New Clear Vision

Finally, Some Good News from Port-au-Prince

by Sasha Kramer

Dear friends and supporters,

I am ashamed that this letter is so long in coming.  I know that the last time we wrote to you SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods) was facing a major crisis, and I am so grateful to those of you who reached out to us during that difficult time.  I know that many of you may have been wondering if we still exist and I am thankful to be able to share good news with you in this letter.

In mid-June, just when we were certain that we would have to close our Port-au-Prince office and cut off our emergency services, a miracle happened. (more…)

Leave It in the Ground

by Mary Sojourner

I was half-way through writing this post when I realized I was weary — not fading light weary or tired from a life suddenly too busy — but weary from revisiting yet again a potential atrocity motivated by nothing but greed and political ambition. I’m seventy-one. I was forty-six the first time my friends and I took action to stop uranium mining on sacred lands around the Grand Canyon.

It was 1986, a gorgeous day on the south rim of the Canyon — brilliant sunlight and clear turquoise sky, ravens spiraling down to circle the trees. My friends and I pulled on white radiation suits and gas masks. We linked hands and stepped across the main road in Grand Canyon National Park. A few dozen people waved banners and sang. There was a human raccoon and a human raven laughing up at the scrawwwking birds. A bright red banner read: Uranium? Leave it in the Ground. (more…)

Why I Support the Occupy Wall Street Movement

by Priscilla Stuckey

In a word: health. The health of the planet.

Put simply, a huge gap between the fabulously wealthy and everyone else is bad for the planet. Why? Because such a system is wasteful and costly.

It’s wasteful because it allows some to have way, way more than they need to live well and in doing so to continue raiding the planet for resources. It’s costly because waste is always costly. (more…)

Seeing and Believing in the Power to Change the World — and Ourselves

by Randall Amster

Words matter, especially in our mediated world where the resonance of language is greatly amplified. In this spirit, among some sectors that are otherwise sympathetic with and supportive of the overall aims of the Occupy Movement, there has been an important critique advanced about the nature of “occupation” as an operative premise, oftentimes seeking to deconstruct the racialized character of the concept as it applies to the legacy of occupiers and the makeup of the movement in its present form.

This critical perspective highlights the fact that Wall Street has always been “occupied territory,” tracing to its earliest days when an actual wall was erected, and even further back when the entire continent itself was taken by an occupying force that failed to recognize the humanity and validity of the original inhabitants. Most of us comprehend this reality — namely that we largely exist on thoroughly occupied land — even as we sometimes forget that for many of us working to #Occupy the centers of power, we ourselves are the beneficiaries of an ongoing and unremediated occupation. (more…)

Lessons on Building Community and Restoring Peace

by Robert C. Koehler

In our techno-saturated society, we have the casual capacity to capture any unfolding event on film — even an act of shocking violence — and send images of the live action around the globe just by whipping out a cell phone.

Two years ago, Chicago’s Fenger High School had its 15 minutes of horrific fame when the beating death of one of its students, an honor student named Derrion Albert — waiting for a bus after school, caught suddenly in a surge of gang violence, savagely beaten with two-by-fours and railroad ties — was recorded on someone’s cell camera and became an international spectacle.

What we lack, it would seem, is the capacity to do anything about the violence itself. We remain trapped within a context of thought that reduces our interaction with the world, and ourselves, to winning or losing, domination or defeat. (more…)

We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident…

by Michael N. Nagler and Stephanie N. Van Hook

When is a person not a person? Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PSR) recently answered this absurd question with the obvious and embarrassing answer: when it’s a corporation. According to PSR’s statement, in case anyone is confused, a human being

“is a complex organism with capacities for joy and pain, reflection, and the compassionate appreciation of others. Mature persons are expected to display reasoned judgment, and are personally responsible for their own actions (our emphasis).  Human beings live, breath, think, experience emotions, and internalize values such as empathy and caring for others. Like all sentient beings, they suffer, and die.”

Corporations possess none of these functions, which make being human sacred, valuable and worthy of dignity. As the Occupy movements grow in remarkably inspiring ways, they have a unique opportunity to raise the human image from the slander and propaganda of the corporate media — where our capacity for consumption defines us and our desire for wealth drives us — to a more promising, and far more accurate conception of what makes us truly human: our capacity for nonviolence, motivated by our most precious desire for freedom. As Gandhi put it, “Non-violence is the law of the humans…” (more…)

Hungering for Justice in the Crime-and-Punishment System

by Victoria Law

“This is what democracy looks like!” These days, when you hear those words at a protest, whether officially permitted or not, you know that the police are seconds away from pulling out their plastic handcuffs and pepper spray and getting ready to pack their paddy wagons.

On October 5th, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, I heard that chant as the police closed in on a group of protesters attempting to breach the barricades blocking Wall Street. Knowing that arrests and violence were soon to follow, my daughter and I turned and left. We circled around to Zuccotti Park where we stayed for an hour and a half until police arrived on horseback and motor scooters and began closing the protesters in with metal barricades.

If this is what democracy looks like, at least there are numerous cameras to record the ways that the police and the city treat the 8,000 to 12,000 people exercising their democratic right to protest. (more…)