But, New York Times readers were told today, the U.S. must increase its military presence still further in that region because . . . it is Iran (which has no military bases in countries bordering the U.S. or fleets stationed off its coast) that is "belligerent" and poses a "threat" (after all, they just dispatched a failed Texan used car salesman who constantly loses his own keys and can't pay his bills to hire teams of Mexican drug cartel gunmen to attack a Saudi ambassador on American soil!).

But the best proclamation in this article comes from the Secretary of State in explaining why this increased American presence is so very needed and so very noble:

"We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president's announcement.

Can occupations survive a winter of global weirding, escalated police brutality, and the corporate media's venom? Should they?

In some parts of the country there will be no cold weather. In others, police abuses will result in larger occupations, not smaller. And it's certainly possible that for the first time in recent years an independent progressive populist campaign will survive the enmity of the corporate media.

In other cases, the cold, the communications assaults, fatigue, and the difficulties encountered by activist camps that also become homes for the homeless and the mentally ill may begin to erode the usefulness of encampments.

What to do?

Here's one activist's recommendations:

Above all: stay! Continue to hold public space! Grow, and rotate people. No single person need stay forever. But the 99% of the 99% that cheers from the sidelines needs to get into the squares and parks. We don't need emails or phone calls or checks or pizzas so much as we need live bodies!

In particular, return wherever police have sought to deprive us of our First Amendment rights. Those abuses cannot be tolerated or our rights will come under greater assault everywhere else. We must occupy precisely where we are told we cannot. The way to do this while keeping the conversation focused on what motivated us in the first place (the need to obey majority demands, to tax the rich, to prosecute the biggest criminals, to end the wars, to move the spending from the military to human needs) is this. We demand the right to petition our governments for a redress of grievances.

That is the First Amendment right that is under assault.

The strength of the Declaration of Independence was the great number of grievances against King George. We have a great number of grievances as well, and if CNN doesn't have time for them, well, it can lengthen its sound bytes. Our demands are not going to shrink except by being satisfied.

Encampments can, with some difficulty, serve as bases for nonviolent action and as community gathering places and providers of community services. If done right, aiding the homeless, the hungry, and those in need of medical care can strengthen occupations that may very well turn out to be permanent.

But the dominant focus should be on nonviolent resistance. Let's not just do theater or spectacle. Let's not just get in the way of commuters and others in the 99%. Let's get out of the streets and into the suites. Let's shut down offices.

And, while the focus on the government's funders, handlers, and lobbyists is very useful, I'd like to see more focus on government. I do not mean working with or through government. I mean resisting it, interfering with it, preventing its operations, shutting it down. The 1% is represented, and the rest of us are not. Let's put a halt to those operations and insist on representative ones.

If occupations end anywhere, they should not be ended by police or the media but by a transition to other tactics that appear more useful in that time and place, and those other tools should be up and running first before any occupation is phased out.

Where did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was it when I returned to my peaceful new home in Oslo and deleted an email invitation to hear Newt Gingrich lecture Norwegians on the American election? (Yes, even here.)

I don't know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or what it means. So I've got no point -- only a lot of anxiety. I usually write about the problems of the world, but now I've got one of my own. They evidently think I'm a terrorist.

That is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a faceless, acronymic government agency.

It all started with a series of messages from my bank: Citibank. Yeah, I know, I should have moved my money long ago, but in the distant past before Citibank became Citigroup, it was my friendly little neighborhood bank, and I guess I'm in a rut. Besides, I learned when I made plans to move to Norway that if your money is in a small bank, it has to be sent to a big bank like Citibank or Chase to wire it to you when you need it, which meant I was trapped anyway.

So the first thing I noticed was that one of those wires with money I needed never arrived. When I politely inquired, Citibank told me that the transaction hadn't gone through. Why not? All my fault, they insisted, for not having provided complete information. Long story short: we went round and round for a couple of weeks, as I coughed up ever more morsels of previously unsolicited personal information. Only then did a bit of truth emerge.

The bank wasn't actually holding up the delivery of the money. The funds had, in fact, left my account weeks before, along with a wire transfer fee. The responsible party was OFAC.

Oh what? I wondered. OFAC. It rhymes with Oh-Tack, but you've got to watch how you pronounce it. Speak carelessly and the name sounds like just what you might say upon learning that you've been sucked into the ultimate top-secret bureaucratic sinkhole. It turns out, the bank informs me, that OFAC is a division of the U.S. Treasury Department that "reviews" transactions.

"Why me?" I ask. As a long-time reporter I find it a strange question, as strange as finding myself working on a story about me.

