This is an active online collection of ideas and research I have collected for my logbook as I learn about what Political Theatre and Theatre is and what I can do with it.
Showing posts with label Political Movement Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Political Movement Research. Show all posts
I read Occupy by Noam Chomsky, which is a series of lectures that he gave between 2011 and 2012. The videos above are from the first lecture in the book, which he gave in Howard Zinn's Memorial, an American activist and historian.
Noam Chomsky is a Professor at MIT in America, but he actively supports movements like this an gives talks expressing his ideas.
He did not start the Occupy movement, nobody specifically did, but his Lectures have been used by many people in the Occupy movement as a source of motivation. He talks in his lectures about what changes need to be made and how.
However, a like many people in the Occupy movement, he's not entirely concrete in his knowledge of how. He leaves this for the masses to decide. But is this a strong enough base for the masses to make a difference? In the past change has come about as a result of having a strong leader - Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Although Occupy's way of working is democratic because there is no leader, what way are they going to get their ideas for change heard if they're all saying different things at the same time. The Occupy movement talks about all the things that are wrong with society but there's been no say of how we can change them. Even Noam Chomsky can't answer it and that's what I think makes this movement weak - until it has something or someone that can embody the force of the changes wanted. But, I think that also makes the movement interesting - to see what change arises from it.
From reading this book, I feel like I understand my character's confusion, anger and desperate defensiveness at the child going out to the protest because this protest isn't concrete. They're fighting for many things but don't know how they want those things to be changed.
The occupy protests created a fair and democratic way of sharing ideas and listening and not interrupting. These were in hand gestures that indicated if people wanted to speak and how they felt about what was being said.
Human Microphone
As amplification at the Occupy Wall Street wasn't allowed, the protesters used the Human microphone to amplify what someone was saying. One person would speak and the people who could hear closest to them would repeat what they said so that the people furthest away could hear.
It is a very democratic way of getting across ideas because
However, it can be seen as a more time consuming way of getting across ideas because the human microphone can only remember a short phrase and longer words can be missed or garbled.
From what I've looked into the Occupy movement, it seems like it has arisen from a global feeling of dissatisfaction with capitalism, the economy and lack of equality in money. But what's interesting about it is that it has been difficult to pin exactly where it has started because people have been protesting and being actively involved in these sorts of ideas around the same time.
It has had a collective start up across the world but the first Occupy movement was Wall Street. From this, other Occupy movements have happened in London, Spain, around Europe and more recently an Occupy Sandy Movement has arisen due to the slow relief effort for people who're victims of the Hurricane's devastating effects. Volunteers are giving aid to help with basic needs.
A lot of what the people were saying in the interviews were differing but had similar themes like money and equality. It was interesting to see how all these people just wanted to get out to Wall Street and protest about what they believe in and I think there's an undeniable strength in that. But I also think, what change will come of this? A lot of the people who spoke were angry about the financial situation their country was in but they had no ideas as to how they could solve it, which I think is the only way that change will ever happen. But I think this movement is definitely a large representation of the dissatisfaction and anger that these people have against the way their government is running their country and a way to get the government to begin creating some action.
Jason: Hi, I’m Jason Ivy and we’re here at
Occupy Wall Street, it’s Saturday October 22nd, 4pm, we’re here to
talk to the protestors, we’re gonna find out who they are, what their views on capitalism are, socialism.
Woman 1: Erm, it’s a Harry Potter
reference. House Elves are slaves that have to like, literally everything their
masters tell them and if they go against their masters they have to punish
themselves. And that’s the relationship our government has with big corperations.
Jason: So you want to get the Government
out of Private Industry, is that right?
Woman 1: Other
way around, I wanna get private industry out of our government: no more of
their money in our politics.
Man 1: The goals in the Tea party and
the Occupy Wall Street Movements are really at their heart, if you come from
the rhetoric, their really the same. So, what I’m trying to send, is that if we
can get behind the issue of the Fed, the Fed reserve is a private bank it’s the
way that Wall Street controls the government. It’s actually two sections,
there’s a private bank which is the Federal Reserve system, and then there’s
the Regulatory Agency, which the Federal board of governors. So the board of
Governers are supposed to regulate the banking system. They stack with Member
executives from the member banks. So they don’t actually regulate themselves,
they regulate the 99%, so they regulate their competition, so Goldman Sachs and
Chase deny their Sermons and Brothers bailout money using their political influence
to put their competition out of business and they regulate the rest of the
economy, but they never actually really regulate themselves.
Jason: So you do think that all people that
make up the 1% are really bad people?
