Quote of the day

Rebecca Solnit has the floor:

As you knew at the outset, it’s [the impetus for the lesser to take to the streets] all about economics. This wild year, Greece boiled over again into crisis with colossal protests, demonstrations, blockades, and outright street warfare. Icelanders continued their fight against bailing out the banks that sank their country’s economy in 2008 and continue pelting politicians with eggs. Their former prime minister may become the first head of state to face legal charges in connection with the global financial collapse. Spanish youth began to rise up on May 15th.

Distinctively, in so many of these uprisings the participants were not advocating for one party or a simple position, but for a better world, for dignity, for respect, for real democracy, for belonging, for hope and possibility — and their economic underpinnings. The Spanish young whose future had been sold out to benefit corporations and their 1% were nicknamed the Indignados, and they lived in the plazas of Spain this summer. Occupied Madrid, like Occupied Tahrir Square, preceded Occupy Wall Street.

In Chile, students outraged by the cost of an education and the profound inequities of their society have been demonstrating since May — with everything from kiss-ins to school occupations to marches of 150,000 or more. Forty thousand students marched against “education reform” in Colombia last week. And in August in Britain the young went on a rampage that tore up London, Birmingham, and dozens of other communities, an event that began when the police shot Mark Duggan, a dark-skinned 29-year-old Londoner. Young Britons had risen up more peaceably over tuition hikes the winter before. There, too, things are bleak and volatile — something I know you would understand. In Mexico, a beautiful movement involving mass demonstrations against the drug war has arisen, triggered by the death of another young man, and by the grief and vision of his father, leftwing poet Javier Cicilia.

The United States had one great eruption in Wisconsin this winter, when the citizenry occupied their state capitol building in Madison for weeks. Egyptians and others elsewhere on the planet called a local pizza parlor and sent pies to the occupiers. We all know the links. We’re all watching. So the Occupy movement has spilled over from Wall Street. Hundreds of occupations are happening all over the North America: in Oklahoma City and Tijuana, in Victoria and Fort Lauderdale.

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• A spark lit in Tunesia ignites the world (cbsnews.com)
• Gainor Column: Occupy Wall Street Nothing Like Tea Party (roarkmj.wordpress.com)
• VIDEO: GOP Candidates on Occupy Wall Street (theroot.com)
• ‘Occupy!’ Wakes Us Up from Our ‘Zombie States’ of Mind! (beavercountyblue.org)
• Dayen’s Roundup from October 18, 2011 (news.firedoglake.com)
• Why Do Police Treat ‘Occupy-ers’ Like Terrorists, Not Tea Partyers? (usnews.com)
• The RNC Jumps on The ‘Occupy Wall Street Is Anti-Semitic’ Bandwagon [Occupy Wall Street] (gawker.com)
• The Demographics Of Occupy Wall Street [Occupy Wall Street] (gawker.com)