‘Nobody wants a recession. Nobody wants historically high poverty rates and unemployment rates. Curiously, it’s the Occupy Wall Street folks who are most passionate about making whatever changes are necessary to ensure the next recession doesn’t happen. The financial industry, on the other hand, is fighting any effort at common-sense regulation tooth and nail.’

‘What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?’

This barely talks about Occupy Honolulu and instead focuses on our homelessness problem, which is a huge one.

Eric Harvey on Occupy Bloomington:

‘The fact that the Bloomington protest was small but well-intentioned and pretty well-executed is a good sign that the non-violent performance of democratic citizenship is infiltrating the everyday lives of people everywhere, to the degree that many people might be viewing these protests as a DIY set of actions that anyone can do.’

‘Further, I think the more that people see similar-looking YouTube tableaux of quiet kids sitting with locked arms being shoved around by black-suited mean-looking authority figures—particularly with the idea that this is “citizen journalism”—the more that they’re going to (maybe) start thinking more generally about the way that state power functions in American society, and maybe (just mayyybe) want to do something about it. And that’s something I hope continues to flourish, even to a small degree.’

‘Most of the biggest Occupy Wall Street camps are gone. But their slogan still stands.’

About our current political situation.

‘For example, there are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, “bad apples.” What both of them have in common is that they occupy, as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.’

‘So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.’

Just how dangerous (and lethal) pepper spray can be.

‘This is the most important effect of the Occupy movement: acts of defiance, courage and conscience are contagious. Just as the Arab Spring clearly played some significant role in spawning, sustaining and growing the American Occupy movement, so too have the Occupy protesters emboldened one another and their fellow citizens. The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The state reactions to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it. This is why I hope to see the Occupy movement — even if it adopts specific demands — remain an outsider force rather than reduce itself into garden-variety partisan electioneering: in its current form, it is demanding and re-establishing the indispensable right of dissent, defiance of unjust authority, and sustained protest.’

‘We have a major economic crisis in this country that was brought on by the greedy and irresponsible behavior of big banks. No banker has been arrested, and certainly none have been pepper sprayed. Arrests and chemical assault is for those trying to defend their homes, their jobs, and their schools.’

‘I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn’t become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.’

‘How the rank and file of both the City and the NYPD deal with our mass nonviolent protests is on them, not us, and certainly not on the people reporting the events of the day.’

‘Now that it's done, how do you feel?’

‘I feel immense gratitude to these youngsters for kicking my ass into gear. I'm feeling so much gratitude to everyone, for putting their bodies on the line every day, for this movement. It's a global uprising we're part of. We have to win.’

‘A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.’

‘If Occupy Wall Street can do that — if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness — it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement.’

‘Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the full transcript of his speech.’

“So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main street, not Wall street,” but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest.”

‘Protests should do three things: they should express anger, through marches and targeted civil disobedience, at a particular political or social situation. They should give people the opportunity to see that other people, even people different from themselves, share that anger. And they should provide a vision of how life would be better if the world were different. Occupy Wall Street is doing all three of those things.’