Occupy Wall Street Protests Research Articles

Every Country Gets the Movement It Needs: Protests and Social Change in AfricaThe Square directed by Jehane Noujaim and produced by Noujaim Films, 2013. 95 minutes; in Arabic and English, with English subtitles.Boy Saloum La Révolte des Y’en a Marre directed by Audrey Gallet and produced by Christopher Nick and Victor Ede, 2013. 74 minutes; in French and Wolof, with

Since the end of 2010, the world has been captivated by a new wave of citizen mobilization. At this time, a wave of protests spread across the world— seemingly starting with the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East—then leading to the Occupy Wall Street protests in the United States, demonstrations across Europe, and a wave of protests across subSaharan Africa. The DNA of protests, social movements, and grassroots mobilization are affected by and rooted in the social, political, and historical conditions within a country. These new protest movements are also influenced by the youth bulge: a demographic shift across Africa (among other countries of the global South), which has resulted in an increased youth population. In 2012, a whopping 70 percent of the population in Africa was thought to be under the age of 30. The confluence of these changes is clearly illustrated in the three films discussed throughout this essay. This review begins with The Square, a documentary film by Jehane Noujaim that documents ongoing political activism in Egypt from the start of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 in Tahrir Square through 2013. This essay also reviews French director and producer Audrey Gallet’s Boy Saloum La Revolte des Y’en a Marre (We’re fed up / Enough is enough), a documentary which provides insight into Senegal’s youth-led protest movement against the attempted constitutional coup d’etat by a two-term president and the population’s attempt to stand up to

The Dialectic of War and Utopia: Systemic Closure and Embattled Social Life in the Work of Fredric Jameson

is a form of socialism.-Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diary, September-October 1939War is war perverted. ... The thing, then, is not to abolish war but to find the true war.-Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (1966)In October 2011 at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, a month before occupiers were ejected from Zuccotti Park, a two-minute video posted online sparked a small flurry of commentary as it migrated from YouTube to a host of other sites. The clip depicts two US Marines standing near the park and responding to remarks by Fox News commentator Sean Hannity that the protests were unpatriotic and anti-American. While many online comments focused on the calm and cogent dismissal of Hannity, punctuated with the occasional well-placed expletive, less attention was paid to the cardboard sign held by one of the Marines. Framed in the opening and closing shots of the video, blocked in large black lettering and accompanied by a peace sign, the placard reads, Second time I've fought for my country. First time I've known my enemy. The message creates a connection between two theaters of war: ongoing US military actions abroad, across the Middle East and Central Asia; and economic war on the domestic front, where conflict and combat between social classes become systemic crisis as austerity measures, capitalist competition, and popular upheaval intensify the struggle over wealth erosion and social transformation. Within the sign's linkage, economic war overrides military conflict, and systemic critique is imagined in martial terms. As a nuanceð antiwar gesture, the sign simultaneously critiques and preserves war, transforming and repurposing the category itself in the process. It locates its opposition to one sort of war within the necessity of fighting a war of different kind.1The two Zuccotti Park Marines join a longer lineage of protest and revolt seeking to articulate military critique with economic critique. We can think here of the antiwar and disarmament movements in the United States between the 1960s and 1980s, and more specifically of Martin Luther King, in the final year of his life, linking his Poor People's Campaign with the US war in Southeast Asia.2 Also central to this tradition is the 1915 Zimmerwald Manifesto, calling for resistance to the First World coupled with a renewed insistence on international class war: Civil war, not civil peace-that is the slogan!3 The antifascist Popular Front during the 1930s also belongs here, as could Henry David Thoreau's 1848 lecture on civil disobedience, a prescient outlier lodged at the beginning of the epoch of modern warfare, situating a refusal to pay his poll tax within the wider context of resistance to US military and economic expansion into Mexico. Despite their apparent differences, such positions not only share a strong conjoining of military and economic analyses but also, in that, manifest an ongoing attentiveness to the intimate and complicated relationship between martial imaginarles and socioeconomic critique.To argue for including Fredric Jameson within this rubric seems at once both familiar and strange. From 1971 's Marxism and Form to his later work on postmodernism and on Utopia, Jameson's status as a trenchant critic of capitalism is well known. At the same time, his work does not feature, at first glance, a firmly articulated position on war, nor do his writings, with salient exceptions, take up war as a theme or topic with any consistency or thoroughness. Nevertheless, Jameson's writings not only display repeated recourse to the category or figure of war but also, at a deeper level, conduct an enduring conversation between the notion of war and systemic, or anticapitalist, critique. We might call this persistent conceptual thread a dialectic of war and Utopia. Rather than defining Utopia in a positive sense, in terms of a specific kind of content-hope or longing, for instance-or employing a taxonomic approach in order to gather a canon of Utopian texts and objects, Jameson's dialectic brings Utopia into focus through an ongoing process of determinate negation, delineating the concept of Utopia both by relating it to, and differentiating it from, what it is not. …