By way of an answer, the bank refers me to an Internet link that calls up a 521-page report so densely typed it looks like wallpaper. Entitled "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons," it turns out to be a list of what seems to be every Muslim business and social organization on the planet. That's when I Google OFAC, go to its site, and find out that the acronym stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Its mission description reads chillingly. It "administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States." And it turns out to be a subsidiary of something much bigger that goes by the unnerving name of "Terrorism and Financial Intelligence."

Off With Her Head

Whoa! Perhaps it doesn't help, at this moment, that I've just been reading Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, the scary new book by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin about our multiple, overfed, overzealous, highly-classified intelligence agencies, staffed in significant part not by civil servants but by profit-making private contractors. Suddenly, I feel myself in the grip of the national post-9/11 paranoia that hatched all that new "security." (And you, too, could find yourself in my shoes fast.)

I check OFAC's list more carefully. It's in a kind of alphabetical order, but with significant incomprehensible diversions -- and if my name is there, I sure can't find it. Since I've spent most of the last decade working with international aid organizations as well as reporting from some of the more strife-ridden lands on the planet, including Afghanistan, the only thing I can imagine is that maybe all those odd visas in my fat passport raised a red flag somewhere in Washington.

Next, I search for the name of my Norwegian landlady. Did I say that the wired funds that never arrived were meant to pay her my rent? She's in India, a volunteer health-care worker with Tibetan refugees, currently helping refurbish an orphanage for 144 kids. (What could be more suspicious than that?) I can't find her name either. No Anns or Heidis at all, in fact, among the raft of Mohammads and Abduls.

Heidi is a Buddhist. I'm an atheist. Almost everybody on the list seems to be Muslim, including really dangerous-sounding guys like "Ahmed the Egyptian." But I guess that to a truly committed and well-paid terrorist hunter, we must all look alike.

I'm desperate to get the rent to Heidi so she can cover her own expenses as a volunteer; an international organization pays for the children's needs, but Heidi does the work. So I call the American Embassy in Oslo and speak to a nice young woman in the section devoted to "American Citizen Services." I tell her about me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian. She says, "I've never heard of such a thing. But there are so many of these intelligence offices now, I guess I'll be hearing these stories more often." (Maybe she's been reading Top Secret America, too.)

She takes it up with her superiors and calls me back. The Embassy can't help me, citizen or not, she says, because they don't handle money matters and have nothing to do with the Treasury Department.

"What? The State Department doesn't deal with the Treasury?"

"No," she says, "I guess not."

Perhaps since I last paid attention the Treasury stopped being considered part of the government. Maybe it now belongs to Lockheed Martin.

At least the State Department has some compassion left in it. If I'm really destitute, she assures me, the Embassy might be able to give me a loan to pay for a plane ticket that would get my two cats and me back to the States. I guess it doesn't occur to her that under the circumstances I might feel more secure in Norway.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Still, all I want to do is clear up this mess, so I put my head in the lion's mouth and send an email directly to OFAC. I tell them that I'm in Norway for the year on a Fulbright grant as a researcher -- that is, as part of an international exchange program founded by a U.S. Senator and sponsored by the U.S. Government, or at least one part of the State Department part of it. Among my informal responsibilities, I add, is to be a goodwill ambassador for the United States, but I'm finding it really hard to explain to Norwegians that I can't pay my rent because a bunch of terrorist-trackers in the pay of my government have made off with the money and left nothing behind but a list of Muslim names.

Remarkably quickly OFAC itself writes back, giving me the creepy feeling that it was lurking behind the door the whole time. It is sorry that I am "frustrated." It will help me, but only if I supply a whole long list of information, mostly the same stuff I have already provided three times to the bank, the same information the bank later said wasn't the issue after all. (Still later, the bank would say that I had given not too little information, but too much.) I send the requested tidbits back to "Dear OFAC Functionary or Machine as the case may be."

Two days later comes another message from OFAC, this time signed by "Michael Z." Like Afghans, or spies, he evidently has only one name, but my hopes that he might be an actual person inexplicably rise anyway -- only to sink again when he claims OFAC needs yet more information. All this so that Michael Z., presumed person, may help me "more effectively." (More than what, I wonder?) He is, he insists, trying to locate my money with the help of my bank, which by the way is now blocking me from seeing information about my own account online.

It seems odd to me that this top-secret office of Financial Intelligence somehow can't manage to lay hands on the money it snatched from me, but what do I know? I'm just a citizen.

Then -- are you ready for this? -- comes what should be a happy ending. A message from the bank tells me that the money has slipped through after all, and sure enough there it is at last in a Norwegian bank, only a month late. I won't be evicted after all, and Heidi will make sure those Tibetan kids get some fresh fruit and brand new bright green curtains.

