OCCUPY WALL STREET Lawsuit Aims To Stop The NYPD From Targeting Free Speech

from The Gothamist:

A new lawsuit filed in federal court last week aims to challenge a reality evident to anyone who has attended a large political gathering in Lower Manhattan over the past decade: lawful behavior is no safeguard against being arrested.

The lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made around the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September 2012, when the NYPD "should have known that members of its police force would encounter individuals engaged in expressive speech activity."

Instead, the NYPD continued to arrest and harass protesters for seemingly no reason other than that they were protesting.

The lawsuit asserts that this is part of a "pattern, policy, and practice of the NYPD misapplying the disorderly conduct statute to peaceful protesters in New York City."

"The City of New York has continually failed to appropriately police the many non-violent and lawful expressions of speech, resulting in the continual breach of individual rights, the waste of judicial and civic resources, and the need for appropriate training policies, methodologies, and systems to address individuals conducting peaceful and legal expressive speech as protected under the First Amendment," the suit states.

Remember, it was the "white shirts," or NYPD commanding officers, who set the tone for how these protests would be policed: pepper-spraying a group of women standing on the sidewalk, sucker-punching a random man in a crowd of people, or in the case of former Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD, body-checking a protester with his baton. (After retiring from the NYPD, Esposito was appointed by Mayor de Blasio your Commissioner of Emergency Management.)

This behavior eventually cost the city millions of dollars.

In addition to Esposito, Mayor Bloomberg, and former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, the suit names other police officials who seemed to truly relish cracking down on protests, including Deputy Chief "This is New York City, you can't be making noise at night" James McNamara, and Deputy Chief Thomas Purtell, seen here tossing a live-streamer to the ground like he's facing the cameras at Summerslam.

Legal experts tell the New York Times that the suit "raised important questions" and noted that it's "well-written," but one expert believes that “These plaintiffs are going to have a really tough time making a case" against the City itself.

In an email, Wylie Stecklow, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, responds that "my firm has spent the past few years litigating twenty different cases involving constitutional violations of rights of members of Occupy."

Steecklow adds that depositions of NYPD officials obtained in other suits would help the plaintiffs prevail: "These class representatives are in a very good position to move forward on their claims."

Those nine plaintiffs include former Episcopal bishop George Packard, and photographer Charles Meacham.

Meacham was arrested by Inspector Edward Winski, who has been named in many Occupy-related lawsuits against the City; this lawsuit cites a deposition in which Winski admits that he has never received any training on the First Amendment.

"He knows who I am. He's asked how I'm doing before," Meacham told us after his 2012 arrest. "He knows I'm a photographer. He'll say, 'Hey, where's your press pass? Oh that's right, you don't have one.'"

Meacham's charges were eventually dismissed.

You can read the entire complaint below.

OWS First Amendment Suit

Please, click on the link at top if you want to get all the links mentioned throughout the piece.

OCCUPY: the Movie Watch it here now...

Rolling Jubilee Announces Abolishment of Nearly Four Million Dollars of Student Debt, Launches New Debt Collective

from our friends at Sparrow Media

On the third anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Rolling Jubilee has, for the first time ever, bought and abolished student debt: $3,856,866.11 of student debt owed by 2,761 people across the United States.

With the aim of building a broad-based debt resistance movement, the Rolling Jubilee relieves debtors by buying debt for pennies on the dollar. The project highlights the injustice of having to go into debt for things that should be publicly provided, like healthcare and education. This is the fourth announcement by the Rolling Jubilee, which has abolished over $15 million of medical bills for thousands of people across the United States since the campaign was launched and went viral in November of 2012.