Marsh, John. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review

JOHN MARSH, In Walt We Trust: How Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015. 248 pp.In the late pages of In Walt We Trust-a lively and incisive appeal to revisit our national (queer and socialist!) poet in light of the crises facing American today-John Marsh poses the vital ques- tion: kind of person would you be if you read poetry? (203). answer for Marsh is that any careful reader of his poetry could become ideal democratic citizen (203). After all, it was who, while engaging the gravest threats to nineteenth century (slavery, war, and monopoly), staked the future of the republic and Leaves of Grass on the cultivation of strong and inventive readers. Now, in 2015, confronted the largest gap between wealthy and poor citizens since era, those future Americans have justifiably lost faith in polity paralyzed by corporate influence, financial trusts, and the dogged culture wars. Weaving personal anecdotes biography, literary analysis, and political philosophy, Marsh turns Leaves of Grass into self-help guide for our New Gilded Age, complete lessons on to die, to have better sex, what to do money, and how to survive our fetid democracy by becoming better people and readers (16).These themes, spanning thoughts on mortality, economy, love, and governance, structure the book's four chapters. Marsh provides instructive context in each through first-person accounts of his pilgrimages, Leaves of Grass in hand, to variety of Whitman-related sites. He hops the ferry from Brooklyn, seeking contact the hereafter; he roams Occupy Wall Street, reflecting on work and money. In Pennsylvania strip club, he questions America's lingering shame sexual desire. While in Washington, D.C., he visits former Civil War hospitals and recreates the scenes of communion forged soldiers amid national fratricide. And Marsh's conversion to Whitmanism is as personal as it is political. Once young fire-breathing socialist, Marsh confesses to have fallen on the tenure track (22). A disaffected professor, self-medicating alcohol and harboring doubts about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country, he weds personal crisis to national calamity, testament to how the disciple has absorbed his master (11).Indeed, Marsh is an insightful guide to poetry. At the outset, he masterfully parses the opening lines of Song of Myself, exhibiting the passage as the crux of poetics: from his sense of human divinity and scientific inspiration to his faith in death-lessness and direct address to readers. situates the abstract ideas of life and death in the atomic matter redistributed eternally across time, space, and bodies. If every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, Marsh claims, then our identities are likewise equal and interchangeable (79), and Whitman, affirming egalitarianism through natural law, proves that we inhabit a socialist universe, not capitalist one (60). At this moment, I was reminded of Horace Traubel in Camden relentlessly prodding the elderly on the question of socialism. Traubel, who galvanized generation of American radicals under the banner of the Walt Fellowship, also published dozens of articles in his Conservator that are in the vein of Marsh's work-essays like Whitman and Socialism, Whitman's Significance to the Revolutionist, and The Propaganda is Whitman. All could duly serve as subtitles to In Walt We Trust, which is steeped in Traubel's inheritance. Marsh, like Traubel, finally consents to nimble evasions, deciding he was with the socialists in the result (107).The book's most rewarding section, to my mind, begins Marsh trailing presence around Zuccotti Park, the site of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. …

