be in there even though one officer told us he disagreed with the policy.

 

There seemed to be about 250 occupiers, and a roughly equal number of GOP candidate supporters of various stripes. The Ron Paulites were the most vociferous, insisting that anyone bearing an antiwar message MUST support their candidate. (Sorry, too racist/anti-immigration for me, based on my own research of a few years ago.) Many of them joined in chanting “We are the 99%” with occupiers, which is the first time I had observed this blend. The protest pen served its purpose by having only one side that faced the sea of media trucks, a side that was quickly dominated by those with commercially printed signs for leading GOP candidates. The shouting crowd behind provided background roars while TV viewers at home saw the placards approved by the Dept. of False Dichotomy. Nifty huh? 

The 1% does many things well. Manufacturing consent has been a strength but is unraveling; manufacturing Potemkin village-type “news” continues to be a speciality. Funding and arming a police state in the U.S.A. is proceeding apace – note this news of anti-protest laws announced by the former White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel, now mayor of Chicago where NATO and the G-8 will convene in May. Oops, did he misspeak when he originally announced the laws were temporary?

As my buddy Bruce Gagnon is fond of blogging, better rattle your chains now while you still can. Inside the protest pen or outside the lobbyist hotels, or wherever you may find yourself.

Sheep No More: Occupy the NH Primary

art by William Hessian

Occupy the NH Primary is upon us this weekend and it looks to be a rollicking good time, with occupiers from around New England converging on a media circus with no shortage of clowns. I was adamant about not participating in any way in the false dichotomy show of the 2012 presidential elections, but when I saw the lineup of events, actions, and presentations from so many of the 99%, I got interested in the opportunity to meet up in NH.

I still plan to Occupy the Vote come November and really any time from now on when I am faced in an election booth with a choice between two evils: just write Occupy in on the line provided. It would not surprise me if a well-organized effort to do such resulted in that being the leading vote getter in some precincts. Would the corporate owned mainstream media be able to ignore that?

Quite possibly they would. After all, where are you reading about the U.S. preparing to send several thousand troops into Israel besides Mondoweiss and a couple of Israeli news outlets? The corporate false information feed is too busy beating a steady tattoo for war with Iran to report inconvenient truths that might alarm the populace. So while I'm reading about the fact that there are more generals, admirals and other top brass than ever before -- bleeding the national coffer$ dry with their salaries and their perqs and their fully funded retirement pensions -- the MSM is spreading Obama false claims to be paring down the military by firing the grunts, and just using robots like the flying drones wherever possible. Not a very original strategy as sci fi novelists began spinning out this scenario decades ago, including the numerous civilian deaths likely to result from war by remote control. Just ask the children of Afghanistan and Pakistan and Gaza and Yemen and... about it.

Real news from Maine: artists are converging for another Draw-a-Thon, this time in response to the Occupy movement: Saturday, January 21 10am-4pm at the Harlow Gallery in Hallowell (right on Augusta's doorstep). In Manchester, NH this weekend 'll be distributing t-shirts and pillow cases that we printed with some of the stronger graphics generated at Bring Our War $$ Home Draw-a-Thons.