While medical debt is widely available to debt collectors on secondary markets, most student debt is not, because it is guaranteed by the federal government. The debt purchased by the Rolling Jubilee is private debt from Everest College, which is part of Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a nationwide system of for-profit colleges that receives approximately 90% of its funding from federal student loans. Corinthian has been subject to numerous investigations by state and federal authorities for fraud. The company is on the verge of collapse and the Department of Education is aiding Corinthian in its quest to find a buyer for its over one hundred campuses and online operations. Strike Debt member Luke Herrine explains: “The Department of Education needs to stop acting as a debt collector for a predatory lender, and start discharging the debt of these students. It is fully within its statutory powers to do so.”

“Debt is the tie that binds the 99%, whether you are a student delinquent on your student loans or a parent struggling to pay healthcare bills,” says Strike Debt member Ann Larson. “Being forced into debt for basic social services is a systemic problem and the only solution is to respond collectively to create a new, equitable economy.”

To that end, this announcement also marks the launch of The Debt Collective (debtcollective.org), which will create a platform for organization, advocacy, and resistance by debtors. “Just as the labor movement demands jobs, higher pay, a safe work environment, and time off, The Debt Collective will challenge the 1% creditor class by empowering members to renegotiate, resist, and refuse unfair debts while advocating for real solutions including free education and universal health care,” says Thomas Gokey, a Debt Collective organizer. “Alone, our debts overwhelm us. Together, they make us powerful,” says member Laura Hanna. “We invite everyone to join us at debtcollective.org and become a part of this unprecedented effort to unite debtors. You are not a loan.”

For more information visit http://strikedebt.org, http://rollingjubilee.org, and http://debtcollective.org

Will crushing student loan debt and worthless college degrees radicalize the Millennial generation?

from Dangerous Minds

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

The existing social and financial order is crumbling because it is unsustainable on multiple levels. The central state is not the Millennials’ friend, it is their oppressor.

No generation of young people is ever politicized by hunger in distant lands or issues of the elderly. It’s no rap on youth that self-interest defines what issues have the potential to radically transform their political consciousness; the transformative cause must reveal the system is broken for them and that it intends on sacrificing their generation to uphold the status quo.

The Millennial generation, also known as Gen-Y (Gen-Y comes after Gen-X), is generally defined as those born between 1982 and 2004.

The oldest Millennials were children during the first Iraq War in 1991 (Desert Storm) and just coming of age in 2001 (9/11 and the war in Afghanistan) and the start of the second Iraq War (2003).

The Millennials have entered adulthood in a era characterized by permanent low-intensity wars and central-bank/state managed financial bubbles—2001 to the present. In other words, the only experience they have is of centralized state mismanagement on a global scale.

The gross incompetence of the government and central bank—not to mention the endless power grabs by these centralized authorities—has not yet aroused a political consciousness that the system is irrevocably broken, not just for older generations but most especially for them.

Anecdotally, it appears the Millennial generation is still operating on the fantasy that all they need to do to get a secure, good-paying job and a happy life is go to college and enter the status quo machine of government/corporate America.

There are two fatal flaws in this fantasy: the $1+ trillion student loan industry and a transforming economy. The higher education industry in the U.S. operates as a central state-enabled and funded cartel, limiting supply while demand (based on the fantasy that a college degree has critical value) soars. This enables the cartel to keep raising prices even as the value of its product (a diploma) sinks to near-zero.



Since the Federal government issues and guarantees all student loans, the higher education cartel is (like sickcare, national defense and the mortgage industry) effectively socialized, i.e. funded and managed by the central state.



If you understand the student loan system is predatory, parasitic and exploitive, you have reached first base of a meaningful political awareness. If you understand the central state (Federal government) funds and enforces this system, you’ve reached second base. If you understand the vast majority of college degrees do little to prepare you to be productively employed in the real economy, you have reached third base.

If you understand the status quo is unsustainable and does not operate according the the fantasy model you’ve been told, congratulations, you’re close to home base.

I have covered all the salient issues repeatedly:

The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo: Diminishing Returns

College Grads: It’s a Different Economy

Bernanke’s Neofeudal Rentier Economy

Degrowth and Anti-Consumerism

Centralization and Sociopathology

Present Shock and the Loss of History and Context

Generation X: An Inconvenient Era

The Nearly-Free University

The central state is not your friend, it is your oppressor. The loan shark that won’t let you discharge your student loan debt without appealing each ruling against you three times is the government (and its hired-gun proxies).

