There’s a fascinating article at Michigan Live about the faith community’s efforts to connect to the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement. I must say (and I’m as secular as they come) I did actually describe my three recent visits to Occupy Wall Street to several people as being like “Going to a new church and EVERYONE you meet is friendly and very WELCOMING.” There’s something special going on at Zuccotti Park and if you think otherwise you are… wrong.

It makes sense that a state as hard hit economically as Michigan has been would have clergy so supportive of the anti-capitalist protests. It’s because they know what post-capitalism looks like in Michigan! The clergy truly cater to the poor there, it’s not a joke to them. The support for Occupy Wall Street is even coming directly from the pulpit as the (appropriate) question is asked:

If Jesus were alive today, would he be at Occupy Wall Street movement?

As senior pastor of the nondenominational Fountain Street Church, [Rev. Fred] Wooden delivered a sermon this month which highlighted the similarities between the Occupy movement’s cry for economic equality and the gospel story of Jesus cleansing the temple by casting out the money changers.

But Wooden didn’t stop at words when it came to expressing solidarity with the Occupy movement. The church has allowed the Occupy Grand Rapids protesters to camp in its parking lot at night and is providing other support measures.

It appears the movement has found an ally in the faith community due to their cry for social and economic justice. On Monday, the Vatican’s call for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions was seen immediately as a measure of support for Occupy Wall Street.

“The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” the Vatican’s Justice and Peace document said.

—Snip—

Although some have criticized the movement’s message as muddled and diluted by fringe elements taking rhetorical refuge under the Occupy umbrella, Belief Watch columnist Lisa Miller points out that the Jesus of history would have loved them all.

Jesus gave preferential treatment to society’s outcasts, wrote Miller recently in the Washington Post. “Lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes — all would attain heaven before the ordained elites.” And, she argues, Jesus says in the Gospels that the meek will inherit the Earth.
“There would be no Wall Street if Jesus and Mohammad had their way,” said Ghazala Munir, one of the founders of the Interfaith Dialogue Association in West Michigan, during the Oct. 19 panel discussion at Fountain Street Church.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and current chair of the Global Agenda Council on Faith for the World Economic Forum, recently wrote a new book called “Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy.”
“Don’t expect the Occupy protesters to produce a list of policy demands, Wallis said. That’s not their purpose. Rather, they are creating space for the fundamental questions about social justice that weren’t being asked before this fall.”

Wallis said Washington, D.C., is not a place where change originates, but where change arrives. If nothing else, the movement has been successful in refocusing the media and politicians on the problem of inequality, he said.

“The Bible says you see the truth of a society more clearly from the bottom and the edges than from the top.”

It’s interesting to read this brain-damaged comments thread at NewsBusters for the opposite side of this issue, including who Jesus would hate, using nukes on OWS, etc, etc.

For more of the flipside of things, rightwing radio fuckwit Michael Savage pukes up some bile on the “Would Jesus Occupy Wall Street?” question: “Jesus was not a communist, that I can tell you!” sez Savage. What kind of bitter, mean old white guys would listen to a radio show like this every day? A few minutes of Michael Savage is enough to be mildly upsetting. He’s a humorless, witless creep who makes Rush Limbaugh seem like a master showman by comparison. Enjoy!
 

 
Academic, activist, scholar and revolutionary, Angela Davis addressed the Occupy Wall Street “annex” in Washington Square Park yesterday. She asked the bone-cold crowd:  “How can we be together in a unity that is complex and emancipatory?”

Via AlterNet:

To the question of the language of “occupation,” Davis counseled protesters to be aware that the U.S. is behind military occupations in other countries that are brutal and oppressive, but argued it was also possible to use the word differently. “We turn occupation into something that is beautiful, that brings community together.”

