...and still more OWS links

Michael: Is this voicing something that could effect the role of police?

Last night, police at Occupy Santa Barbara arrested protesters who were insisting on staying in a public park. Before these arrests were made, a man who identified himself as Danny, a Navy veteran, confronted police about suppressing the rights of protesters. "I made a [expletive] oath and I'm going to keep it," Danny told the officers. "As long as your fellow brothers in blue keep beating on veterans, I would either get out of the badge or expect a lot of trouble to come from veterans....You want to watch some video? You watch a cop 20 feet away intentionally throw a flashbang onto [Scott Olsen's] head while he's knocked out unconscious from a [expletive] rubber bullet. Watch 400 Boston police attack a hundred Vietnam vets having a peaceful Vets for Peace rally....Is that the kind of badge you want to be behind? Anybody?"

Michael: Below are some links to articles in the most recent issue of The Nation dedicated to the Occupy Movement

The Body Acoustic
JoAnn Wypijewski
October 26, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/164217/body-acoustic

Michael: Looking #OWS from the perspectives of bodies and personal connectedness.

It cannot be overstated that the youth raised on video games were also raised on fear and the specter of terror from all directions. Their political identity may still be as curious as the juxtapositions in their People's Libraries-Plato's Republic beside Judy Blume, a box or two away from Marx and Augustine-or as hard to decipher as the grab bag of symbols and references in V for Vendetta. Theirs is a kind of twenty-first-century surreality, so let us recall an aphorism by surrealism's great poet, Paul Éluard: "There cannot be total revolution but only permanent revolution. Like love, it is the fundamental joy of life." Talk of revolution is premature, but a joyless generation has finally tasted public happiness.

Why Occupy Wall Street Has Left Washington Behind
Gordon Lafer
October 26, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/164207/why-occupy-wall-street-has-left-washington-behind
As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hone their lines, trying to work out a position that sympathizes with the aggrieved while reassuring their donors, the OWS message to both candidates is the same: "This isn't about you. It's between us and them," pointing up to the Masters of the Universe on the executive floors-not the mouthpieces of the corporate chieftains but the actual power.
OWS is clearly inspired by Tahrir Square. Yet Egyptians succeeded in toppling the Mubarak government not because they occupied the square but because their occupation exerted direct pressure on the country's most powerful business interests. As SUNY Stonybrook sociologist Michael Schwartz has detailed, by shutting down the tourist industry, disrupting construction projects whose financing had already been committed and initiating general strike actions that threatened to shut the Suez Canal, the occupiers of Tahrir threatened the interests of the economic elite-and that is what brought down the regime.
Clearly, something similar-nonviolent action that directly challenges the economic elite-is required here if we're to succeed in making serious change.

Also in This Nation Forum
SAM PIZZIGATI: "OWS Revives the Struggle for Economic Equality"
RINKU SEN: "Race and Occupy Wall Street"
GEORGE ZORNICK: "How to Be a 1 Percenter"
TAMARA DRAUT: "Occupy College"
SARAH ANDERSON: "The Costs of Wall Street Greed"