September 2011 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Macro, and Micro ETM.
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

The terms Macro, and Micro ETM, or Electronic Transaction Monitoring is a part of my evolving project on Transfinancial Economics, or TFE. Simply stated these two approaches are a way of monitoring money as electronic data of some environmental, and socially ethical commercial project. The aim of this is to keep an eye on the Free Market pricing of goods, and services. It is ofcourse the opposite of full ETM which gives confidence to the credible phasing in of a tax, and interest free world. An example of this should make things clearer. If a Facilitation Bank dealing with a microfinance project creates a Basic Income for the poor in partnership with a government (if necessary) for certain people in a region of India...the local "economy" would have to also be taken into consideration.With the right legal arrangements with the relevant banks the suppliers of foodstuffs, and services would have their transactions monitored electronically. The simple aim of this is to ensure that the Basic Income (or BI) for the poor can meet any "inflationary"demands from local goods, and services. The suppliers themselves may receive help if they wish to increase capacity if demand grows from those on the BI. The danger here is that those supplying goods, and services may try to deliberately increase their Free Market Price, and hence, create a moral hazard knowing that BI could be increased if necessary by the FB. The solution to this is ofcourse quite simple but Free Marketeers would possibly loathe it. The answer ofcourse an electronic price cap. If the price cap becomes problematic for the suppliers then instant compensation could occur, and be electronically transmitted to their bank accounts. However, the above example of Micro ETM would probably be temporary as microfinance loans, or grants could be created to help the poor become independent financially . When they start relying at last on earned money the Micro ETM could be stopped on the Free Market Price. The banks would probably "love" all this as the grant interest would accrue through the creation, and transmission of new non-repayable money. Since they have the REAL POWER in the world they could easily dismiss neo-classical economic ideology in connection with the Free Market Price where, and if necessary..especially if there is some money to made out of it at the end of the day.... And yes, I know this is not the most ethical approach....but what is the alternative if any? Protests may work against banks (notably the "occupation" of the Wall Street) but it is hard to see that they would get very far with dethroning the status quo of the present banking system. I hope I may be wrong...but only the future can tell. http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics PS BI is ofcourse similiar to the UBI which is the Universal Basic Income..................

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Germany has Hidden Debt??
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

I think the following maybe of interest. Germany Has 5 Trillion Euros of Hidden Debt, Handelsblatt Says www.bloomberg.com Germany’s public debt is much higher than officially shown, Handelsblatt reported, citing calculations by Bernd Raffelhueschen, an economics professor at Freiburg University.

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Is Charity Fundraising Absurd In The 21st Century?
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

Is charity fundraising absurd? As far as I am concerned it is. A far better approach is to have some, or indeed, all of it created electronically...Why should the people irrespective of their economic status have to fork out. The idea may seem "socially unacceptable" but so is famine, deadly diseases, absolute poverty, and many other ills of the world. It is time for money which controls the use, or abuse of resources to become something humane, and progressive as never before imaginable. http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics Ofcourse, people like Soros, Gates, and Buffet, have pledged to give millions, and billions to charity... ...BUT THIS MONEY IN PART COULD ALSO BE WELL SPENT IN CREATING A CAMPAIGN FOR A NEW FINANCIAL SYSTEM ON THE LINES SIMILIAR TO TRANSFINANCIAL ECONOMICS...... Granted, they maybe brilliant geniuses at making money, but are they bright enough to understand the sentence in capitals Simply just giving away money without any serious thought of developing a new financial system which can bring about a better, and fairer world is frankly a waste of time, and indeed, a waste of money. The great tragedy is that this "revolution" could happen much quicker than we might expect if a pragmatic approach is taken towards the present financial system. RS

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Could the US Congress, and the Banks save the Planet!!???
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