Many in the audience seemed to want advice from Davis, but she encouraged the movement to find its own answers. “We stand behind calls for…the decommodification of education, healthcare,” she said, and noted that the movement’s language carries with it the implicit promise of more work: “If we say we are the 99%, we have to commit ourselves to organizing the 99%”

Repeatedly, Davis stressed the need for inclusion, urging protesters to insist on inclusiveness, to make space for the most marginalized people in society, to hear their voices. To questions about political process, she got a laugh from the crowd when she said, “I agree with you that capitalism sucks,” but she urged the crowd not to let another Republican become president even as she said that the two-party system was broken and called for growing the movement until even conservatives wanted to join it.

“That seems to me what this movement is about: freedom and the redefinition of freedom,” Davis said. She called for support of the November 2 general strike planned in Oakland, CA.
 

Angela Davis interviewed in a California prison in 1970 by Barry Callahan. This is a fascinating clip.
 

 
Roast-master general Jeffrey Ross takes some timely humor to the people of Occupy Los Angeles.
 

 
I love what this guy says here.

Plus one!
 

 
Via Glen E. Friedman

 
While the mainstream media has turned its back on Occupy Wall Street and its associated Occupations across the world, one reporter, Fox UK’s Don Ronson has kept his job and boldly gone out on to the streets to make things up. Without Don and Fox UK’s coverage this whole OWS thing would probably have blown over weeks ago. But thankfully, Don has been committed to getting his side of the story out, and even offered to pay protesters fifty quid to hit a policeman.

Recently Don went down to the front-line of the Occupy London Stock Exchange, where he came face-to-face with the grim reality of peaceful protesters, who hate money and want to “put it in a room and spank it on the botty.”
 

 
Via Bt3a
 

 
This warms the cockles of my Trotskyite heart: Wednesday night in New York City, schools Chancellor Dennis Wallcott and the members of the Panel for Education Policy (or PEP,  the body which enacts policy for the New York City DOE), got more than they bargained for when annoyed parents took a page from Occupy Wall Street and commandeered the meeting with the “people’s mic.” Unsurprisingly, rather than attempt to engage the parents and find out what they wanted, the panel just fucked off.

Nice work, folks, keep the pressure on these clowns.

There is a revolution going on that will touch every aspect of American life. Anyone who think this genie is going back in the bottle is dreaming.
 

 
Thank you Glenn E. Friedman of New York City!

 
This is a pretty incredible bit of “you were there” style video. The camera was quite near the epicenter of what was happening at Occupy Oakland on Tuesday.

You can see Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen just moments before, and after, he was felled by a projectile.

Video by Raleigh Latham.

Via Business Insider

 
Look familiar? After the horrifying events Tuesday night at Occupy Oakland that saw Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, 24, severely injured in a clash with police, this short documentary clip about 1932’s fabled “March of the Bonus Army” seems like particularly timely viewing.
 

 
This amazing photo was taken at an Elizabeth Warren volunteer meeting last night in Framingham, Mass. and posted by Daily Kos reader ndrwmls10.

Scott Brown is so fucked. I’m sure he must know it. Although Brown is my #1 favorite Republican—not that this is saying very much, of course, because I hate all Republicans—I won’t be sorry to see him go…

If you are interested in Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign, you can find more information here: Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts

Slavoj Žižek at Cooper Union in NYC, 2009

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek poses some interesting questions in a new essay titled “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning,” which was prepared from the remarks he made at Occupy Wall Street on October 10th (video of that below).

This except from the full essay, which you can read at In These Times, discusses answering conservative’s hollow critiques of the OWS movement:

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer.

Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are done — –but what is this violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

The protesters are called “losers” — but the true losers are on Wall Street, bailed out by hundreds of billions of our money.

They are called socialists. But in the United States, there already is socialism for the rich.

They are accused of not respecting private property — but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day. Think of the tens of thousands of homes foreclosed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990. The communists who are still in power run the world’s most ruthless capitalist system (China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is a sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce.

The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—that are threatened by the system.

The protesters are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes.

The protesters are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything. They are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.

We all know the classic scene from cartoons: The cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What the protesters are doing is reminding those in power to look down.

Read more of “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning” by Slavoj Žižek at In These Times
 

 
Part 2 after the jump…