The Gezi Park Protests as a Pluralistic “Anti-Violent” Movement

Abstract a new era of public protest began in 1999 with the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations, and continued through the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2013 Gezi Park insurrection in Istanbul. This new era of demonstrations differed from movements that had come before in the understanding of politics employed by the protesters, reconstructing popular imaginations about the future, bringing about a reconsideration of politics, its domain, and time itself. This article investigates the Occupy Gezi movement that began in Gezi Park and led to the occupation of Istanbul’s Taksim Square. I examine the events through Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Hungarian Revolution. Arendt’s five criteria for evaluating the status of the Hungarian Revolution as a “true event” help shed light on the politics of Occupy Gezi (Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism” 5). In spite of the two movements’ similarly unprecedented, spontaneous, non-ideological, and un-hierarchical characters, the Gezi Park protests differed from the Hungarian Revolution in important ways. This is particularly true of the reaction of the protesters to the violence to which they were exposed. In refusing to react in kind to the state’s violence, the Gezi Park protesters created a new public domain for confronting the state. It is possible to consider this movement to have been an anti-violent rather than a non- or counter-violent resistance. Important political conclusions follow from this distinction.

Inequality, corporate legitimacy and the Occupy Wall Street movement

This exploratory study examines legitimacy challenges to business spawned by growing inequalities. It uses aesthetic inquiry in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement to understand the processes of organizational legitimation and delegitimation. By studying photos of slogans and placards from the Occupy Wall Street movement, we show how corporate and business legitimacy are challenged by the public. We identify different types of legitimacy challenges across organizational systems’ levels. We explore implications of these challenges for corporations and the use of aesthetic strategies as delegitimation signals by Occupy Wall Street protesters in order to express their support or discontent with existing norms, values and standards.

The occupation of art museum educator in the time of Occupy Museums

Abstract This article considers the occupation of art museum educator in the time of Occupy Museums (OM). I maintain these two different forms of occupations – the job of educator as occupation within art museums and OM as an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests as occupation – are both related and at odds with one another in the context of the art museum under neo-liberal managerialism. The working lives of art museum educators are morphing into occupations within art institutions that employ populist veiling tactics as cover for labour abuse in fulfilling their missions. OM reveals contradictions inherent to a museum system working hard to normalize such economic injustices, with a particular focus on the workers associated with these institutions. Current trends in art museum education and features of OM are analysed through neo-liberalist and horizontalist ideologies, bringing to light similar anti-hierarchical motivations, aiming for dissimilar ends. The article closes with a call for a return to modified forms of verticality in institutions based on cultures of mutual support instead of capitalism alone.

Occupy Bartleby

By examining the repeated appearances of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” at Occupy Wall Street protests, this essay examines public modes of literary criticism. In calling upon “Bartleby,” how does Occupy Wall Street interpret and make use of American literature? If the demonstrators who invoked “Bartleby” were not interpreting or analyzing the short story in ways that were immediately recognizable, what then were they doing with it? The essay’s aim is not to read the protests but rather to read how Occupy reads. It is an endeavor that also entails some reflection about how professionally trained readers read. Taken together, these inquires can illuminate some important differences between activist citations of “Bartleby” and the protocols of professional literary criticism, which are often seen as proximate to political activity, if not political activity themselves.

Using Twitter to mobilize protest action: online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi movements

The extensive use of social media for protest purposes was a distinctive feature of the recent protest events in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Like the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the United States, the indignant activists of Spain and Greece protested against unjust, unequal, and corrupt political and economic institutions marked by the arrogance of those in power. Social media can potentially change or contribute to the political communication, mobilization, and organization of social movements. To what extent did these three movements use social media in such ways? To answer this question a comparative content analysis of tweets sent during the heydays of each of the campaigns is conducted. The results indicate that, although Twitter was used significantly for political discussion and to communicate protest information, calls for participation were not predominant. Only a very small minority of tweets referred to protest organization and coordination issues. Furthermore, comparing the actual content of the Twitter information exchanges reveals similarities as well as differences among the three movements, which can be explained by the different national contexts.

The Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street: spillover, spillout, or coalescence?

This article argues that a symbiotic coalescence has emerged between the Global Justice Movement (GJM) and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), rather than a spillover or spillout from the GJM to OWS. News coverage concerning GJM and OWS protests and interviews with scholars who have studied or participated in these movements are used to explore overlapping actors, frames, targets, and tactical repertoires as well as dynamics in protest mobilization levels. I conclude that a symbiotic coalescence emerged between the GJM and OWS. Although the coalescence was mutually beneficial to both movements, OWS benefited more from these cross-movement ties than the GJM. Further, the demobilization of the GJM preceded the onset of OWS. The findings are consistent with coalescence arguments and inconsistent with spillover or spillout arguments. OWS continues to maintain a largely untapped network of participants, which can be remobilized at politically opportune moments for new waves of social justice activism.