At the first sight of this post the whole notion of the US government, and banks saving the planet is understandably absurd...! But is there a credible way forwards? The answer may well be yes if we take my developing project of Transfinancial Economics, or TFE into the equation. http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics Here is the basic draft proposal. 1. A special academic website could be set up with commissioned papers on TFE by recognized experts notably in IT, the law, and economics. This should add credibility to the research project. 2. The above site could be sent notably to those who have real power. In other words, the top bankers, top CEOs of "green friendly" corporations, and US politicians. 3. A Bill for the American government could be expertly drafted known as Facilitation Banking Bill I. This would allow for the setting up of Facilitation Banks, or FBs if it were passed into become law. 4.These would have the legal powers to create new non-repayable money which would be electronically monitored for urgent environmental, and socially ethical enterprises at a micro, and macro level. Its operations unlike the normal mainstream retail, and investment banks would be transparent in extremis. Ideally, they should be legally "separate" from the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank notably. 5.Just as banks benefit from the interest charged on the loans the new non-repayable money created electronically would also have what might be termed "grant interest" minus the principal (ideally). This "interest" could created electronically by an independent body. Mainstream banks could also have equal shares in the FBs, and would receive passive revenus from them. 6. These new financial institutions would also be able to electronically create loans. However, they would be interest free. The interest again would be created by an independent body. 7. The NGO promoting TFE reform with the aid of the academic website mentioned at 1. would emphasis the great importance, and need for a credible full legal framework in which the decision-making process for commercial grant applications should be for genuine environmental, and socially ethical business projects. 8.A second Bill which could be created after Bill I could be drawn up known as the Electronic Transaction Monitoring Bill II. 9. This is a very controversial Bill, and represents advanced TFE. It may takes years to become Law even if Bill I is passed, and becomes an Act. 10. Most monetary reformers would probably dislike the above because it implies a highly pragmatic approach to the banks, and bankers in which they could benefit greatly from the introduction of Facilitation Banks, and indeed, with ETM. 11. Time, and time again evidence suggests that working against the banks, and other financial institutions is probably a waste of time though it is ofcourse the most ethical approach. However, what matters NOW is whether humanity will survive into the future, or not. For that a new financial system on the lines of TFE would have revolutionary implications. 12. By presenting TFE as a powerful "business opportunity" for the rich, and powerful it could ironically lead to a better, and fairer world. This is a counterintuitive stance but one which is worth pursuing

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Fw: Can "Printing" Money Save Economies? The Answer, Yes, and No....
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

----- Forwarded Message ----- From: robert searle <dharao4(a)yahoo.co.uk> To: "dharao4(a)yahoo.co.uk" <dharao4(a)yahoo.co.uk> Sent: Monday, 26 September 2011, 12:54 Subject: Can "Printing" Monye Save Economies? If for whatever reasons governments cannot pay off their debts one way of achieving economic stability is to "print" it en masse!! This is not ofcourse a good debt concellation/reduction plan (!) as it could lead to serious inflation, or even hyperinflation.....but it can work..if not too much money is created by governments. Something like this could ultimately save the Euro if it occurs on a large enough scale. In pre-revolutionary America colonists found it very difficult to raise funds in the various States they created. So, they resorted to the printing press. Quite often this worked but not always (ref. Ellen Brown/Web of Debt). Infact, the American War of Independence was funded by printing money. This money was known as the Continentals but it ultimately lead to serious inflation. However, it is claimed that the Brits had been "flooding" the money supply with fake copies. The same claim was also made about the Assignats created during the French Revolution (ref. Zarlenga, and his key book on money). The American Civil War was funded by Lincoln with his Greenbacks notes created by the then existing government. This did not lead serious inflation as far as we know...The Russian Revolution was largely funded in a like manner though there is some talk about some capital being borrowed by private foreign commercial banks. It appears too that Hitlers miracle economic "revolution" leading to WII was due to simply printing money but with strong price controls in place on many products. Apparently, the same goes for the funding of the Vietnam War when President Johnson admitted that it could not be financed by taxation because the war was so unpopular .......This is a big subject, and no doubt other examples have not been included here (notably Zimbabwe!!). There are a number of articles about Hitler "printing" money on the internet along with the Vietnam War (plus the Assignats, Greenbacks, et cetera, et cetera). As far as I understand it governments cannot legally create money electronically en direct into the economy. However, it is not fully clear whether they can still print it "legally". To very limitedextent this occurs but if huge amounts were to be involved this might require somekind of legal arrangement. This is still subject to research. http://www.google.co.uk/#pq=hitler+and+monetary+reform&hl=en&sugexp=tsh&cp=… http://www.google.co.uk/#pq=hitler+prints+money&hl=en&sugexp=tsh&cp=40&gs_i…

