So we have come to the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Big Al mentioned it in an essay already.

Have all those thousands who participated, not just here in the US, but around the world, gone underground and dropped out of any attempt at change? Nah.

Decentralization and the End of Protest

Not sure 'what happened to Occupy' ? If you are interested there is much to learn about the spin offs and strategies that came from the successes and failures, the 'Children of Occupy' if you will.

There are Occupy Wall Street websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and more where alumni gather to exchange ideas and gather support for actions. The anniversary might be a good time to survey these in order to balance the crap that the corporate media will spew.

I suggest doing a Twitter search like I did. Found some interesting things to contemplate..

You might be surprised as to what you find there.

This is the most important and honest book about activism written in decades https://t.co/CqeamuGGDq pic.twitter.com/6qVu7suzbA

— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallSt) September 15, 2016

What a trip that was, 5 years of raising hell, repression, but what has happened to those who participated? Have they 'birthed' anything we at Caucus99 can use as we go forward?

What did OWS give birth to?

Would submit that the article highlighted below is great read of lessons learned and application in action. Hope you enjoy it.

#Occupy didn't just change the conversation—it laid the foundation for a new era of radical protest https://t.co/tuF5PiTZl5 @OccupyWallStNYC

— In These Times (@inthesetimesmag) September 17, 2016

Here's a snippet, but the entire article was worth reading:

http://inthesetimes.com/features/occupy-legacy-five-year-anniversary-may...

SNIP
Without being able to clearly articulate Occupy’s organizing model, it would be hard to identify its weaknesses and improve them. Shapiro and some like-minded organizers formed the “think-make-and-do-tank” Movement Netlab (MNL) to change that.

Through one project, it has tried to detail the various roles participants take on in a mass, decentralized movement. For instances, a movement requires coaches, culture-makers, introducers and so on. Through another, it has charted the life cycle of a movement. MNL hypothesizes that movements are made up of distinct “moments:” First public anger grows over an ongoing crisis. Then, a trigger event incites a spontaneous mass response, which begins a “heroic” expansion phase and honeymoon period, when anything seems possible. When this ends, the movement goes through a painful contraction, and lastly through a period of reflection and evolution. Then the cycle begins again—with the difference that the movement, hopefully, has won some concrete gains and is even better prepared to take advantage of the next peak.

Shapiro and MNL’s work with the climate justice movement put into practice some of their hypotheses about how mass, decentralized movements can organize effectively for a common purpose. During the preparation for the 2014 People’s Climate March, for example, Shapiro built out a communications system that riffed off of InterOccupy’s structure, providing each of over 100 hubs (Labor for Climate, Arts for Climate, Yoga Teachers…) with a website, Facebook and Google group—“connected but separate online front doors.”

This allowed people to enter from a community that they felt deeply a part of, so they could bring their particular identities into the larger movement, rather than leaving them at the door. Moreover, it enabled groups who may sometimes be at odds—say, labor unions and anti-fracking groups—to organize autonomously for the march with messaging specific to their constituencies.