On social inequality: Analyzing the rich–poor disparity

From the Old Testament to the Communist Manifesto, and from the French Revolution to the Occupy Wall Street protests, social inequality has always been at the focal point of public debate, as well as a major driver of political change. Although being of prime interest since Biblical times, the scientific investigation of the distributions of wealth and income in human societies began only at the close of the nineteenth century, and was pioneered by Pareto, Lorenz, Gini, and Pietra. The methodologies introduced by these trailblazing scholars form the bedrock of the contemporary science of social inequality. Based on this bedrock we present a new quantitative approach to the analysis of wealth and income distributions, which sets its spotlight on the most heated facet of the current global debate on social inequality—the rich–poor disparity. Our approach offers researchers highly applicable quantitative tools to empirically track and statistically analyze the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

Visual Proof: Identifying a Pattern in Photographic Coverage of a Social Movement

This study compared the photographic news coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests from two competing New York City tabloid newspapers on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the New York Post (conservative) and the Daily News (liberal). The purpose of the study was to determine if there were any differences in the photographic coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests between the two media outlets. A content analysis was conducted to detect and confirm any statistically significant differences in photographic coverage. Results showed that the differences in photographic coverage were significantly different suggesting that each media outlet may have presented the photographs to express a specific opinion of the protests. The study also determined that social proof is a useful theory for detecting a pattern of selection in photographic coverage of a social movement.

Christian Liturgy Spilling Out into the World: Youth as Public Theologians

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The Youth Theological Initiative is a three-week summer residential program in justice-seeking theological education. We gather youth from around the country, and around the world, in an inclusive, ecumenical Christian community to study, reflect, worship, pray, and enact our faith in the world. For more information, see www.yti.emory.edu. All names are changed. The concept of “protest chaplains” received new attention during the Occupy Wall Street protests, and this language was also used during the Troy Davis protests, although one can see examples of clergy attending to protesters earlier in history. Here is one description: http://protestchaplains.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html (accessed Aug. 30, 2013). James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009). Smith, 75. Smith, 57, his emphasis. Smith, 82. Smith, 85. Smith, 86. Smith, 88. Smith, 93–103. Smith, 104. Smith, 115–16. Smith, 115. Smith, 153–4, his emphasis. Smith, chapter 5, 155–214. Smith, 154. Duncan Forrester, Truthful Action: Explorations in Practical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 127–8. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophet Imagination (2nd ed.) (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 23–9. See Saul Williams’ video, http://youtu.be/keqAQk1YuOs; and To Write Love on Her Arms website, http://twloha.com (accessed July 30, 2013). Additional informationNotes on contributorsElizabeth W. CorrieElizabeth W. Corrie serves as assistant professor in the Practice of Youth Education and Peacebuilding and director of the Youth Theological Initiative at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Anatomy of Protest in the Digital Era: A Network Analysis of Twitter and Occupy Wall Street

Two months before the first Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest in September 2011, activists were using Twitter to organize and spread the movement. In this study, the earliest Twitter messages regarding #OccupyWallStreet were subjected to network analysis to answer these questions: What were the central hubs in the OWS discourse on Twitter in the summer of 2011? How did OWS emerge from among several social movement organizations to lead a nationwide series of demonstrations? What were the key points in the Twitter dialogue that aided the process of scale shift? By addressing these questions, this research connects social movement concepts with network centrality measures to provide a clearer picture of movements in the digital era.