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BBC Speechless As Trader Tells The Truth..
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

The following maybe of interest!!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN3amj6AcE RS...

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Interesting Vids....
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

The following seems to come from the site where Tadit has done some book reviews. http://reimaginingeconomics.mirocommunity.org/ RS.

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Economics Resource...
by robert searle 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

The following maybe of interest. http://www.economics-ejournal.org/conception/aims-and-scope

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Fwd: Whole System Conversations - and the Voice of the Whole
by Michel Bauwens 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bryan Hugill <bryan.hugill(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 12:48 PM Subject: Fwd: Whole System Conversations - and the Voice of the Whole To: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tom Atlee <cii(a)igc.org> Date: 28 September 2011 02:32 Subject: Whole System Conversations - and the Voice of the Whole To: undisclosed list <cii(a)igc.org> http://bit.ly/VoiceOfTheWhole WHO PARTICIPATES IN "WHOLE SYSTEM" CONVERSATIONS? - PARTSANS, STAKEHOLDERS, DOMAINS, AND CITIZENS by Tom Atlee Consciously convened conversations have many functions. Many seek simply to get people talking with each other. Others try to bring together what they call "the whole system" to address that system's collective issues or dreams. Who is involved in these "whole system" conversations? A "whole system", in this case, involves all the parties who play - or could play - roles in some social unit or situation. The social unit could be a family or relationship, a group or organization, a community or a whole society. A situation might be, on the one hand, an issue, a problem, or a conflict - or, on the other hand, an inquiry, an opportunity, a shift, or simply a periodic reflection about what's happening. We can convene conversations around any of these things. So how do we decide who the parties or players are? How do we "cut the pie" of the whole system? And, if we're ambitious, how do we elicit a "voice of the whole"? I see four different approaches to defining who "a whole system" includes. Each approach has its own rationale and appropriate usages. They are not mutually exclusive, but are usually used more or less separately. Perhaps being aware of them and building synergies between them would enhance the power and wisdom of our conversations. These approaches include: 1. Adversaries: The "whole system" here is everyone involved in a conflict. The conflict can be anything from a family quarrel to a political struggle over ideas, values, policies, or resources. The goal of the conversation is to resolve or transform the conflict. To do that, we need to engage both sides - or all sides, as the case may be. Powerful conversation can help adversaries work through their differences, discover each other as human beings, and find better ways to relate to each other. When only a few people are involved in the conflict, we want to include both or all of them. When the conflict is between groups, we want to include a manageable, influential subset of "the whole system" that includes members from each group. Often this includes leaders or representatives of those groups, but sometimes - especially in an archetypal battle like liberals vs conservatives - we choose archtypal voices from the conflicted sides whose ability to then find common ground helps contradict widespread assumptions that they can never work together. 2. Stakeholders: The whole system here is a situation or issue itself, which is generated by interactions among the interested parties and diverse perspectives involved. The goal of the conversation is to resolve the issue or at least see how it could be handled better. We want to bring people together who, if they (or their networks or people like them) can agree on a better path ahead, will co-create a better path forward. We want people who are or might be affected, people who have a stake in what happens with it, and people who have information or power that could make a difference. Usually we want to include leaders, representatives, or at least voices from all the groups or kinds of people involved in the issue. Our job here is primarily to help them all hear each other well enough to recognize the full dynamics that keep their co-created problem alive - dynamics in which most or all of them are playing significant roles - including their diverse legitimate interests. We want to move them from co-creating the problem to co-creating solutions. 3. Domains: Here the whole system is a social grouping that could function more coherently and effectively. The goal of the conversation is to enable greater understanding and collaboration to happen. We're interested in creating a new multi-domain activity, stimulating trans-domain consciousness, or helping an existing organization or activity improve its internal functionality. In an organization, we want to include people from all the organizational domains - all the departments and all the levels of staff and management. In a coalition, we want representatives of all the organizations and groups that are coming together. In an interdisciplinary, interfaith or multicultural convocation or convergence, we want the full spectrum of worldviews - people from all the various fields or faiths or cultures or perspectives we are trying to connect up. We want to engage them in weaving together a well-functioning collaborative whole that helps them achieve their shared goals. 