What is an #Occupy site actually like? What's it about?

Taken Monday 17th October

Welcome sign

Having been in to support the #OccupyBristol site on College Green today and yesterday, I can tell you.

It is tidy. No mud - yet. The people are very welcoming, and there is a good, purposeful buzz. These are early days - I was there for days three and four, to be exact. I brought stuff in, as per their wish list folding chairs, firewood, saws, pipe, and hazel poles. For a bender. 

Au urban camp is a strange space. Here's the city of Bristol going about its frenetic rush from home to work to coffee shop eatery and back again, and here are a bunch of people who are camping, talking, and (sometimes) singing. 

 Why?  What's the point? How is camping in the middle of the city going to change anything? 

Exactly the same questions were being in Cairo asked eight months ago. How will a bunch of young people camping in Tahrir Square change anything? Do they seriously think that they will be able to topple Mubarak by occupying space in the city?

But they did succeed, because of their persistence, and the fact that they were physically expressing the rejection of the majority of the Egyptian people.

Now I have been on many demonstrations since 1969. I always try to talk to passers-by, and am used to finding only a minority of support. #Occupy is different. 

People are walking in, bearing gifts of food. 

Everyone is sick of politicians and banksters and corporations and the Daily Mail. Except not the Daily Mail. They're still buying that. 

Which will probably lead to the Mail and Sun giving us a bad press. I heard today that the Bristol Evening Post belongs to Dacre and that he owns 50% of the local press.  Please tell me its not true.

But I digress. As in Egypt, so throughout the world. Obviously Cameron is no Mubarak. We could topple Cameron, but would probably wake up to find Liam Fox. Our struggle is not with a single dictator, but with the multinationals who have bought our politicians. 

It is a high mountain to climb. There are hardships ahead, right across the globe. And right across the globe, people of all types, shapes, sizes, ages, and colours are standing up and saying -

Enough! That's enough poverty and powerlessness for us, the 99%, when the 1% has so much wealth they do not know what to do with it.

These are ordinary people saying the system is broken. Back come the critics, asking what they offer to put  in its place. And they laugh because these are not economists or politicians, but ordinary (or extraordinary) people. They are not economists or politicians. They just want (as one activist said) to be.

It is up to us, the bloggers and writers, to work out the changes necessary to fix the system.

It'll take a bit of work, but we owe it to our brothers and sisters sleeping (or not sleeping) when their canvas is shaken by rain, wind, or drunks. We, the bloggers and tweeters and writers and thinkers, owe it to the activists to draw up a clear, pragmatic programme designed to remedy our broken economic system.

There are many such operations in progress, right across the web, but if you feel like staying on this blog, there is a starter right here on the Ma'blog, so you don't have to go flying around all over the Web.

PS here's an account of a #Occupyakland, in the USA. 

Orange Parades; what is the solution?

O dear. They're still rioting in Northern Ireland.

Police chiefs in Northern Ireland today called for a long term solution to the annual parading disputes after another 12th of July was marred by rioting.

Years ago - so many years that I cannot find the letter on this computer, I proposed a long term solution to the annual parades.

The problem is that the Protestant Christians wish to march through Republican Christians' streets. The Republican Christians object to this.

The solution is that the Protestant Christians should pay rent to the Republican Christians for the use of their streets. Since it would take many centuries for the Protestant Christians to agree to pay the rent directly, the local authority should pay on their behalf. The rent would be sufficiently generous for its effect to be visible each year - for instance, in terms of a community hall, or a swimming bath, or a children's play area. Receipt of the rent would be conditional on absence of violence as their guests march by, wearing the Sash, past signs saying New Community Hall, thanks to the Generosity of our Protestant Friends. (Mooning would not be classified as violence).

As a psychiatrist, I can opine that after a couple of years of realising that their marches were benefiting the Republicans, the Protestants would swiftly discover that the authentic traditional route in fact did not pass through Republican areas at all.

I did propose this to the ?Parades Commission, charged with actively seeking solutions to the annual ritual of violence, but they were only interested in that which was hammered out on their own anvil, and did not reply.

Avatar: the Corporate Message

Went to see Avatar in 3D last night. Visually stunning, and engaging to the extent that I went along with the decision to resort to violence against the Corporation. The mawkish bits were just a bit mawkish, and there was next to no solemn cod philosophy.

However, there is a lot of criticism of a thin plot on Twitter. What do people expect from Hollywood? Complexity? Come on, Hollywood only has 2 plots, #1 boy meets girl, and#2 hero saves world from calamity. Avatar was #2. The similarity to Dances with Wolves has been noticed. It has Matrix like themes. And Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings and, and...

The plot criticism is as meaningless as saying that James Bond is predictable.

What amazes me is that Corporate interests did not strangle Avatar at birth. It is a clear allegory of what Shell did to the Ogoni, what Union Carbide/Dow Chemical Co. did to the people of Bhopal and what Trafigura did to the people of Abidjan.

Human history in a nutshell: tribes, clans, kingdoms, empires, corporations. All politics is in one way completely beside the point. We struggle to develop and defend democracy, trying to make our political leaders accountable for their actions (with notable lack of success; think Tony Blair), but the real power has passed on beyond Presidents and Prime Ministers into the fat hands of the corporate overlords.

Avatar is a call to revolution. It contains the line that says something like "There is one thing that shareholders like less than bad press, and that is a bad quarterly return". Simple as that.
The sole legal responsibility of company directors is to stuff their shareholders' pockets with gold.