Protest Through Presence: Spatial Citizenship and Identity Formation in Contestations of Neoliberal Crises

We live in a contested, crisis-prone era, indicative of ongoing processes of neoliberalization. The most recent global financial and food crises have disproportionately impacted those already marginalized in society: people of colour and the working classes. The spatial expressions of this disproportionality are especially acute, evidenced by the uneven distribution of the basic necessities of food and home. Activists in the USA are responding with forms of spatial citizenship, namely exercising their right to peaceably assemble and reclaiming public spaces. During the creation of spaces of dissent, we observe the fluid formation of a collective spatialized identity among social movement actors, contingent on political identities and ideology. We use two cases based in Florida to highlight these processes. The first case is a local iteration of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Occupy Gainesville, which has occupied the city's most central public gathering place, the Bo Diddley Community Plaza. The second case involves Food Not Bombs in the city of Orlando where attempts were made to ban the group from distributing food in public parks to the homeless and working poor. First, these cases highlight the spatiotemporal relationships between unjust economic systems and the state surveillance and policing apparatus and those resisting such systems. Second, they reveal how collective identity influences and in turn is influenced by space. Our article furthers a processual, dynamic understanding of activist mobilizations to reduce the uneven burdens of neoliberalization and argues for greater attention to the spatialities of contentious politics.

Poverty and Disability

Living in poverty increases the likelihood that students with disabilities will experience poor postschool outcomes, including unemployment, underemployment, and limited postsecondary education. The effects of the intersection of poverty and disability persist into adulthood where the employment rate for adults with disabilities is only one fourth that of individuals without disabilities. For close to 50 years, federal legislation has attempted to address the educational and economic disparities faced by students with disabilities and those growing up in poverty. In keeping with the focus of the civil rights movement and the Occupy Wall Street protests on the social and economic inequalities prevalent in the United States, policy directly addressing educational inequities is recommended to improve the daily lives and postschool outcomes of students with disabilities and those who are living in poverty.

Strategic incapacitation and the policing of Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, 2011

The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.

What is the Occupy Wall Street Protest a Protest of? A Psychoanalytic Investigation

The Occupy Wall Street movement appears to be a protest of capitalism, but their expressions of what they are doing offer little in the way of economic analysis. Their critique is not economic but moral. I analyze Communique #1, their purest self-definition, which reveals that they see us as living in a world of artificial images created by, and serving the interests of, malevolent forces: capitalism is the expression of these forces. Their stance against this is their own authenticity, which is their paradigm of an alternative. I compare this to the movie The Matrix, which sees us as living in a similar world, except that the malevolent forces are not capitalism. I compare these with the Cave allegory in Plato's Republic, which is similar, except the artificial images are not expressions of malevolence. I use psychoanalytic theory to argue that the malevolent object of OWS' critique is the father, who, in fulfillment of the paternal function, forces socialization upon us. The world of artificial images is culture, seen from the standpoint of alienation. Their alternative, rooted in their authenticity, with themselves as models, doesn't amount to much.