The oppressor who demands you work your entire life to pay interest on public debt squandered on neocolonial wars and various cartels (sickcare et al.) is your central state.

The entity who demands you pay higher taxes so the generation entering retirement gets all that it was promised, even though the world has changed and the promises are no longer sustainable? The central state.

The oppressor that will devote its enormous resources to investigate and crush you if you actively resist the bankers and financiers who pull the political lackeys’ strings? The central state.

At some point, the Millennial generation will have to awaken to the fact that the only way to change its fate is to grasp political power and redirect the policy and mindset of the nation. Centralization is the black hole that is destroying the nation’s social and economic vigor. Decentralization, transparency, accountability, adaptability, social innovation, a community-based economy—these are the key features of a sustainable social order.

The existing social and financial order is crumbling because it is unsustainable on multiple levels. The status quo will cling to its false promises and corrupt centers of power until the moment the whole thing implodes.

Related links of interest:

Dear Class of ‘13: You’ve been scammed: How the College-Industrial Complex drove tuition so high.

Overdue Student Loans Reach Record as U.S. Graduates Seek Jobs

Bureaucrats Paid $250,000 Feed Outcry Over College Costs

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?

My Generation’s Disease

Podcast with Mike Swanson of WallStreetWindow.com on student loan debt and the Nearly Free University: Charles Hugh Smith On the Forces of Centralization and Soaring Education Costs. I always enjoy discussing issues with Mike, a polymath with a wide range of interests and experiences.

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

"Occupy Comics"

From DangerousMinds

Occupy Comics is the first issue of a new project bringing together comic pros, storytellers and artists to create a time-capsule of the Occupy protests. Each issue of the anthology will tell individual stories and explore broader themes inspired by the months of protests that began in fall of 2011.

Halo-8’s Matt Pizzolo told Wired back in 2011:

“Adbusters created a really powerful image of a ballerina atop the Wall Street bull with protesters in the background, and that was enough to set this off,” he said. “Then Anonymous brought in the Guy Fawkes masks, and U.S. Day of Rage created more art challenging the relationship between Wall Street and Washington. So this is an art-inspired movement, and that’s part of what makes it so viral. It’s not intellectual, it doesn’t need a manifesto. People are banding together around an idea, rather than an ideology.”

Occupy Comics participants include Alan Moore, Charlie Adlard (The Walking Dead), Susie Cagle (cartoonist arrested at Occupy Oakland), Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night), Dan Goldman (Shooting War), Molly Crabapple, Amanda Palmer, Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), Laurie Penny, Zoetica Ebb, Patrick Meany and Douglas Rushkoff.

Check out this PDF preview of Occupy Comics. You can purchase the 48 page first issue via Midtown Comics. There will be a hardback graphic novel published this Fall.

Occupy Comics was funded via the social-networking site Kickstarter and the profits were, and still are, being donated to Occupy-related groups.

 

Good Deed: Help The Sparrow Project Meet Their Spring 2013 Budget

If you are a real activist, you know not everything is as easy as it seems, in terms of getting out there and getting your message spread. And even if you're just a desk top activist and hope something you do, some click might help inspire some positive change, here's one that can help, a small but brilliant organization a friend of mine runs... Read what they've done and what they do, and if you're so moved please donate something to the cause.
peace,
GEF

Dear Friend,

2012 was a terrific year for us at The Sparrow Project, but we need your financial help to continue our campaigns into 2013. Our Spring 2013 budget is currently at a $5,800 deficit and we will need to supplement that amount with donations by people like you by April 1, 2013 in order to continue our campaigns. You can choose an amount that best fits your budget and make a one-time or recurring pledge by simply clicking on the donation box on the right side of the screen. Any donation, no matter how small or large, will help us reach our Spring 2013 goals!