Corporations are all about Profit before People.

Maybe the Twitter thread about Avatar's thin plot is a bit of corporate astroturfing.

In spite of hugely successful films like Avatar, and the common cynical view of the machinations of "Big Business", corporations continue to dominate our world, with very little criticism apart from campaigning organisations like Corporate Watch. There is no journalistic criticism of corporations for the obvious reason that journalists work for corporations. Duh!

Do these films help or hinder public perception of what is going on? Probably neither. They just get filed away under "Entertainment". Although they must affect our cognitive constructs of the world.

Where the plot does come unstuck is in the violent rebellion bit. The violence was provoked, and the threat of cultural and religious annihilation produces a union of Na'avi tribes, who come and do battle. Any Marxists out there who think that they might like to try this at home, please think again. Humanity is no way ready for this kind of thing. Violence is the problem, not the solution, and in any confrontation, the Right, backed by the police and the army are going to win hands down. Sure, the people, united, will never be defeated, but the people are not united. They may or may not follow United, but mainly they are controlled by a daily dose of corporate journalism and telly.

In the absence of any possibility of a James Bond resolution of the problem by blowing it up, what can we do about the corporate dominance of our world?

That is a long journey, but the first step is to sketch out the kind of laws that we need our political representatives to bring in to constrain the corporations.

We have made a start on this project here. Please read, bookmark and forward.

At this stage in the journey, we just have to spread the meme that corporations need to be brought within a framework of law. That's the easy bit. Once your lollipop lady agrees that this is a Good Idea, the next stage is to start lobbying your government.

Meanwhile, enjoy the film.

Haiti: Looting? Or surviving?

"Looters continue to steal over the body of a man who has just been shot and killed by police in central Port-au-Prince" [Original caption]. Interpretation: Desperate people try to feed themselves despite the danger of being shot by police acting under ill-considered orders.
Image from Los Angeles Times photographer Carolyn Cole

They are shooting "looters" in Port au Prince. . A supermarket is cracked open, there is food in there, about to rot, and starving people get shot for going in.

Why?

Because our Governments have lost sight of human reality. They have a fetish for the supremacy of private property. " What's mine is mine, and even if I am not able to use it, even if you will die if you do not have it, I will kill you if you try to lay a finger on MY PROPERTY."

Someone is responsible for this shoot-a-looter policy. He (and it probably is a he) will have the title of Security Officer. Probably the same guy that has been causing US military planes to be prioritised in the landing stack over planes carrying food and medicines.

Wait a minute! I understand now: White people find things, black people loot:
Here's a couple of photos from New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina.

That's OK then. (Thanks to Jim Jepps for the heads-up on this one)


I am not a revolutionary, I believe in radical reform. But things like this do make me wonder...
[Update: on reflection, in order to avoid any unwelcome attention from the Terrorist Thought Police, I should make it clear that I do not believe that a revolution, whether violent or non-violent, would succeed in the UK. The army and police are too well indoctrinated, and would quickly suppress it, and the most likely outcome would be a right-wing coup. Karl Marx underestimated the power of the likes of Rupert Murdoch to indoctrinate the masses.]

Here is a portal on how to help Haiti.
Link: Reconstructing Haiti

Lying Down in the Faslane

Wow! 50 hits yesterday; not presumably because of a sudden interest in greening lifestyles, but as a result of a newspaper piece, after a press release I sent out. This one:

Congresbury GP Dr Richard Lawson plans to help obstruct Britain's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on July 6th. With at least four other members of the Somerset Stop Trident Replacement campaign, he will take the train up to Faslane, the Scottish base of Trident nuclear submarines. The "independent"* nuclear “deterrent”** has the combined destructive power to kill somewhere in the region of 160,000,000 (one hundred and sixty million) people.

Dr Lawson, who is International Coordinator for the Green Party, said

"It is the duty of all citizens to disobey their Government when it is acting illegally and foolishly. I do not relish the prospect of jail, but there comes a time when we have to stand up and be counted. Or in this case, lie down and get arrested."

The Somerset group's action is part of the Faslane 365, which is a year-long daily disruption of the doomsday base. 600 people have been arrested in the action since it began in October 2006. The Green MEP Caroline Lucas has been arrested, as has the Somerset-based political folk band Seize the Day. At the end of October 2006, five elderly Quakers from Bristol (combined ages over 360) were arrested.

"Gandhi used civil disobedience to make the British quit India. His actions were ignored at first by the British Government, but in the end, the tide of history was with him.

We have a choice: nuclear WMD will either be abolished or used in a final act of catastrophic folly.

Nuclear weapons do indeed raise the threshold at which politicians go to war, but Iraq shows that war making is not a logical process, and possession of WMD is not a guarantee that they will not be used".

Dr Lawson, who has a wife and three children, feels driven to take direct action because of the lack of national debate.

"Tony Blair said he wanted a Trident debate, but then he suppressed the poor old Labour Party hacks who tried to raise the matter at their sorry excuse of a party conference. The Tories of course are always 100% in favour of anything of a warlike nature, although I am sure they will want to paint it a fetching shade of green when they come in to power". Labour and Tories were noticeably absent from the Trident debates held earlier this year in Bath and Wells.

The logical case for nuclear disarmament is on this blog, on 9.6.2007

*in fact Trident is totally dependent on George W Bush

** in fact “deterrence” is old hat. In modern military doctrine these are tactical war-fighting weapons.