The morphing of Occupy into an alternatives countercultural movement — Back to the Sixties

Government has finally abandoned the public interest for good, Kirkland says. He sees little potential for taking it back.
It’s now “about building self-sufficient communities that can support themselves without the government,” he said. “It’s no longer political. It’s social. 

The Occupy movement, Kirkland says, teaches people how to cope with the absence of government. As social programs, school offerings and health and pension benefits get cut, working-class people will have to learn to take charge of their own communities.

Because of the movement, “they’ll be prepared for when there is no government to serve them,” he said.

Kirkland and Seidewitz do not agree with notions in the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement has died out.

“The parks were magical,” said Seidewitz, “but they served as a place where we all met each other.”

The encampments were educational. They helped people build connections and form social groups. But camping in a park and talking to like-minded people, she said, can only do so much.
“It’s now about creating alternative media sources, which is easier to do now that we have all these connections,” she said. “We’ve all woken up. So it’s not about a park anymore.”

truthdig
One Year Later: Lessons Learned From Occupy Wall Street
Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law

Andrew Koppelman — Tomasi's Free Market Fairness

In his new book, Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi offers a new synthesis of Rawlsian high liberalism and market-oriented libertarianism, which he calls “market democracy.”  It treats capitalistic economic freedoms as crucial elements of liberty, but demands that institutions be designed so that their benefits are shared by the least fortunate citizens.

Other political theorists, notably Gerald Gaus and David Schmidtz, have also emphasized the value of entrepreneurial activity as a moral ideal, but Tomasi makes this his central focus.  All three try to supplant Rawls with a more market-friendly, less welfare-statist vision.  Tomasi’s important work also inadvertently reveals the limitations of that vision.

Read it at Balkinization
Tomasi's Free Market Fairness
by Andrew Koppelman | John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University

This links only to the beginning of the article by Professor Koppelman posted at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I recommend and reading the whole thing if this is of interest. It's not much longer and contains a lot of good stuff. Or else just use this link.

Koppelman's review of Tomasi adresses many key issues that are constantly coming up here. Worthwhile.

Rawls's insensitivity to the moral virtues of markets, so well anatomized by Tomasi, entails little about his theory of justice, because his theory doesn't exclude market capitalism and so can easily incorporate it as an element. It is entirely compatible with the regulated capitalism that exists in all industrialized democracies. Libertarianism, on the other hand, demands radical change, of a kind that would empower the economically strong and crush the economically weak. Its vision of a just society is not liberalism at all, but rather resembles its ancient adversary feudalism, in which parties trade their allegiance for protection by the powerful.[8] Rawlsianism is necessarily at war with this. It isn't possible to bring the likes of Ayn Rand into the liberal coalition. Tomasi's desire to find a middle ground between these views thus repeatedly brings him to incoherence.

Something that has been asserted many times here.

If you don't read anything else of this article, consider this at least.

Liberalism doesn't necessarily entail much about either regulation or redistribution. The questions that determine liberalism's entailments are going to be resolved, not at the level of political philosophy, but at the level of empirical description: does an unregulated market create transaction costs, externalities, market failures, inequalities of wealth beyond those necessary to create incentives for growth, etc.? To the extent that you think the answer is no, then liberalism will entail a small state. To the extent that you think that the answer is yes, then liberalism will entail a big state. 

DHS tracked Occupy Wall Street to ‘control protesters’

Leaked documents reveal that federal government tracked Occupy Wall Street protesters because it feared the movement could turn violent.

An internal Department of Homeland Security report (PDF) titled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street” was part of 5 million leaked documents published by WikiLeaks andexamined by Rolling Stone contributing editor Michael Hastings.

The report indicates that the department monitored protesters’ social media activities to assess the movement’s impacts in individuals sectors, including financial services, commercial facilities, transportation, emergency services and government facilities.

In addition to monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Meetup and Occupy live video feeds, the feds also relied on the left-leaning activist website Daily Kos for tracking protest locations.

“The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence,” the report notes in its final paragraph. “While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters.”

Read it at Raw Story
DHS tracked Occupy Wall Street to ‘control protesters’

by David Edwards

No surprises here. The government was doing the same thing in the Sixties and Seventies wrt the anti-war movement.The difficulty is drawing the line between legitimate security concerns and overreach. Authoritarian and libertarian mindsets disagree over where the line should be drawn, and security forces tend to draw on those who fall toward the right tail of the bell curve of population distribution.