With your help we are able to publicize actions and coordinate events for fledgling non-profits and grassroots groups without having to charge them!

To view case studies of a handful of our many successful projects in 2012 visit: http://www.sparrowmedia.net/case-studies/

To read an archive of our press releases for 2012 visit: http://www.sparrowmedia.net/press-releases/

The Sparrow Project specializes in giving amazing causes access to the media and attention that they deserve. We'd like to give everyone who fights for justice a similar opportunity to shine.

Love & Liberation,
Andy Stepanian
Cofounder, The Sparrow Project

https://www.wepay.com/donations/351530105

Hedges v. Obama NDAA Lawsuit Press Conference, 2/6/2013 from Sparrow Media on Vimeo.

OCCUPY

from occupywallst.org

“The Occupy Wall Street movement may have faded from the headlines in the aftermath of the eviction of Zuccotti Park more than a year ago, but the issues that originally sparked it and the activism it inspired remain very much alive.”

This was the opening to a blog post called Who Were the 99 Percent? from co-authors of the recent study Changing The Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City.

Regrettably, as reported by Allison Kilkenny in the Nation, many in the media have twisted the study’s findings regarding the makeup of OWS by dismissing the movement in an entirely new and spurious way: “this was a damned if they do, damned if they don’t moment for Occupy--they’re either poor, dirty hippies or the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite, but never, ever Americans exercising their First Amendment rights”.

Fortunately, we don’t need outside justification to know that ‘We Are the 99%’, and as the study depicts, nothing will extinguish the flame compelling us to speak out and inspiring us to act.

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team

Jello Biafra at Zuccotti Park on the 1st Anniversary of OCCUPY WALL STREET

I ran into Jello at the 1st year Anniversary of OCCUPY WALL STREET down at Zuccotti park.
He's an old friend, and in my early Punk days a serious inspiration...
Shot this digi pic after he asked me to shoot a couple of episodes of "What Would Jello Do" with his Flip video recorder. I'll post those here once he puts them up.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to THE MOVEMENT!

Where Anonymous actions come from

from BoingBoing:

Quinn Norton reports in depth on Wired with a careful, important account of where Anonymous's actions come from -- how coordinated activity (political, lulzy, legal and illegal) can emerge from noise, randomness, bombast and joking. This is the best description of how decision-making works in decentralized movements, and has important implications for the future of activism, governance, politics, crime and security:

But it’s a mistake to identify Anonymous entirely with these arrestees, some of whom were blackhats and others who were guilty of just using the LOIC. The hacks draw their power from the support of the wider collective, not the other way around. The majority of Anonymous operations are conceived and planned in a chaotic and open fashion. At any given time, a few thousand people are congregating on the Anonymous IRC channels, figuring out for themselves what it means to be an anon. And together they embody whatever Anonymous is going to be that day.

Most of the time, in most of the channels, there’s little more than conversation; sometimes a whole channel will consist of lurkers, with no one contributing a thing. But when some offense to the net is detected, anons will converge on one or more of these “chans,” with hundreds or thousands arriving within hours—many of them new to Anonymous and yet all primed and eager to respond. What looks in one moment like a sad, empty chat room can quickly become the staging ground for a major multipronged assault.

Consider OpBART, which flared up in August 2011 and dealt with an unlikely issue for Anonymous: the messy offline world of race relations and police violence. Ever since 2009, when a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant, protests against abuse of authority by transit police had grown. On August 11, anti-BART activists were planning a rally at several of San Francisco’s underground transit stops to protest another shooting by a BART officer, this one of a homeless man named Charles Hill. It was an unremarkable story by the standards of the national media, but the response from BART to the planned protest did catch the interest of the local press: To thwart protesters from coordinating via mobile devices, BART cut cell service at its downtown stations.

How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down

OCCUPY Los Angeles on MAY DAY 2012Inspirational video "If I Could Change The World"

HAVE A GREAT WEEK!

