This is a listserv for free-ranging conversations among the Occupy Boston community as a whole. If you want to raise a concern, give or get advice or suggestions, or pass on information to the broader OB community, this is a good place to do it. If what you want to talk about goes beyond the narrower focus of a working group, this is a good place to have that discussion. Join the Community Forum here.
Occupy Women: Will Feminism’s Fourth Wave Be a Swell or a Ripple?
What challenges will a fourth wave of feminism face? What lessons have been learned?
Is a fourth wave of feminism rising from an ocean of unrest? The First Feminist General Assembly taking place in Washington Square Park in New York City the evening of Thursday, May 17, may mark a historical turning point. Emerging out of the Occupy Movement, the event brings together a cross-section of the hundreds of thousands of women already mobilized from a broad progressive spectrum since September 17.
On May Day, women filed into the streets by thousands around the world. Indeed, seen and unseen, woman has been on the front lines throughout the Arab Spring, the uprisings in Russia, in Spain and in London most recently, and within the Occupy movement since September 2011. She’s held countless signs in the marches and protests, walked miles, strategized for hours, written hundreds of emails, facilitated many meetings, moderated many discussions. Now, women are launching the 1st Feminist General Assembly.
Pharmacists In Kansas Can Now Deny Women Access To Birth Control
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed a bill yesterday that will allow pharmacists in the state to refuse to fill a prescription they think could be used to induce abortion. But since the “conscience” measure says they cannot be required to provide a drug or devise that they think “may result in the termination of a pregnancy” – but does not define which drug in particular – the law’s opponents say it could allow a pharmacist to interfere with a woman’s health care by refusing to distribute birth control or emergency contraception.
Women who already have difficulty obtaining contraception may face additional hurdles, according to Julie Burkhart, founder of an abortion-rights group in Wichita, Kansas:
Burkhart said the law could create a hardship for women in small towns with a sole pharmacist who may refuse to fill certain prescriptions. In larger cities, women will have to make sure they go to a cooperative pharmacist, she added.
Austerity Everywhere: Fiscal Drags Coming Out of Great Recession
The idea that this is just a problem limited to Europe, without consequences for the United States, has been rendered inoperative by simple math. Jared Bernstein took a look at budget deficits in the US year over year and finds that we’re implementing a significant amount of austerity of our own, despite the fragile economic state:
…what matters in terms of foot-on-the-accelerator is the change in the budget deficit, and the fact is we’ve been letting up right as the economy appears to have a slowed a bit. Add state fiscal drag and the growing unemployment insurance cuts and you get the picture.
On the first point, the figure compares the budget deficit so far this fiscal year with the one from the same months of last FY. Last year’s was $150 billion more negative. Annualized, that’s enough to drive the unemployment rate a half-point higher than it would otherwise be.
Then there are all the state job losses, which are also keeping the unemployment rate elevated, as I show here.
Finally, as my CBPP colleague and UI expert Hannah Shaw points out, over 400,000 long-term unemployed persons in 25 high-unemployment states have lost UI benefits so far this year as the extended benefits program is ending in states across the land.
Children’s Mental Health At Risk From Chronic Financial Instability
Drew McWilliams, a clinician and the Chief Operating Officer at Morrison Child and Family Services in Portland, Ore., suggests that amid the underwater mortgages, chronic unemployment and other fallout of the recent recession, a less obvious but equally worrying phenomenon has emerged: the troubled minds of children.
Since the financial collapse of 2008, McWilliams said his clinic has seen an increasing number of children suffering anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the 6,000 children that the center treats through in- and out-patient programs, McWilliams said many are trying to cope with the stress borne of persistent financial insecurity.
“Parents are struggling with their own issues and that spills over to their kids,” he said.
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/17/12” »
Breaking the Taboo on Challenging Capitalism in America
Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.
Greece on brink of collapse as runs on its banks break out
[Greek president] Papoulias said he had been warned by the central bank and finance ministry that the country faced “the risk of a collapse of the banking system if withdrawals of deposits from banks continue due to the insecurity of the citizens generated by the political situation”.
Report: Global Biodiversity Down 30 Percent in 40 Years
The world’s biodiversity is down 30 percent since the 1970s, according to a new report, with tropical species taking the biggest hit. And if humanity continues as it has been, the picture could get bleaker.
Humanity is outstripping the Earth’s resources by 50 percent – essentially using the resources of one and a half Earths every year, according to the 2012 Living Planet Report, produced by conservation agency the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/16/12” »
Stories of the Day: If you’re going to the NATO protest, please read this information from the ACLU: Protesting NATO: What to Know About the Secret Service and H.R. 347. Inequality isn’t only plaguing America—the Arab Spring flowered because international capitalism is broken. In From Cairo to Wall Street: Voices from the Global Spring, edited by Anya Schiffrin and Eamon Kircher-Allen, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says the world is finally rising up and demanding a democracy where people, not dollars, matter—the best government that money can buy just isn’t good enough. … What the protests tell us is that there was outrage and that outrage gives hope. For more, see The 99 Percent Wakes Up. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. … The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. … A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process. For more, see Colonized by Corporations. And: David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up. Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist…He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade … This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street. For more, see David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street. And here’s an article by David Graeber, who says: “Occupy is shedding its liberal accretions and rapidly turning into something with much deeper roots, creating alliances that promise to transform the very notion of revolutionary politics in America. … In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America’s greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.” For more, see Occupy’s Liberation From Liberalism.
Other Occupies/Protests: Tents belonging to some of the most persistent Occupy protesters in North America will be removed Wednesday morning if demonstrators won’t leave a downtown park, the mayor of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, said Tuesday. Dennis O’Keefe has asked Occupy protesters in Harbourside Park to leave by midnight or city officials will dismantle their tents at around 8 a.m. “I don’t use the term ’evict’ because we’re not evicting them,” O’Keefe said, stressing that protesters can use the popular seaside meeting place during daylight and evening hours. “The only thing is, they can’t continue to live in the park — any more than I can.” For more, see Occupy Newfoundland Kicked Out. In more news from Canada: A court order had forced a Quebec college to reopen; as a result, some teachers and parents helped striking students form a picket line to keep other kids out; riot police then burst through to help enforce the court order; and, in the end, the school closed again because teachers weren’t prepared to teach. The height of Tuesday’s standoff at College Lionel-Groulx saw riot police use pepper spray and physical force to help 53 students return to class after winning a court injunction. For more, see Riot Cops Open School, Staff Shuts it Down. And in more school news: a 16-year-old Bronx boy was slapped with a disorderly conduct ticket inside his high school after trying to hand out flyers protesting the city’s plan to shut down the school. Malik Ayala, a sophomore at Lehman High School in Schuylerville, was summoned to the dean’s office last month after being ordered by school staffers to stop handing out copies of a letter he had written urging students to unite and stand up for the school. The Education Department is in the process of closing it. ”What will happen if all the public schools get shut down?” Ayala, who is a member of the school’s Student Leadership Council, wrote in the flyers, which featured the Black Panther Party icon at the top, along with the words, “Power to the People …Then and Now.” … “They’re turning our schools into penitentiaries,” added Ayala, who said he has was issued a second ticket at a Bronx subway station April 18 while videotaping police officers conducting stop-and-frisks. For more, see Bronx Student Ticketed After Handing Out Flyers Protesting School Closure.
“Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.” Nelson Mandela
Media@occupyboston.org • Occupy Boston Media, PO Box 51162, Boston, MA 02205 • @Occupy_Boston
