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October 31, 2011
Occupying the Institutions.
Rumur
by Michael Galinsky
If you watch one piece of film this week, make sure it's the one posted below.
Last week on buzzflash I wrote about the connection between our film “Battle for Brooklyn” and OWS. Last year, as we completed Battle, we started to make a film about education in NY. We saw intense similarities between the way in which parents were shut out of the education process and the way in which communities were shut out of the development process. Our daughters’ school felt under attack by the DOE, and we heard rumors that they planned on putting a charter school in our building. We started to examine the way in which decisions were made and information flowed, and we found a thoroughly corrupted system that was gamed to shut out parent and community involvement. It was once again, a top down management style that did not take into consideration the voices of those most affected by decision makers.
The process, of housing one school inside another has a tendency to pit neighbor against neighbor, forcing them to fight over scarce resources in the guise of fostering competition. If the community is divided, those in power have a much easier time of doing what they want. We witnessed both development fights and school fights using sham public forums to create the impression of public involvement. However these public meetings were almost always overrun by division. We saw this time and time again in the Atlantic Yards fight, and it was clearly taking place in the schools fight.
...This year the people took over the PEP meeting using consensus techniques learned at Occupy Wall Street, rendering those in power essentially useless. Thankfully it was captured by meerkat media collective so that we have direct evidence that the occupy movement has moved from anger to rage to action.
From the first moments of my first visit to occupy wall street I had a sense that something momentous was taking place. This morning, when I saw this video by meerkat media that cinematically captures the people taking control in a consensus model it was clear that the movement has powerful legs to carry it.
NoLandGrab: We'd like to think that the folks at the PEP meeting learned from the mistakes of those of us who earnestly testified at the ESDC's rigged Atlantic Yards hearings, when we thought that if we just laid out all the facts about the unsolvable environmental impacts, reason would prevail. We were wrong. Don't get fooled again: sham democracy isn't democracy — it's a sham.
Posted by eric at October 31, 2011 12:42 PM