SOLIDARITY WITH THOSE OF YOU PROTESTING NATO IN CHICAGO!

Rally this Wednesday at Mr. 1% Fundraiser

Rally this Wednesday at Mitt Romney Fundraiser
Wednesday, March 14 at 11:00am at The Waldorf Astoria New York

Saturday night the NYC general Assembly reached 100 % consensus on the Mr 1% Rally at the Waldorf Astoria.
Here's the facebook event page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/185675944879348/

Wednesday, Republican kleptocrat Mitt ’1%’ Romney will join a bevy of Wall Street bankers for a fundraiser to fill his election coffers right here in Manhattan, at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown. At a luncheon hosted by a billionaire supermarket magnate friend, Romney will shmooze the SuperPACS and corporate fat cats, and we want to mobilize OWS to show this radical 1% fringe that their time is up.

Community organizations, unions, and pro-worker coalitions will be out there but we want to make sure that the message isn’t just about Romney’s record, or partisan politics. We want to highlight the the nightmare of corporate personhood, and the selling of our democracy to the top bidder.

But rather than just mix our message in with other protests being planned, a group of participants from across OWS is proposing a fun rally to highlight Romney’s true masters. We’re proposing a “1%ers for Romney (or Obama)” rally with people dressed to the nines—we’ll work on costumes like ball gowns and suits and tophats and tiaras— and signs that echo Romney’s own words, like “Corporations are People Too!” as well as “Buy Your Own Politician. Romney’s Mine” and “Ask Me About my Super PAC” etc.

We need creative minds and people willing to put in a little work between now and next Wednesday. We need help designing a scenario, gathering materials, and coming up with funny, smart, biting messages that do more than just slam Romney for his political positions and rather critique a system in which a tool like Romney could be in the political position he’s in.

America's growing anti-intellectualism

By Paul Rosenberg from AlJazeera.net

The first high-profile article to offer a sensible explanation of Occupy Wall Street came from anthropologist David Graeber, author of the recently-published book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In his op-ed, "Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination", he wrote:

"We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt... Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

"But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008.

"There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie...

"It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an 'economy' is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before."

Actually, Graeber is understating the case, in at least two ways. First, the lies have been with us far longer than just a single decade. They go back at least 30 years, to the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the later of whom became known as "Tina" for her favorite catch-phrase attack on the imagination: "There Is No Alternative". Second, it was not just a failure of nerve, and a failure of imagination. It was a failure of reason and of democracy as well. It was, in a sense, an inevitable failure, since those three decades have seen us create enormous deficits of reason, imagination and democracy which made it impossible for us to mobilise the necessary resources at the moment they were needed most.

I agree with Graeber that now we've been granted a second chance. But to make the most of it, we need to understand the hole we've dug ourselves into. That's what this series, America's 13 Deficits is all about: understanding the hole. And the last three deficits - reason, imagination and democracy - are, in a sense, the most important of all, for they are the most basic resources for finding our way out.

Part One examined fiscal deficits - short-term, mid-term and long-term federal deficits, along with state and local deficits. Part Two considered physical deficits in infrastructure and ecosystem services. Part Three dealt with three structural/functional deficits: the sustainability deficit, the time/jobs deficit and the equality deficit. These final three deficits are cognitive and political, and the key to overcoming all three of them is simply the will to do so.

The Reason/Critical Thinking Deficit

America has always had a critical thinking deficit, in that it has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. This is particularly perverse, maddening and contradictory, since America's Founders were the most intellectual group that ever founded any nation we know of, and the desire to foster free and critical thinking, both in government and in the society at large, was one of their notable goals, as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment heritage on which America's Founders depended.

This philosophy prized individual critical inquiry, as well as institutions-formal and informal-which enabled individual efforts to be joined together into a far more powerful whole. This outlook was crucially important to the creation of a new nation on a new hemisphere, confident enough to establish itself on a new political foundation with some ancient roots, but fashioned with its own original design. Mere imitation of the past was rejected as a guiding principal. So, too, was blind reliance on the fantasy of individual political genius. Instead, the spirit and process of critical inquiry was crucial to how the new nation was conceived.