4. Citizens: In this approach the whole system is the community, state, nation or other generic/geographic/inclusive political entity. The goal of the conversation is to enhance democratic responsibility by individual citizens, public officials, and/or the whole community or society. That goal may be focused on solving a public issue or on making sensible democratic decisions or on generating a community vision. If our target is for individual citizens to be more informed or engaged, we can invite everyone and engage "whoever shows up." If we actually want to generate some coherent public knowledge, judgment, policy, or action, we may seek to convene a microcosm of the community - usually "randomly selected citizens" often balanced demographically - so that their collective voice can be more legitimately be called the voice of the people. In any case, we encourage participating citizens to view themselves and each other as involved, co-creative peers. Our job is to provide them with an information-rich, communication-enhanced environment to enable a special level of collective citizenship on behalf of their community. As noted earlier, these four approaches are not mutually exclusive. After all, people in all these conversations tend to be citizens. And obviously adversaries are stakeholders in their conflicts just as department heads are stakeholders in their organizations. Furthermore, citizen deliberators are usually informed by expert partisans or stakeholders. But the four categories of conversation differ in their FOCUS of who is mostly talking to whom, what subgroups or self-identities are being invited, and what roles they are being asked to play. When we invite participants to play roles in a particular conversational story, we shape how they see themselves and each other and how they behave in the conversation. When they are selected because they are citizens of their town, for example, they tend to behave less as a partisans, stakeholders, or holders of official positions and more as peer citizens - and vice versa. Each approach has its own appeal and logic. We like the stakeholder and domain approaches because they bring separated parts of a system together face-to-face to talk their way into more effective wholeness. The adversaries approach also offers a certain elegance, since the conflict exists only because certain folks disagree about something - or their competition is nasty because they can't see each other as fully human. If they understood each other's perspectives and needs and work together to meet those needs, their battle might well evaporate or at least become less toxic. The citizenship approach has a compelling democratic mystique: It offers a way for We the People to more effectively govern ourselves well together. As citizens who share community values and care for the well-being of our community, individually and collectively, we can generate community solutions as well as greater civility and social coherence. WIth all this in mind I would like to suggest that the challenging public issues of our day - climate change, war, economic instability, health care, and so on - urgently call for a legitimate, potent, and wise "voice of the whole" that can influence government policy, stakeholder activity, and mass public consciousness and behavior in sensible directions. I think that consciously integrating these approaches could elicit that voice, so sorely lacking in today's politics. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a research project that convenes three parallel, independent, comparable ad hoc councils of randomly selected citizens (e.g., Citizens Juries) who interview diverse stakeholders about climate change and then deliberate to produce policy recommendations. Now imagine ALSO convening a simultaneous set of comparable and parallel stakeholder dialogues about climate change. To top it off, imagine convening three parallel transpartisan deliberations on climate change - liberals and conservatives with some libertarians, greens, and others to spice it up. What would all these conversations come up with? Imagine comparing the results of all nine forums. Imagine what we would learn from both their differences and similarities, both within each approach and across the three approaches. If their recommendations are significantly similar, wouldn't that be remarkable! Imagine how it would change everything we think about the possibilities of politics! It is reasonable to expect, however, that the different conversations would produce some different results. So imagine that we then mix and match the participants across the three approaches, creating three new parallel groups each consisting of members from all nine forums. Now imagine putting these three new groups through a dynamic choice-creating process (e.g., a Creative Insight Council) to see if they then come up with similar results. Again, analysis of the results and processes would provide fascinating insight into the powers and dynamics of conversation and how to best use it to address major public issues. To my knowledge nothing like this has ever been done. But think for a minute: What if it were truly possible to discover a legitimate, inclusive, coherent, wise voice of a whole society? How much do you think it would add to the quality of our public discourse, our public policies, the behavior of interest groups, and how members of society think and act about public issues? This particular research approach is only one way to explore this. The most important thing is the inquiry, itself. Are we ready to ask the pivotal question: How can we best evoke a true voice of the whole? I suspect that if we took this inquiry seriously, it would change everything. ________________________________ Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440 http://www.co-intelligence.org / http://tom-atlee.posterous.com Read THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY - http://www.taoofdemocracy.com and REFLECTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY ACTIVISM - http://evolutionaryactivism.com Please support our work. Your donations are fully tax-deductible. ________________________________ -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: Truth-out : #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag
by Michel Bauwens 28 Sep '11