Man 1: Oh no, not at all. I think
individually it almost doesn’t matter, I think many of them are people of
conscience, they’re good people, they may even care about social justice, the
environment and given their massive amount of resources, they may even dedicate
some percentage of that towards those goals, but individually that doesn’t
matter. Institutionally, it’s monstrous and destroying this country and the
planet, so…
Jason: So you’re not against, say,
individual entrepreneurs -
Man 1: No not at all
Jason: Getting rich –
Man 1: No, I’m
not against corporations or capitalism in the abstract. What I’m against is
sort of a… is sort of corporate capitalism as it’s currently practiced in this
country and exemplified specifically by the financial institutions and the
banks in this country have gone completely out of hand – their corrupt, their
fraudulent, their felons, eluded the American economy to the tune of several
trillion dollars and they should be prosecuted.
Jason: What percentage of the Federal
Budget consists of military spending?
Woman 2: You can see it right here (holding
a sign) 60% - it’s huge – it is true.
Jason: According to the Federal Budget,
it’s in it’s 20s. They said it’s about 23%.
Woman 2: Well that’s because you’ve
included the social security. If you take it – Oh yeah, if you take social
security, take it in put it out for social security.
Jason: But social security and military
spending, how do they relate?
Woman 2: The discretionary budget, this is
our tax payer’s dollars and we’re spending well over half of them on the
military.
Jason: But that’s purely discretionary
spending
Woman 2: Right, that’s the way it should
be. The social security, we pay it in in order to get it out later – it’s not
to pay it in –
We’re not paying it in to spend it on the
military or anything else.
Jason: So, but I think you’re wanting to
count that as a separate budget almost –
Woman 2: Of course it is.
Jason: But I don’t think our federal
government count it as –
Woman 2: No,
because they don’t want it to look as if were spending this enormous amount on
the military. They wanna hide that behind the social security.
Jason: But the Fed has played a role in
stabilizing the currency over the years?
Man 2: No, they have played a role in
destabilizing. Intentionally destabilizing the currency, absolutely.
Jason: Why would they intentionally do it
then?
Man 2: Because
the top percent of Wall Street makes money, whether you’re in up or down
market. They don’t care about market cycles, they create the market cycles, but
what they do is during down cycles, they suck the wealth out of the middle
class through bailouts. All year, no matter what cycle it is, it’s sucking
wealth out through crony capitalism through contracts, sweetheart deals, five
hundred dollar hammers, etc. And then in down markets, they get bailouts and
subsidies and tax credits and all that. They use the Federal reserve system to
socialise loss and then they privatize their gains, sending off for sure.
Man 3: For me, the mere exsistance of a
central bank suggests that the government feels that it has the right to meddle
in the market. That it has the right to pick winners and losers.
Yeah, I fundamentally believe in the
capitalist system, except for the idea, I mean, it stops being capitalist once
my tax dollars bailout a bank. The flip side of capitalism, the only thing that
makes the market work, is that if you take too much risk, you might get rich,
but then if you fail, you fail. I believe in property rights, I believe in freedom
and free will and free markets, but it seems to me that the banks have sort of
hand their cake and eaten it too in terms of picking the parts of capitalism they like, and then picking the parts of socialism that they like.
Jason: Then, why do you want to prosecute
Ben Bernanke?
Man 3: At best his monetary policy is inflationary,
at worst it may be hyper inflationary. We don’t know yet, we haven’t seen the
full effects, sort of unfold, and I would argue that weakening the dollar,
weakens the country, weakening the country strengthens our enemies and to me
that’s close enough to be treason.
Jason: What do you hope this movement will
accomplish?
Man 3: Either massive, from the ground up,
political reform or revolution.
Jason: If Andrew Jackson were alive today,
would you be a Republican or a Democrat?
Man 3: The thing is, I don’t even agree
with that division ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’. If I would pick the four or five
politicians who I’d most support, we have Bernie Sanders, who is an
Independent, we have Ron Paul who is a Libertarian, you have Alan Greyson who
is a Democrat. What ties them all together is that they are all fundamentally
moral people who really really care about their country.
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.
Page last updated at 15:00 GMT, Monday, 15 March 2010
Stern review calls for focus on care of rape victims
Moment of contact: Review looked at how victims were treated
A new approach is needed to give greater priority to the care and support of rape victims, a major review in England and Wales has said.
The review's author, crossbench peer Baroness Stern, said debate had been too focused on rape conviction rates.
Her recommendations include offering every rape victim a specialist adviser to help them recover after an attack.
The report acknowledged attitudes and practices had improved but said implementation had been patchy.
During her five-month study, Lady Stern talked to more than 200 people, including rape victims and police officers, to find out how police and prosecutors deal with complaints of rape.
GABRIELLE - A CASE STUDY
Seven years ago, Gabrielle reported an attempted rape. It was 688 days before her attacker was convicted.