Rites of Dissent: Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution

Rites of Dissent: Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution John Mac Kilgore (bio) In a recent television appearance on the Fox Business Network’s Follow the Money with Eric Bolling, conservative pundit Ann Coulter compared the slogans of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests to “mob” ideas in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and even Nazi Germany. “It [the protest rhetoric] all comes from the French Revolution,” said Coulter, and thus it represents the “molecular opposite of the beginning of this country, with the American Revolution” (“Coulter”). Coulter testifies to the endurance of a popular historical narrative that juxtaposes the conservative or prudent ideology of the American Revolution and the radical or excessive ideology of the French Revolution. Philosophers and historians, cultural critics and literary scholars, across a wide intellectual spectrum—from Hannah Arendt to Gordon Wood, Antonio Negri to Sacvan Bercovitch—have tended to agree with Coulter on the conservative roots of the American Revolution.1 However one understands its shaping, whether from the vantage point of republicanism or Puritanism, moneyed interests or Lockean liberalism, or some synthesis thereof, the American Revolution certainly was not a movement tending toward radical “mob” ideas, according to most commentators.2 Two arguments for a conservative American Revolution (and its aftermath) that have been influential on American literary scholarship are the Puritan thesis and the Anglicization thesis. Representative of the former is Sacvan Bercovitch’s classic 1975 text, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, which he recently republished. In his new introduction, Bercovitch continues to assert that the American Revolution was, for its ideologues, the political consummation of a sacred mission rooted in longstanding Puritan theories of America’s divine “federal identity” (89). As Bercovitch concisely puts it in Rites of Assent, “The sacred origin was the Puritan migration; [End Page 367] the telos was the Revolution” (38). The false parity between the strict logic of Puritanism and Revolutionary bourgeois society is irrelevant: what matters are “the forms and strategies of cultural continuity” that unify all American political—and literary—projects around the central myth of a “sacred teleology” embodied by the American self (Rites 30; Puritan 136). From Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the narrative of a special, cosmic American self survives through various historical and literary mutations, transforming all political dissent into new strains of cultural consensus about the American mission. When pressed as to the deeper point of this mission, Bercovitch tends to accent the conservative, capitalistic economic values of American liberalism: nationalist exceptionalism translates into “middle-class hegemony” in the making, and the “rhetoric of the millennium” into the “spiritual version of free enterprise” (American xiii; Rites 53).3 Recent eighteenth-century scholarship, however, tells a very different story than Bercovitch, but arguably one no less conservative in its understanding of the American Revolution. Edward Larkin has recently called it the “Anglicization thesis” of American independence (“Nation” 501). This thesis states that, in the cultural and economic fruition of the American colonies, an intensifying identification with and consumption of Englishness—a veritable Anglophilia—led to an eventual crisis: the colonies came to see themselves as central, rather than peripheral, actors in the empire, deserving of the same political rights, certainly, but also warring in defense of true Englishness so as to supplant the declining and corrupted British Empire.4 In Larkin’s view, the Revolutionary War was fought over the constitution of empire, not a desire for discrete and special American nationhood; in this sense, a move away from the Puritan migration back across the Atlantic so to speak, in a cultural continuity of Englishness, resulted paradoxically in a political collision over the distributive hierarchies of power within the British Empire. As Leonard Tennenhouse argues in The Importance of Feeling English (2007), Americans, especially in their literature from 1750 to 1850, saw Americanness as a distinctive culture of Englishness transplanted in North America, part and parcel of a British diaspora in which English-derived cultures forge their own unique version of the English heritage that they continue to adopt subsequent to political independence. This narrative arguably replaces American with English [End Page 368] rites of assent: Americans organize dissent in...

Do Riot Police Serve Public Health?

It has been just over a year since the US movement, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), followed in the steps of the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and the Greek antiausterity protests in calling (in general terms) for an egalitarian reform of the political-economic system, which entails steering away from favoring large banks and corporations and moving toward the 99%. Some understand the concerns of these protests and reform movements as relevant to fundamental determinants of public health.1 Initially, the OWS protests were characterized by occupation of public spaces—initially of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in Manhattan—but were quickly joined by occupations in cities around the country. These occupations served (1) as forums for people to engage with, learn about, and organize around a variety of political and economic concerns (2) to enact, demonstrate, and transmit alternative forms of community-directed and consensus-based self-governance, and (3) to meet a variety of social needs including the provision of shelter, food, and medical assistance, as well as library and internet resources. In a nationally coordinated effort, the mayors of major cities responded by directing police actions to violently evict the OWS protestors. The mayors’ public justifications of these evictions (e.g., Mayors Bloomberg of New York City,2 Quan of Oakland, California,3 and Adams of Portland, Oregon4) invoked rhetoric of serving public health and safety. Ironically and tragically, the mayors’ uniform prescription for addressing public health and safety by deploying police in riot gear entailed violence, including property destruction, beatings, shootings, and assault with chemical weapons.5-7 Where was and is the condemnation on the part of public health professionals of this unethical, unconscionable, and flagrant usurpation of public health prerogatives? The increasingly militarized and publically unaccountable police systems in this country pose growing harm to the public, so much so that large police divisions are under the threat of federal receivership.8,9 Where is the epidemiological accounting of state violence (by the police, military, and penal systems) as a public health issue domestically and abroad? Where are the voices of Masters of Public Health instructors on these issues? Why is state violence not presented as a public health issue in basic public health textbooks? Lawyers have criticized Bloomberg’s rhetoric on public health and the OWS eviction.10 Why do we in public health permit the police and those who deploy them to adopt the mantle of public health without criticism?

The Religious Counterculture

The claims of liberal theology, if taken seriously, generate radical obligations. What would the world look like if religious liberals became religiously observant?