28 Sep '11

hi Amia, any comments? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:41 AM Subject: Truth-out : #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag To: econowmix(a)googlegroups.com http://www.truth-out.org/occupywallstreet-more-hashtag-its-revolution-forma… http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag - It's Revolution in Formation Friday 23 September 2011 by: Nathan Schneider, Truthout | Report #OccupyWallStreet protesters gathering in New York's financial district on September 17, 2011. (Photo: David Shankbone / Flickr<http://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/6157852302/> ) A lot of what you've probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you're getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That's where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement. At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream<http://livestream.com/globalrevolution>. They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until they're viral. But for those looking to understand even the basic facts about what is actually going on - before September 17 and since - the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything else. For someone who has been following this movement in gestation as well as implementation, it's painfully easy to see which news articles take their bearing entirely from a few Google searches. Some reporters come to Liberty Plaza looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or conspiratorial Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. They're briefly disappointed to find none of the above. Instead, it's a bunch of people - from round-the-clock revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to zealous students - spending most of their time in long meetings about supplying food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza's limited space and what exactly they're there to do and why. And that's the point. More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like<http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/09/the-demand-is-a-process/>: a discussion among people, not a contest of money. As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call on July 13<http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html> for an occupation of Wall Street. That and a bit of poster art were the extent of its involvement. Adbusters floated the meme and left the rest to others. The trouble was, though, that most of the others were meme floaters, too. The occupywallst.org web domain was registered anonymously on July 14, and it soon became the main clearinghouse for information about the movement’s progress. It remains so now and is getting, on average, about 50,000 unique visitors per day. It’s maintained mainly by a man and woman who met through the Anarchism section on the web site Reddit. Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O'Brien, an IT content management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform - "One citizen. One dollar. One vote." - and decided to peg her efforts to the September 17 action. While she has around 20 organizers working with her in cities around the country, as far as one leading #occupywallstreet organizer in New York could tell, it seems like her only colleagues might be coffee and cigarettes. Then, of course, there's Anonymous. The most-wanted hacker-activist collective indicated that it would join #occupywallstreet in late August. Within days, the Anons' presence in the movement was being felt through Anonymous-branded viral videos, the bombardment of the movement's Twitter hashtags (of which there is an ever-growing number) and rumors of scrutiny from Homeland Security. Meanwhile, quietly, a group of several hundred mainly young activists, artists and students started gathering as a "General Assembly" (GA) - a leaderless, consensus-based decision-making process. They met weekly in public parks, starting on August 2 and continuing until the occupation began, with the intention of building an organizational and tactical framework for the action. It grew out of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, which had recently held a three-week occupation near City Hall called "Bloombergville" to protest against austerity measures. They had learned a lot from that and were ready to try something bigger. The GA formed an Internet Committee, which quickly became fraught with infighting about process, security concerns and editorial control. These problems consumed hours and hours of the whole Assembly's time. Their site went up, then down and then finally up again just days before the occupation began. It is now online at nycga.cc, but it receives only a small fraction of the traffic of occupywallst.org. Only on Thursday afternoon did the two sites figure out how to formally coordinate their activities. As a result of these hiccups, in the lead-up and early days of the occupation, media coverage almost always associated it with meme floaters