“Occupy…to engage the mind, energy and attention of”
Here’s a song for all who are awake, engaged, and working to make this world a better place. Thank You!

Disaster has a way of concentrating the mind. And Gotham has always had its share of it: whether it’s a slow-burning disaster like the epidemic of income inequality, the endemic scourge of police brutality and racial profiling, or the chronic deprivation of healthy food in isolated neighborhoods. Superstorm Sandy churned all of these elements of urban chaos. But in its wake, the storm has laid bare new pathways for innovations, and new frontiers for struggles against inequality.

The undercurrent of these contradictions ran through a conference this weekend dedicated to “designing a city for the 99%,” a possibility made more real and urgent in the storm’s aftermath. Urban Uprising, held at the New School and the CUNY Graduate Center (where this reporter is also a graduate student), brought together academics, legal experts, organizers and urban ecologists to broach fresh questions about organizing communities: how to harness the energy of Occupy and channel it into direct, localized campaigns; how to balance environmental renewal with economic development; and how to reorient debates on food policy away from apolitical consumer interests and toward the connection between food justice and fighting poverty.

On November 16, Richard Estes interviewed me on his KDVS program Speaking In Tongues about Burning Man and the recent suicide of Paul Addis. This is part 2 of the interview, in which we talk more about the effects of police and pranksters on countercultures and activist movements.

We are letting our elected officials off the hook. We must demand our representatives start doing their jobs. It is not enough to make statements of commitment. We need action. We need long-term solutions that will finally address the issues of environmental justice, especially the most important issue of our generation -climate change. Our planet is undergoing a severe crisis that unfortunately leaves our most vulnerable communities to suffer the consequences of an irresponsible and exploitative business model.

On November 16, Richard Estes interviewed me on his KDVS program Speaking In Tongues about Burning Man and the recent suicide of Paul Addis. Burning Man centers around an annual festival in a temporary desert city that surrounds a human effigy. This effigy is ritually burned on Saturday night of the week-long event, but Addis was jailed for setting fire to it on the Monday before its scheduled destruction.

Recently, while standing in an hour-long U.S. Customs line at Washington Dulles, I pulled out Slow Democracy. Listening to others complain about the untenable situation as we crisscrossed back and forth, I read, holding up the book title for all to see. Finally someone said, “What is that book about?” I delivered a succinct summary, consciously using tools I had just learned to include diversity, to all within earshot. What followed was a splendid example of slow democracy.

People rallied from jetlag, shook off fatigue, spoke over wailing babies, and listened to each other share stories and experiences about an issue close to all our hearts: the democracy crisis in America. I was inspired to see in action the main contentions in Slow Democracy: i.e., people care about democracy and want to bring it back to the local level.

What you first notice, because they are everywhere, are the mounds of people’s things lining every curb. They stack up head-high, spilling out into the road, some of them still oozing water after three weeks. You park your car, careful not to scratch the side on all the debris, open the door and get hit with the sound of motors – chain saws, generators, drills, pumps. Everybody is hacking and cutting away at the accumulation of their lives, and dragging the now worthless pieces out to the street.

The Rolling Jubilee debt elimination project is one of the best ideas to come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Yet some, most notably Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, have raised concerns that eliminating debt in this fashion might create tax liabilities for the former debtors.

It turns out that the Rolling Jubilee folks have already dealt with this potential issue.

The reason why Shapiro’s op-ed is notable and worth writing about is not that it makes the case for the Red Cross but rather that it lays bare the reality that a radical group of organizers have been tremendously successful. There are reporters, residents and colleagues of Shapiro that find what they have done is exemplary. Corporations and businesses have considered donating, even though they may have had a distaste for Occupy Wall Street. But, in the end, for people like Shapiro, their business or capitalist ideology is impossible to ignore and Shapiro recognizes the popularity and respect is so high that he must justify a rational business decision to not support Occupy Sandy.

The media as a collective has never understood the Occupy movement.

From November 2011 to the movement’s one-year anniversary, various outlets pronounced the movement dead. The pronouncements ignored the various reasons why the movement appeared to be dead, such as less media coverage and the fact that it has never had a national organization at the top. It has always been decentralized.

To pronounce it dead is to say that all the small groups spread out through the nation are no longer organizing. Now, with the success of Occupy Sandy, the media is drawing conclusions about the Occupy movement that again shows it does not understand this social movement.