Still, this is not a cheery story. So I have to send my apologies to the long-dead Senator J. William Fulbright: I'm sorry indeed that certain changes in the spirit and operations of the United States have occurred since that day in 1948 when you launched your farsighted program of grants to encourage open international educational and cultural exchange. And I apologize that some of those changes may have temporarily cramped my style as a goodwill ambassador; I'll try to get back on the job if I can just figure out what hit me.

Was this all simply a mistake? A technical glitch? An error at the bank? I'd like to think so, but what about that list of "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons"? Why was I directed to that? And what about Michael Z., who presumably is some kind of intelligence analyst at OFAC and who, when last heard from, was still seeking information and trying to find the money?

A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe "that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation."

Right now the weaponized Keynesians are out in full force - which makes this a good time to see what's really going on in debates over economic policy.

What's bringing out the military big spenders is the approaching deadline for the so-called supercommittee to agree on a plan for deficit reduction. If no agreement is reached, this failure is supposed to trigger cuts in the defense budget.

Faced with this prospect, Republicans - who normally insist that the government can't create jobs, and who have argued that lower, not higher, federal spending is the key to recovery - have rushed to oppose any cuts in military spending. Why? Because, they say, such cuts would destroy jobs.

Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because "more spending is not what California or this country needs." But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon - now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee - warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.

Oh, the hypocrisy! But what makes this particular form of hypocrisy so enduring?

First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn't a morality play: spending on things you don't like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges?

John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious "preference for wholly 'wasteful' forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict 'business' principles." Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like the promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, "Solyndra! Waste!" Spend money on a weapons system we don't need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition.

To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting the private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again.

But there are also darker motives behind weaponized Keynesianism.

For one thing, to admit that public spending on useful projects can create jobs is to admit that such spending can in fact do good, that sometimes government is the solution, not the problem. Fear that voters might reach the same conclusion is, I'd argue, the main reason the right has always seen Keynesian economics as a leftist doctrine, when it's actually nothing of the sort. However, spending on useless or, even better, destructive projects doesn't present conservatives with the same problem.

Beyond that, there's a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence.

Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street's whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power - so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it's being used to defend lucrative contracts.

I had the honor of talking with Cindy Sheehan tonight, recording an interview for her radio show, which I believe will air on Sunday. She made mention of the "police riot" -- as she aptly phrased it -- in Oakland Tuesday night, as a Democratic administration moved in with gas and other weapons of war to clear the streets of American citizens taking part in the Occupy movement.

Ms. Sheehan also noted the fact that the Occupy movement's terminology about "the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent elite" is not entirely accurate; far too many of the 99 percent are serving as willing tools of the 1 percent -- in the police forces, in the media, even in the general public, where you can always find plenty of people eagerly genuflecting to the high and mighty, even as they and their own families and communities sink deeper into the mire.

The Oakland debacle is a prime example of this, as cops -- putative public servants whose pay scales put them deep into the 99 percent -- waded into the Occupy citizens, breaking heads and driving away the very people trying to stand up for their interests.

The New York Times reports on one victim of these first strike-backs by our panicky overlords. And he is a most telling victim indeed: a military veteran, who had served two tours in the imperial war of aggression in Iraq, then turned against the War Machine and joined that stalwart band of humanity's patriots, the Iraq Veterans Against the War: (See original for links and video.)

Two veterans groups say that a protester who was badly wounded in Oakland on Tuesday night is a former marine who is now hospitalized with a fractured skull.

According to Iraq Veterans Against the War, the protester, Scott Olsen, is a member of their group who left the Marines in 2010, after serving two tours in Iraq. In a statement, the group's executive director Jose Vasquez, claimed that Mr. Olsen "sustained a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating in an Occupy Oakland march," on Tuesday night. Mr. Vasquez added that Mr. Olsen, a systems network administrator in Daly, Calif. "is currently sedated at a local hospital awaiting examination by a neurosurgeon."

A series of bloody photographs that appear to show Mr. Olsen after he was wounded were posted on the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center's site, Indybay.org. Those images show that Mr. Olsen was wearing a brown military shirt with his last name on the front. Jay Finneburgh, the photographer who shot the images of Mr. Olsen, wrote on Indybay: "This poor guy was right behind me when he was hit in the head with a police projectile. He went down hard and did not get up. The bright light in the second shot is from a flash-bang grenade that went off a few feet from us. He looks like he might be a veteran. he was eventually taken to highland hospital." ....

