The World Tomorrow: Occupy

Short Transcription from beginning:

Julian Assange (interviewer)

Marissa Homes and Alexa O’Brien – Occupy New York

Aaron Peters – Occupy London

Naomi Coleman – Occupy London

David Greybor

Julian: I want to understand how Occupy came to be. Sort of, people who were involved and the political background for organizing it and conducting its affairs and spreading it. And then look into where it’s going to go. David, where do you think this movement came to eventually cause the Occupation of Zuccotti Park and spread out to the rest of the United States?

David: Well, I think there’s been a sort of global movement that, I mean, I guess it started in Tunisia and sort of swept across the Mediterranean, Greece, Spain so sorely the same movement but in America. There are a lot of people from Greece and Spain that were involved in the very early days and even before the Occupational Zuccotti Park, we were coming together. So I think there’s a global format.

Julian: Alexa, you were involved in this US day of rage, back in May 2010, but do you see that as the time of going into sort of this transition from cyberspace to meet space or is there some earlier analog?

Alexa: I think definitely, I mean, I look at Odd Bart and other smaller swarm activist activities. Social media and the transformation and the organisation of media also has played a role in the last year in Occupy Wall Street.

Julian: Clearly, there was a feeling emerging from the Arab Spring.

Brian: I mean, this is very rarely alluded to, 2008 Egypt gets the World Bank’s number one, kind of, reforming country in the developing world. And in terms of liberal reforms, Egypt was unbeatable in North Africa and the Middle East - from the World Bank and the IMF’s point of view. The bigger, kind of, phenomenon that’s gone on here is that after the Second World War, the nation state has broadly seen as a repository of democratic accountability. Now, since the late 1970s that has been going away.

In some places it never exsisted, right? but that now is a global phenomenon and we now recognize that public policy outcomes aren’t happening at the national level and that 'policy makers' aren’t actually the ones that are a national parliament, their elsewhere. And the ones who are are dictating policy aren't in any way accountable and their not democratic representatives and that's a global phenomenon, and that's in India, that's in China, that's in the US, that's in the UK. 

Alexa: We don't just have a global financial crisis, we have a global political crisis because our institution's no longer functional.

David: And this is one of the points of the Global Justice Movement, which is there are these newly created, administered, global, planetary mechanisms.