The basic architecture of "separation of powers", for example, was intended to prevent the accumulation of all power into the hands of any unaccountable group or faction - and thus to put a premium on the process of advancing ideas that could pass the muster of critical examination by the widest possible range of parties involved. Similarly, steps were taken to insulating of government from dogmatic religious influence. Religious tests for public office were banned in the Constitution itself, and separation of church and state was formalised in the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom, which similarly guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press - all intimately connected to the individual and collective exercise of critical reason.

And yet, despite all this, there was always an anti-Enlightenment, anti-intellectual side of America as well. And that side has always created needless deficits in critical thinking, hampering America's ability to fully realize its promise.

In 1994, the anti-intellectual forces won a substantial victory when Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. One of the earliest and most profound changes introduced under Speaker Newt Gingrich was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA, first established in 1972, provided Congress with objective and authoritative analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues of the late 20th century, and was widely imitated in the establishment of similar legislative offices around the world.

It was both a product and a promoter of a mature analytical approach to governmental problem-solving, which strengthened respect for a dispassionate truth-seeking approach. Its purpose was not to coldly dictate policy outcomes, but rather to provide reliable, common factual and analytical foundations on which people with different interests, opinions and values could depend in an effort to work out commonly-agreeable policies. It was, in short, a concrete expression of the Enlightenment rationality that informed the shared worldview of America's Founding Fathers.

Thus, Gingrich's elimination of the OTA represented a crucial turning away from the idea of valuing, promoting and relying on the power of critical thought as a key ingredient in the process of self-governing. Of course this is not to pretend that America was ever perfect-or even near-perfect-in pursuing enlightened policy primarily based on critical reason. Basic flaws in our ability to even recognise the full humanity of women and ethnic, racial and religious minorities are but the most vivid and embarrassing proofs of how far from perfect we have been. And yet, the OTA was established in 1972, immediately after what was arguably the most significant decade in American history for systematically correcting those grievous shortcomings. Abolishing the OTA epitomised a shift in political values away from critical thinking and toward raw political power which has coincided with a prolonged period of political dysfunction, during which all the other deficits described in this series have become far more serious burdens on the general welfare of the nation.

In depth

Although Republicans clearly took the lead in turning away from reason, the list of major blunders since then implicates both parties, with major foreseeable blunders including the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law preventing commercial banks from involvement in risky speculation, the failure to prevent 9/11 despite substantial forewarning, and the followup response of going to war against people not responsible for the attacks, the passage of the Bush tax cuts, failure to prevent the housing bubble and collapse, and prolonged inaction to the threat of global warming. As noted in Part One, the entire mid-term deficit is due to such blunders.

While measuring the presence or absence of critical thinking is a challenging goal, it should not be considered impossible, particularly in light of an explosion of research in cognitive science over the past 20 to 30 years. Indeed, the state of California once developed educational standards for the teaching of critical thinking-standards that conservative Republicans organised to get rid of. Hence, the primary challenge is not the difficulty of defining and discovering how to measure our critical thinking deficit - rather, it is how to muster the political will and power to once again dedicate ourselves to increasing our resources of critical thought, rather than destroying them.

The Imagination Deficit

Our imagination deficit is closely tied to our critical thinking deficit. Minds that are perpetually muddled in uncritically accepted ideas and psuedo-facts, incapable of grasping clear-cut truths are hardly prepared to grasp projected possibilities and judge them soundly. This was strikingly obvious in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, for example. Calls for critically examining the reasons behind the attacks were quickly demonised, with a leading role played by a centre-right organisation - the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) - that pretended to stand for academic excellence.