Occupy Oakland protesters after their camp was destroyed by Oakland police along with ten neighboring police departments. Several hundred protesters regrouped at the intersection of 14th and Broadway where police tried dispersing the crowd with tear gas, flash bang rounds, rubber bullets and bean bag shots.

The national standoff between authorities and protesters in the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement has reached a new and dangerous level of tension and violence.

At first glance, it looked like something out of Pink Floyd's film 'The Wall': menacing images of creatures in gas masks swarming toward the camera under a dark and forbidding sky. This was no dystopian fantasy, however; these were members of the Oakland police department charging into a group of protesters behind a wall of tear gas, flash-bang bombs, rubber bullets and bean-bag projectiles. The police bull-rushed these unarmed protesters with the intention to do violence, and violence is exactly what they did.

As of this writing, one woman is known to have been seriously injured when a flash-bang grenade went off right by her head. She was seen being carried away unconscious from the scene of the police riot by other protesters. Anther known injured protester has a name, and a face, and a record of service to his country. Scott Olsen, a Marine veteran of two Iraq tours, was participating in the Occupy Oakland protest when he was shot in the head by a 'less-than-lethal' police projectile, suffered a fractured skull, and was taken to the hospital in critical condition. His condition has since been upgraded to fair.

Welcome home, Marine. Thank you for your service to your country, but since you dared to exercise your First Amendment right to peaceable assembly, here's a cracked head for your trouble. And you thought Iraq was dangerous.

According to Oakland officials, the justification for this eight-hour-long explosion of force was that the area being occupied by protesters had become unsanitary, and that people were being raped within the camp zone. This was news to those who had been peacefully occupying the space in front of Oakland's city hall. It sounded suspiciously familiar to some last-decade claims about weapons of mass destruction being justification for a different burst of violence, and smells just as bad. The extreme nature of this police action might have had more to do with the fact that the protester's camp was unofficially named Oscar Grant Plaza, after the unarmed citizen who was murdered in 2009 by BART transit police, an incident that was caught on camera and broadcast to the world. Maybe the Oakland police did not like the reminder, and so swung their truncheons with an excess of vigor.

This is not the first example of excessive violence being directed at protesters in the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement. A number of incidents directed at unarmed, non-resisting protesters in New York City have been documented in detail, and in one case, an official inquiry into one NYPD officer's use of pepper spray is ongoing. The scene that played out in Oakland could very well have taken place several days ago in New York, had Mayor Bloomberg not made the wise, last-minute decision to back down from his demand that Liberty Park be cleared of protesters so it could be "cleaned." A number of protesters were injured by police in San Francisco and Denver, as well.

What happened in Oakland in the hours between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, however, is a definite escalation of tensions between protesters and authorities, and seems to indicate those authorities are edging closer and closer towards unleashing the dogs of war on people who offer no violence and pose no threat to anyone other than the financial power-brokers who have so thoroughly ravaged this country's future.

It goes without saying that not every person participating in these national actions are docile lambs; every movement, no matter its political denomination, is going to have its share of idiots and adrenaline-junkies. Within the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement, however, these types of people make up so small a fraction of the main as to be negligible...but they do offer authorities a nice excuse to bulldoze the whole movement, and it makes you wonder how many of these so-called agitators are running around causing trouble with a badge in their back pocket. Beyond agitators, there is the simple fact that not everyone is going to react like Gandhi when they get gassed, pepper-sprayed, flash-bombed, clubbed and shot with projectiles for peacefully assembling to point out a grievous wrong.

'Occupy Wall Street' is about saying "No."

"No" to institutionalized greed of such vast width and breadth that it plunders our country even as it smiles around a mouthful of filet mignon.

"No" to the ocean of corporate cash that drowns our democracy.

"No" to rewarding the failure of frauds who proudly carry the banner of capitalism even as they enjoy the galloping socialism of the government bailout.

"No" to those who refuse to hire new employees because they want to screw over the economy and remove a president they don't like. But it is also about so much else.

The 'Occupy' movement is as diverse and multifaceted as the cities and towns where it has been happening. More often than not, local issues are at the forefront of the protester's concerns; Wall Street is local for New York City, but in Oakland, the protest has been geared more toward halting austerity measures and the closures of schools and libraries…and, yes, police violence. Yet even as every 'Occupy' community has its own set of priorities, it is all part of a single continuum, as the issues being protested all stem from the same core concerns that crashed the economy, and created the movement, in the first place.

'Occupy Wall Street' is not about getting into a public crunch with cops over whether or not tents should be allowed in a public park. Rather than react with violence to people who are sacrificing themselves to point out what has gone so terribly wrong with the America we all love, these authorities should take a step back and encompass the awesome fact that such a movement has become so very necessary in the first place.

