We Win When We Live Here: How Occupiers Are Standing Up Against Foreclosures and Evictions

That afternoon, 65-year-old Bertha Garrett lay down on the floor in front of the office of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company, and refused to leave until the bank agreed to negotiate her eviction. The next day, the Garretts’ lawyer received a call from Mellon Trust’s lawyers asking the family “to call off the dogs.” Less than a month later, Bertha Garrett signed papers to buy back her home for $12,000.

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Lest I be considered anti-Occupy, allow me to offer a link to a report, which describes one way in which I think the movement can and does make a real, positive difference.

My only source of ambivalence where Occupy are concerned, is the movement's use of centralised tactics; when they go into the central business district of a city as a singular group, and are very predictably attacked by the police.

SKYNET was built and designed around large scale engagements, namely how to defend America from domestic attack and how to defend Europe from Soviet invasion. However, It couldn't handle small guerilla conflicts and Connor understood that this was SKYNET's one weakness which could be exploited from the start.

SKYNET was built to handle large scale mechanized and nuclear conflicts of a conventional strategic or tactical nature but Connor and the Resistance operated in small unit tactics, cell structures and guerilla warfare. It was evident from the movies and the books that SKYNET had to adapt to the tactics used by Connor and that it did so by a learning process, having to adjust and change its programming to accommodate and compensate for Connor's tactics.

Large scale standing armies vanished almost instantly on Judgment Day and there just wasn't enough logistics support left intact to reform those armies should anyone be around who could direct them. Connor understood that SKYNET could counter any military operation that was large scale and mechanized. If Connor assembled a standing army and tried to attack somewhere, SKYNET would probably just nuke that standing army with a tactical device ... or a strategic device, if the standing army was big enough and stupid enough to gather for too long in one place at one time.

Nuclear devices are the ruin of large scale standing armies and the only reason that large scale standing armies are not nuked is because there are consequences to the national power that would drop the nuke. After Judgment Day, SKYNET is the only power left that has access to nukes and it is, for the most part, immune to their use. It doesn't mind dropping more nukes if it will take out Connor or any of his forces and if the Resistance is foolish enough to try to launch a nuke at SKYNET, then SKYNET would just burn the nuke out of the air or probably use an orbital asset to cook the ICBM in the silo (along with any human operators) before it could ever complete the launch sequence.

The point is that in the future, after Judgment Day, the only side in the conflict who will have nukes will be SKYNET (with the odd nuke appearing from time to time in Resistance inventory) and SKYNET won't care about using those nukes with the exception being that it won't use nukes on targets that are too small to warrant a nuke being used. In other words, SKYNET isn't going to use a jack hammer to hunt ants. Connor knew this so he kept his "army" small, dispersed in groups and cells, in sizes that were too small to warrant a tactical or strategic nuclear response.

No, Connor understood that if he kept his forces small and always on the move, if he used guerilla tactics, if he used hit and run tactics, he could force SKYNET to waste valuable resources and irreplaceable time rearranging its core logic structure to compensate for Connor's behavior and that while It was having to reconfigure and compensate to a type of combat that It had not been intended for, Connor could use that confusion to win some early victories ... key victories and lock steps in what he understood would for the most part be a war of attrition. Connor forced SKYNET to fight humanity on humanity's terms.

-- Christopher T. Shields

If Occupy are going to be effective, they have to decentralise. That means going into individual suburbs and towns; spreading out, and making themselves less visible targets. It means doing things like the foreclosure initiative, and working with groups like Food Not Bombs; but also, if possible, doing that below the radar.

I feel, truthfully, that Occupy's single greatest weakness is actually a desire for visibility. Occupy want to be seen; they want to be on every newspaper front page and TV set. It is that fact, which leads them into conflict with the system on the system's own terms, and as a result, the system wins.

There needs to be a major adoption both of guerilla organisational tactics, and focusing on doing things which will earn them public good will, rather than a desire for punkish, black bloc type engagements with the police.