Calls for imagining a pro-active, rather than a reactive responsive were quickly dismissed as well. A Gallup Poll conducted immediately after the attacks found only a bare majority favoring a military response, rather than a criminal justice response - in sharp contrast to most of the rest of the world. There was clearly an opening for imagining a different world, a different way of dealing with destructive violence. But that opening was quickly closed. There was no significant process of critical inquiry and discussion between 9/11 and the initiation of war against Afghanistan, nor was there any serious concern to imagine other possible courses of action. Things were arguably even worse before going to war with Iraq less than a year and a half after that. The careless disregard for facts, much less for reasoned argument, precluded any possibility of trying to imagine alternative approaches - even though there was no need to imagine such alternatives on our own. All we had to do was be willing to entertain alternatives that others had not just dreamed up, but actually implemented.

Failure of imagination is equally evident in our prolonged refusal to act on global warming. Collectively, we have proven incapable of imagining either the future we are headed for, or the alternative pathways that could save us, even though scientists and economists, using critical reason, have developed very good pictures of what lies ahead. Thus, the problem is not a lack of information, but a lack of capacity to grasp that information as a coherent whole, which is the very foundation of our capacity for imagination.

Finally, as Graeber's powerful op-ed reminds us, we've suffered a grievous lack of imagination in coping with the global financial crises, which has only somewhat abated for a while. This failure is most astonishing, considering that we already know what is needed from the experience of multiple nations during the Great Recession - yet we simply cannot imagine doing something similar today. The necessary and humane has become utterly unimaginable to us. Our imagination deficit precludes us from even considering the real solutions to the other deficits that confront us.

Political Deficits - The Democracy Deficit

Democracy is not just a good idea in and of itself, it is also generally conducive to positive policy options. Anti-democratic forces tend to advance the narrow self-interests of those they represent. If the un-represented suffer as a result, there is nothing surprising about it. Of course, democracy per se is no guarantee of good outcomes, but it does significantly improve the odds of such outcomes, particularly when it is paired with protections of individuals and minority groups by a framework of rights, in the form known as liberal democracy. The more that a wide range of people's views and interests are openly considered, the more likely their best interests will be served. Thus, any deficit or deficiency in realising broadly democratic self-government is likely to cause harm, or at least fall short of the optimal good that might otherwise be achieved. Deficits in democracy produce needless deficits in all other realms as well, as surely as night follows day.

America's democracy deficit can be seen in a number of ways. One is simply to compare its relatively abysmal level of voting participation to other nations. From 1960 to 1995, more than 20 countries had turnouts higher than 80 per cent for lower house elections, while the US averaged just 48 per cent - a gap of over 30 per cent. The US average was even lower for off-year elections without a presidential race.

A second view of America's democracy deficit comes from looking at class bias in voting. One cross-national study of late 1990s elections found almost no class bias in high turnout countries, while declines in turnout overall correlated with increased gaps between voters in the highest and lowest income quintiles. Still, there was only one country with a lower overall turnout than the US - Switzerland - and its income gap was 20 per cent, compared to a much higher 35 per cent in the US.

A third view of America's democracy deficit comes from looking at electoral systems. With only a few scattered exceptions, US elections are and always have been winner-take-all, compared to proportional representation systems that predominate in almost all other advanced democracies. In a winner-take-all system, whoever wins the most votes wins all the representation, while proportional representation gives roughly equal representation to winners and losers alike. The winner-take-all system tends to discourage voters and even political organisers in areas where they are unlikely to win a majority - thus creating long-term disincentives to democratic participation.

In depth

A fourth view of America's democracy deficit comes from looking at its institutions. The most blatant, high-profile example is the US Senate, which is comprised of two senators from each state. Thus California, with a 2010 population of over 37 million, is represented by two senators, while the 21 least populated states have a combined population of just over 35 million - two million less than California, but are represented by 42 senators. Making matters even worse, the senate has a plethora of anti-democratic rules, the most well-known of which is the filibuster, which allows a minority of 40 senators to block any action, except on narrowly-tailored budget-related bills. Thus, a population less than that of California can block almost all legislation in the US senate, and there's nothing that representatives of the other 274 million Americans can do about it. In fact, there are many senate actions - such as voting on judicial nominees - that can be blocked by just a single senator ... anonymously!