They should remember that violence is the last refuge of the desperate, that violence directed towards these protests will only make them stronger, and will put a big, bloody underscore beneath their efforts. Every punch thrown by a police officer, every protester clubbed or gassed or bombed or shot down with a riot-control projectile, only proves the point of that protester, and invigorates the entire movement.

They should remember that this is the year 2011, and every single person gathered at these protests has a phone with a camera that will make any unnecessary or egregious act of official violence an instant media sensation. These authorities are not working in the dark, not by a long chalk. One protester with a steady hand will make an over-the-top cop famous in all the wrong ways in exactly as much time it takes to read this sentence. Enough footage like that, and matters will escalate quickly indeed. The whole world is, in fact, watching.

If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead, victories don't come quickly, the Occupy protests could mark a significant moment in American history.

I've never seen anything quite like the Occupy movement in scale and character, here and worldwide. The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that's already coming.

That the Occupy movement is unprecedented seems appropriate because this is an unprecedented era, not just at this moment but since the 1970s.

The 1970s marked a turning point for the United States. Since the country began, it had been a developing society, not always in very pretty ways, but with general progress toward industrialization and wealth.

Even in dark times, the expectation was that the progress would continue. I'm just old enough to remember the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, even though the situation was objectively much harsher than today, the spirit was quite different.

A militant labor movement was organizing, the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and others, and workers were staging sit-down strikes, just one step from taking over the factories and running them themselves.

Under popular pressure, New Deal legislation was passed. The prevailing sense was that we would get out of the hard times.

Now there's a sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. This is quite new in our history. During the 1930s, working people could anticipate that the jobs would come back. Today, if you're a worker in manufacturing, with unemployment practically at Depression levels, you know that those jobs may be gone forever if current policies persist.

That change in the American outlook has evolved since the 1970s. In a reversal, several centuries of industrialization turned to de-industrialization. Of course manufacturing continued, but overseas, very profitable, though harmful to the workforce.

The economy shifted to financialization. Financial institutions expanded enormously. A vicious cycle between finance and politics accelerated. Increasingly, wealth concentrated in the financial sector. Politicians, faced with the rising cost of campaigns, were driven ever deeper into the pockets of wealthy backers.

And the politicians rewarded them with policies favorable to Wall Street: deregulation, tax changes, relaxation of rules of corporate governance, which intensified the vicious cycle. Collapse was inevitable. In 2008, the government once again came to the rescue of Wall Street firms presumably too big to fail, with leaders too big to jail.

Today, for the one-tenth of 1 percent of the population who benefited most from these decades of greed and deceit, everything is fine.

In 2005, Citigroup, which, by the way, has repeatedly been saved by government bailouts, saw the wealthy as a growth opportunity. The bank released a brochure for investors that urged them to put their money into something called the Plutonomy Index, which identified stocks in companies that cater to the luxury market.

"The world is dividing into two blocs, the plutonomy and the rest," Citigroup summarized. "The U.S., U.K. and Canada are the key plutonomies, economies powered by the wealthy."

As for the non-rich, they're sometimes called the precariat, people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. The "periphery" however, has become a substantial proportion of the population in the U.S. and elsewhere.

So we have the plutonomy and the precariat: the 1 percent and the 99 percent, as Occupy sees it, not literal numbers, but the right picture.

The historic reversal in people's confidence about the future is a reflection of tendencies that could become irreversible. The Occupy protests are the first major popular reaction that could change the dynamic.

I've kept to domestic issues. But two dangerous developments in the international arena overshadow everything else.

For the first time in human history, there are real threats to the survival of the human species. Since 1945 we have had nuclear weapons, and it seems a miracle we have survived them. But policies of the Obama administration and its allies are encouraging escalation.

The other threat, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps to do something about it. The United States is taking steps backward. A propaganda system, openly acknowledged by the business community, declares that climate change is all a liberal hoax: Why pay attention to these scientists?

If this intransigence continues in the richest, most powerful country in the world, the catastrophe won't be averted.

Something must be done in a disciplined, sustained way, and soon. It won't be easy to proceed. There will be hardships and failures, it's inevitable. But unless the process that's taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world continues to grow and becomes a major force in society and politics, the chances for a decent future are bleak.

You can't achieve significant initiatives without a large, active, popular base. It's necessary to get out into the country and help people understand what the Occupy movement is about, what they themselves can do, and what the consequences are of not doing anything.

Organizing such a base involves education and activism. Education doesn't mean telling people what to believe, it means learning from them and with them.

Karl Marx said, "The task is not just to understand the world but to change it. A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you'd better try to understand it. That doesn't mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that's helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you're trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.