Creative Activism Thursdays with the Yes Labs

Announcing the Yes Lab’s Spring 2012 lineup!  Stay tuned for additions. All lectures are at 7pm at 20 Cooper Square, 5th floor, unless otherwise noted.  Come meet the revolutionaries who have changed or are changing the world, and those who study them. We’ll be meeting many Thursdays for a series of lectures, workshops, and other …

Joseph DeLappe

Joseph DeLappe, Dead in Iraq, 2007 “It may not effect change in the kind of physical sense that maybe we’ve been talking about, but I think if you can get inside someone’s head, and make the synapses shift for a second, then there’s something really valuable to that.” Working with electronic and new media since …

CAA Awarded $75,000 Grant by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations

For Immediate Release Contact: directors at artisticactivism-dot-org CENTER FOR ARTISTIC ACTIVISM AWARDED $75,000 GRANT BY GEORGE SOROS’S OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS Grant to expand CAA’s School for Creative Activism after Successful Inaugural Year The Democracy and Power Fund, an initiative of the Open Society Foundations, awarded $75,000 to the Center for Artistic Activism.  The grant will allow …

Party as a Political Act

“We pulled off an event that invoked the shock of something completely different, but was also universally familiar, and we did it in the middle of downtown. I feel good about that at the basest level.” We met Donovan McKnight last Spring when he participated in our School for Creative Activism in North Carolina. McKnight …

Clowns Arrested in Near-Successful Attack on Wall Street Bull

From the Yes Lab Earlier today, a small group of Occupy Wall Street activists engaged in a near-successful corrida against the Wall Street Bull. The incident began when two clowns, Hannah Morgan and Louis Jargow, scaled the steel barricades protecting the landmark. The clowns began spanking and climbing the beast, traditional ways of coaxing a …

APEC World Leaders Dinner Gets Occupied

From the Yes Lab Honolulu – A change in the programmed entertainment at last night’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gala left a few world leaders slack-jawed, though most seemed not to notice that anything was amiss. During the gala dinner, renowned Hawaiian guitarist Makana, who performed at the White House in 2009, opened his suit …

12,000 Encircle White House In Protest of Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

Today, more than 12,000 people from across the United States and Canada gathered at the White House to call on President Obama to stop the TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  After a rally in Lafayette Square addressed by elected officials, youth climate activists,  environmental leaders, climate scientist James Hansen, religious leaders, Nobel Peace Laureate …

Tim DeChristopher’s OWS call to action from prison

Incarcerated climate activist Tim DeChristopher recently sent Occupy Wall Street a letter from jail, which was read by Russell and Ashley Anderson from Peaceful Uprising on October 30th. “The message should be clear,” DeChristopher wrote. “We’re not giving up on our future even if it’s difficult. And we need a president with similar courage.” You …

Student Activists Pressure Colleges to Participate in Bank Transfer Day

Campus activists across the country are preparing for Bank Transfer Day, which encourages people to move their money from big banks to community-based credit unions on November 5. But student supporters aren’t stopping at encouraging their peers to close their accounts at major banks. They plan to leverage the energy from the Occupy Wall Street …

The Age of Activism (and reclaimed pizza boxes)

Let me rashly and prematurely propose a name for our era: the Age of Activism. Here’s a preliminary sketch for a history of the age in which we are currently immersed, as well as a diagnosis of where this activism is heading. via The Age of Activism – Foreign Policy in Focus I stumbled across …

The Beats

The catch-all nature of the Occupy Wall Street protests has been a major focus of the coverage of the events. Depending on the perspective of the commentators, the diversity of demands is alternately perceived as a detrimental lack of coherence, evidence of far-reaching public discontent, or a model for radical egalitarianism. Many have distilled the …

Will Bloomberg End Protesters’ Stay on Wall Street?

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raised the specter of shutting down a two-week long demonstration on Wall Street, telling protesters who are speaking out against greed and corruption that the banks deserve support. Asked directly on his weekly radio show Friday whether he will allow the protesters to stay indefinitely, Bloomberg replied, “We’ll see.” …

700 arrested at Occupy Wall Street

Anjali Mullany/News A crowd of protesters and police officers swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday. Thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the Brooklyn Bride Saturday, shutting down car lanes and setting up yet another tense showdown with the NYPD. Roughly 700 people were arrested after standing in the roadway, blocking the Brooklyn-bound lanes. Traffic …

Moving Planet Rallies Prompt Global Climate Action

More than 2,000 “Moving Planet” clean-energy demonstrations took place on Saturday, September 24th – at UN Headquarters in New York, in all 50 U.S. states and in 175 countries. “The planet has been stuck for too long with governments doing nothing about the biggest problem we’ve ever faced,” said Bill McKibben, founder of the nonprofit …

Trader’s Goldman Sachs comments spark BBC hoax claims

Alessio Rastani, who claimed on BBC News ‘I dream of another recession’, is not a ‘Yes Man’ – but he could be an honest trader. He caused outrage with his comments on the global economic meltdown claiming “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world”. But is independent stock market trader Alessio Rastani, …

Tim DeChristopher speaks from prison

Letter from prison: Tim DeChristopher speaks The following text appeared in a handwritten letter from Tim DeChristopher addressed to Grist’s Jennifer Prediger. If I had ever doubted the power of words, Judge Benson made their importance all too clear at my sentencing last month. When he sentenced me to two years in prison plus three …

#OccupyWallStreet Bleeds and Leads

Here is an interesting article from Waging Nonviolence about Occupy Wall Street. A bit after 10 p.m. on Saturday night in occupied Liberty Plaza, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any …