like Adbusters, US Day of Rage and Anonymous. But none of them were especially responsible for what would be happening on the ground starting on September 17. That was the GA's doing. Others, it seems, have taken it upon themselves to fill the GA's media vacuum of their own accord. One document beingcirculated and discussed<http://openletters2you.blogspot.com/2011/09/open-letter-to-occupywallstreet…> online is "Occupy Wall Street - Official Demands," dated September 20 of *2013*, which includes detailed proposals for reforming the financial system, none of which has been approved by the GA. "This is definitely not ours," says Marisa Holmes, a facilitator of the GA since the first planning meetings. "All decisions made by the GA are made in this space." Worse, thanks to some imaginative theorizing by Aaron Kein of the right-wing online publication WorldNetDaily, the idea began circulating that the movement was "closely tied" with ACORN, SEIU and that it took its inspiration from the Weather Underground; George Soros; and, ultimately, President Obama himself. Five minutes at a GA meeting would easily disabuse one of such associations. The GA had no official organizational ties and, besides a food fund that has been stuck in an inaccessible WePay account, almost no money. Many wish that they had the support of unions, but so far they still don't. What's actually underway at Liberty Plaza is both simpler and more complicated: music making, sign drawing, talking, organizing, eating, marching, standoffs with police and (not enough) sleeping. It's a movement in formation. As protesters sometimes like to chant, "This Is Just Practice." There are a handful of guys with Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks backward on their heads, but they're just one affinity group among many. O'Brien didn't appear on the plaza for a couple of days - she was "running the back-end," she says - and there has been almost no talk of "One citizen. One dollar. One vote." Adbusters sends the occasional package of posters in the mail and offers confusing advice to organizers on the ground. Nobody's exactly sure yet who is doing what, but they're learning. For the most part, the occupation is riding the momentum started in the GA meetings that were going on for a month and a half beforehand. They built a community of people who trust each other, who have a sense for each other's skills and who are in some basic agreement about ends and means. In the revolutions and uprisings and occupations that have been taking place around the world since the beginning of this year, there has been a lot of talk about the mobilizing power of social media - of the Twitters and Facebooks and cell phones. But when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet and the cellular signals in January, the movement there carried on. One of the deciding factors that brought down Mubarak, in the end, was not some new Twitter hashtag, but a general strike organized by traditional labor unions. The Internet can help (as well as hurt) a movement, but it's no replacement for actual relationships among actual people, building actual trust through actually working together over a period of time. "I could have a political discussion just on the Internet," says web developer Drew Hornbein, who is on the GA's Internet Committee, "But it's nice to get out like this." When he started attending GA meetings in August, he got excited, thinking, "This is something really real. This could really be something." So it has become. But everyone at Liberty Plaza knows the movement has to be bigger for it to have the effect they want to see. Whole swaths of Americans - from racial minorities to disgruntled Wall Streeters - are underrepresented among the occupiers. Not everyone, it seems, is quite so glued to Twitter as the young radical set. They've had to start scrambling to relearn how to make fliers, reach out to membership organizations and find people where they are to make the movement's numbers grow. On Thursday evening, a surprise march of hundreds mourning the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia set out for Liberty Plaza from Union Square, led by occupiers. Police made attempts to stop it with barricades and clubs and arrests, but they couldn't; and when the marchers arrived, the numbers in the plaza swelled. There were a lot of new faces and new kinds of faces. It paid off to quit the Internet, go to where people actually are and bring them back. In the GA that night, Ted Actie, who lives in Brooklyn and works for On the Spot, a minority-owned talk-show production company, called on the protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them. "You do so much social networking," he said, "you forget how to socialize." [image: Creative Commons License]<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/> This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/> . -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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