Her treatment by police and authorities left her feeling like "a piece of evidence, not a person".
She said although the initial police response was quick and the offender arrested promptly, there were failings.
The police medical officer did not carry out an internal or lower body examination and she had to identify her attacker using a system which showed only his head and neck.
At one stage, her attacker was jailed for robbery and the police asked whether she still wanted to continue her case.
She said she felt she was "at the bottom of the pile". Her case officer said she was because her attacker was already behind bars.
Gabrielle tried her local MP and even Met Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens before her case was properly pursued.
Her attacker was convicted on a lesser charge of serious sexual assault.
It follows the conviction of two high profile sex attackers - London taxi driver John Worboys, who drugged and raped his victims, and Kirk Reid, thought to have sexually assaulted dozens of women in south London.
Lady Stern, a prisons reformer, said support and care for victims should be given as high a priority as prosecution and conviction of perpetrators.
It was also "completely unacceptable" for police and prosecutors to lose interest in a victim whose complaint was not going to lead to a conviction, she said.
"The obligations the state has to those who have suffered a violent crime, and a crime that strikes at the whole concept of human dignity and bodily integrity, are much wider than working for the conviction of a perpetrator," she said.
"The victim must be treated as a whole person. With rape, it is always going to be difficult to be sure that you'll be able to prove it to the jury beyond reasonable doubt.
"I talked to a lot of victims and they accepted that. What they felt was really important was not in the end if they could get a conviction; what they said was, we still feel we want to be believed."
Lisa Longstaff, from campaign group Women Against Rape, said police must focus on justice.
"Women do not go to the police to get care, they go to the police to get protection and justice. In 2010, respect and sensitivity for victims should be a given."
Solicitor Debaleena Dasgupta, who deals with mishandled rape cases, said good care was as important as getting a conviction.
She added that an arrest and conviction "can be very helpful to a victim because they need to know the authorities are taking the matter very seriously and are putting together the best case possible".
'Abysmal' treatment
Other key recommendations outlined in the report include:
• A network of independent professional advisers to support a victim after she or he comes forward. Their role would be to explain police procedures, provide a link between the victim and detectives, and support the victim in court. Similar schemes have been piloted in some parts of England and Wales
• Forensic medical evidence should be gathered by the NHS, not the police
• The expansion of Sexual Abuse Referral Centres (Sarcs) to every police force in England and Wales by 2011. At these centres, victims receive counselling and other help, including medical examinations, without having to speak to the police
• Consideration of proposals for victims to have their own special lawyer in court, alongside the prosecutor and defendant's representative
The report said the claim only 6% of rapes lead to a conviction was misleading because it was based on all complaints to police, not all complaints brought to court. Nearly 60% of those charged with rape are convicted.
Lady Stern was also critical of the treatment victims of alleged rape received from police and prosecutors.
She said while victims in some areas received the best possible support, in other areas they were treated abysmally.
One woman called Gabrielle, who reported an attempted rape in 2003, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "I was treated worse than something you accidentally tread on.
"Victims need to be treated as a human being first and a piece of evidence second."
Another woman, who spoke to the BBC anonymously, said the police did not seem interested when she told them she had been raped by a man she was in a relationship with.
"I felt I was a thorn in their side. They did not really want to bother with you because it was too difficult. They would much rather deal with the crimes that they can quickly tick the box and move on."
'Dignity and respect'
For the government, Solicitor General Vera Baird said much had already been improved in combating rape.
"Public perception of the way rape complaints are handled lags behind reality," she said.
She welcomed the report's acknowledgement that significant improvements have made since 1997, but said work remains to be done.
"We want all victims to feel confident that when they come forward and report rapes it will be taken seriously and they will be treated with dignity and respect," she added.
For our protest performance, my group is looking at the Slut Shaming and SlutWalk movement.
The movement began in Toronto, Canada as a reaction to a policeman's advice to a group of law students that to not be raped, women 'should avoid dressing like sluts'.
The movement tries to promote that no kind of behaviour invites rape, it is the perpetrator's fault for committing the act. Rape happens to many different types of women in different situations - in a relationship, as a sex worker, under the influence of drugs of alcohol, but it doesn't mean it's their fault
Some of the problems they want to tackle are the ways the police deal with rape. In some cases, the police prioritise prosecuting the sex worker for being a sex worker rather than the rapist for committing the crime. In court cases, women are interrogated about their medical record and past history that are elements that are irrelevant to them being raped.
What shocked me in the video, was when the woman said that one of the reasons she wasn't given compensation was she didn't report straight away. Women who experience rape can find it incredibly difficult to tell someone because of many different reasons. It can take some women years to tell someone and it should be their decision if they tell the authorities. How long the rape survivor takes to speak out is irrelevant for compensation consideration.