Yet, astonishingly, all of these democracy deficits are dwarfed by the deficit due to economic special interests. In Part One, I described how our long-term, multi-decade federal deficit is due entirely to oligopolies, powerful economic special interests that thrive at the expense of the general welfare. I cited the analysis presented in 2010 paper, "A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession”, by political scientist Thomas Ferguson and economist Robert Johnson, which identifies three oligopolies in particular - the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and the financial sector. However, at a deeper level of analysis, Ferguson had earlier explained how organised economic special interests largely control American democracy, creating a constant condition of democracy deficit, regardless of outward appearances, and our constant pretension to be the foremost democracy in the world.

Ferguson presented extensive historical evidence in his 1995 book, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, but the basic pattern is readily grasped, and witnessed in politics virtually every day: Small groups of wealthy donors with narrow policy goals are far more able to realise those goals than large groups with broad goals, up to and including the entire public at large. This control traces back to the costs of political involvement. Voters can only choose between alternatives presented to them, while major donors can predetermine who and what those alternatives will be.

In a vivid imaginary illustration, Ferguson describes an electorate composed of 3 per cent who are are vehemently anti-union textile manufacturers, controlling all the wealth, while the the other 97 per cent are pro-union. In a two-party election with a law permitting unionisation as the only issue, Ferguson argues, neither party would advocate for the law advocate with 97 per cent support, since they literally couldn't afford to do so.

The parallel to our actual politics today are striking. "Every poll I know of has big chunks of the public, sometimes even Tea Party members, opposed to cuts in Social Security," Ferguson told me last spring. "Medicare appears to show the same pattern, too. And, the percentage of the public that wants to concentrate on the deficit is very small versus truly large numbers of Americans putting 'jobs' at the top of their priority lists." Yet, under the threat of default this summer, the priorities of the American people were not just ignored, but openly mocked for months on end.

This is what a democracy deficit looks like. And it is, quite literally, a road to ruin. Eventually, even the special interests will be destroyed by their own short-sighted folly.

The Occupy Wall Street movement stands in dramatic contrast to all that, in at least two fundamental ways. First, one of their primary themes is "We Are The 99 per cent" - the vast majority whose welfare is systematically ignored, just as Ferguson explains. Second, their method of organising is radically democratic, based on a model of participatory democracy that goes all the way back to ancient Greece, but whose spirit is much closer to that of Quaker communities, whose long influence on racial and gender justice movements in America played a particularly important, if unheralded, role in the civil rights, feminist and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

While direct democracy practises have played a significant role in social change movements since then, they've also become a significant, though largely unrecognised part of the American political process. New England town meetings have always been one example of direct democracy that is recognised, and the town meetings of Vermont have proven particularly important in raising to prominence otherwise neglected issues. But similar sorts of community meetings have become commonplace adjuncts of the public policy process in many other parts of the nation. They are almost exclusively advisory in nature, but their influence is undeniable. For example, in Los Angeles, a decade ago, the city charter was amended to create a system of "neighbourhood councils". While their power is advisory only, and they have their own elected boards, they hold regular public meetings where the spirit of direct democracy has tentatively emerged in one of the most unlikely of places.

If America is to find its way once again, its people cannot rely on simply delegating this task to others - to think, to dream or to act in their behalf. "Occupy Wall Street" or be occupied by it. That is the simple choice we face. The one per cent will never have the best interests of the 99 per cent in mind. This isn't just true in America - it's just as true of the Arab world as well, where the leadership of the Arab Spring helped re-awaken the American people. Which is why addressing our democracy deficit stands at the centre-point of dealing with all the rest of our deficits as well - not just for America, but for all the world.

Paul Rosenberg is the senior editor of Randon Length News, a bi-weekly alterntive community newsletter.