Keyword: Occupy Wall Street

Toward a Fair Future Economy

David Graeber is an anthropologist, a leading figure in the Occupy movement and author of the book, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. He addresses the current age of ‘total bureaucratization’, rife with rules and regulations, in which public and private power has gradually fused into a single entity whose ultimate purpose is the extraction of wealth in the form of profits. Graeber considers what it would take, in terms of intellectual clarity, political will and imaginative...

How the Internet has Made Social Change Easy to Organize, Hard to Win

Today the speed at which we spread information is so fast that a single email can launch a worldwide awareness campaign, as with the Occupy movement. Yet as techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci seeks to show, the ease of social media can actually hurt social change in the long run. From Gezi Park to the Arab Spring to Ukraine to Hong Kong, she shows how today's movements can miss out on the benefits of doing things the hard (and slow) way. Technology does empower in multiple ways, but easier...

Why Didn't Occupy Wall Street Transform into a Political Movement?

Tuesday marked the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, America’s protest movement, which decried economic inequality and inspired a string of occupy movements around the world, including Occupy South Africa – Operation Ubuntu. The Real News Network’s Jessica Desvarieux talks to Nathan Schneider, the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse”, about why Occupy Wall Street did not transform into a political movement. Given growing...

Manuel Castells: "Social Movements are Destined to Die"

How did the financial crash in Iceland inspire the Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements? Why did the Arab Spring in North Africa end with Islamists running Egypt? How did the peaceful movement against a dictatorship in Syria degenerate into an all out civil war? World famous Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, best known for his research on the information society, communication and globalization, talks about the emergence and characteristics of new social movements around...

Taking Stock of the Occupy Movement One Year Later

“By using the simple slogan of the 1% and the 99%, the Occupy dynamic was able to raise questions of inequality. Globally the question often put to people is the issue of poverty. Poverty is quite different to inequality. When you talk about poverty, the reaction could be charity. One feels bad for the poor, you want to have soup kitchens, etc. But inequality doesn't really always give you the sense that the answer is charity, because inequality tells you that whereas some people are...

Noam Chomsky: US and Europe Committing Suicide in Different Ways

Laura Flanders of GRITtv sat down with professor and author, Noam Chomsky, to discuss his latest publication, OCCUPY, published in the Occupy Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press. During the interview, Chomsky talks about anarchism, racism, corporate power, the media and what it might be like to live in a non-market system. "The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways," says Chomsky. "In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and...

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