I call us the Crash Generation. For many of us in our twenties, 2008 was a period awash in exhilarating highs and terrifying lows. The words “depression,” “economic crisis,” “mass layoffs,” and “foreclosures,” along with “hope,” “change,” and “Obama,” all clogged the headlines and made their way into whiskey-fueled party conversations. Washington and the media had never been so frank about the cataclysmic proportions of a financial crash. And a candidate had never kicked young voters into such high gear like Barack Obama, who seemed to reflect the seismic demographic shift our generation was heralding. The mythic American dream-bubbles were bursting for young people at the exact moment we had begun to wield our political influence. That second half of 2008 was our JFK assassination. Our Vietnam. Our Great Depression.

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One reason was the ambiguity of the legal situation: While public parks close by 12 p.m., Zuccotti Park was a public-private hybrid, owned by an investment firm, Brookfield Office Properties. Technically such “privately owned public properties” are accessible to the public twenty-four hours a day. Still, by our experience, the mere existence of such a law would have been of little relevance if the authorities decided they wanted to evict us anyway, but it allowed something of a fig leaf. But why did they even want a fig leaf?

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A new study from CUNY's Joseph A. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, based largely on a sample of protesters interviewed during a mass May Day rally last year, found that the majority of participants were white and well-educated (76 percent of respondents had a four-year degree). Two-thirds of Occupy protesters had professional jobs, the sociology study found, with nearly a third living in households with incomes of $100,000 or more. Meanwhile, nearly a third of the protesters had been laid off or lost a job and a similar number said they had more than $1,000 in credit card or student loan debt. A significant number of respondents were precariously or underemployed and 10 percent of respondents were unemployed and seeking work.

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David Graeber — of Occupy Wall Street fame — has written, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a grand intellectual project and a call for action. He investigates debt across time and across cultures and finds it to be a primary institution, preceding exchange, money and any notion of “the economy.” Debt is a building block for ever more elaborate social organization, because it creates fluid structures of subordination. Though in principle the sum of all debts should equal the sum of all credits, in practice debtors are many and creditors few. Today, there is growing concern about income inequality in America — but it is wealth inequality that captures the relation of debtors and creditors.

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According to FBI documents obtained through FOIA by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC) -- "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" -- produced a report specifically for the use of "the corporate security community" on the Occupy protests that aimed to shut down West Coast ports. DSAC also issued tips to corporate clients advising that they avoid "all large gatherings relating to civil issues." As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) put it, such documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

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The Partnership for Civil Justice received the records after a Freedom of Information Act request. They show that once again the agency used counterterrorism agents to track domestic activists -- like they have in the past with environmental, anti-poverty and animal rights groups.

The Times reports that:

The memo said agents discussed “past and upcoming meetings” of the movement, and its spread. It said agents should contact Occupy Wall Street activists to ascertain whether people who attended their events had “violent tendencies.”

The memo said that because of high rates of unemployment, “the movement was spreading throughout Florida and there were several Facebook pages dedicated to specific chapters based on geographical areas.”

The F.B.I. was concerned that the movement would provide “an outlet for a lone offender exploiting the movement for reasons associated with general government dissatisfaction.”

The records provide one of the first glimpses into how deeply involved federal law-enforcement authorities were in monitoring the activities of the movement, which is sometimes described in extreme terms.

An agency spokesman told the paper that “The F.B.I. recognizes the rights of individuals and groups to engage in constitutionally protected activity. While the F.B.I. is obligated to thoroughly investigate any serious allegations involving threats of violence, we do not open investigations based solely on First Amendment activity."

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I spent some time at one of these megastores last week, and what I really noticed were the kids. The best way to understand Christmas in modern America is to watch how children react to the intense marketing directed their way. Kids are the purest representation of our values, because they haven't yet learned to disguise their desires and feelings. They don't yet know they are being marketed to, they want what they want, and they are going to bug their parents to get it. In fact, piggybacking on innocence is a standard tactic in children's marketing, known as accentuating "the nag factor." But they also want to be adults, to help, to be taken seriously.

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Occupy Sandy’s story began in the hours just after the superstorm hit, when “a few of us occupiers were just texting each other at like 2 a.m. seeing how we could help,” recalls Bre Lembitz. A lanky 22-year-old whose blond curls are shaved close on one side of her head, Lambitz suggested bringing meals to the shore, and “everyone was totally down to do relief work.” So the next morning, she and a few others from Occupy Wall Street created an Occupy Sandy Twitter account and Facebook page, and headed down to Breezy Point with hot food, though they didn’t mention their affiliation to the residents of the relatively conservative community at the time. “It felt like people might not trust us to eat the food,” says Lambitz. “It was about helping the people—not pushing occupy values.”

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What we’re talking about is a broad, multi-year agenda to give America’s workers a living wage and voice on the job and to take on the continuing exclusion of workers of color, immigrants, and women from good jobs. The media may have discovered inequality last year with the surprise emergence of Occupy Wall Street, but in truth, there is a 30-year backlog of policies to fix the extreme maldistribution of wages and opportunity in the labor market.

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It's not incongruent.

The Rolling Jubilee -- borne of Occupy offshoot group Strike Debt -- is best considered one among many Occupy tactics that aim to challenge or disrupt our current socio-political economic conditions. And as far as tactics go, this one is pretty clever. The idea is this: Occupy plans to buy up distressed debt -- debt which is in default -- and then forgive it (or, "abolish" it, as the ever-dramatic Occupy parlance puts it). Banks sell on distressed debts at pennies on the dollar (since the debts are in default, they're not making money off them and prefer to get rid of them). There are a number of websites where anyone can go and then buy this discharged, cheap debt. So, you or I or Occupy could buy $16,000 worth of debt for just $500 and then either make a profit by recovering the difference or just cancel it. Occupy and Strike Debt plan to do the latter on a large scale.

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Since the setup of the "Occupy Sandy Relief NYC" Facebook page (which has accrued over 2,000 "likes") and the proliferation of the Twitter hashtag #SandyAid to spread information, on-the-ground work has begun. OWS has teamed up with environmental group 350.org (responsible for the Times Square "end climate silence" demo on Sunday) and disaster relief platform Recovers.org to coordinate efforts. They have established drop-off points throughout Brooklyn to collect items including clothes, candles, flashlights, batteries, water and food. The volunteers started in Manhattan's blacked-out Lower East side and have been moving through New York's five boroughs.

As Allison Kilkenny noted on her Nation blog:

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Witness this piece from Gothamist, in which a citizen sleuth checked out what was happening in parts of Downtown where the poorest residents live and wrote in with his findings:

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Still, we are at that point in the election cycle when some progressives have been busily listing what they despise about Democrats, going on to remind us how tired they are of lesser evils and how weary their hands grow from holding their noses.  In 2000 we were told how bad a campaign Al Gore ran, how soft he was on corporations, how little he did about climate change when he had the chance, and how pure of heart Ralph Nader was.  This year we are reminded that Barack Obama failed to close Guantánamo, kept the stimulus too small, hired Tim Geithner, dispatched drones, made up a kill list, and, like Mitt Romney, supports oil drilling and collects corporate dollars.

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So what is Burning Man like? It’s not special. It’s simply what happens when gearhead artists, new agers, and frat types get together to build resilience tech in the desert together. Badly. It is easy enough to describe in principle, but harder in practice.

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According to a report from The Daily, Occubaby, real name Tegan Kathleen Grodt, was born to Robert Grodt and Kaylee Dedrick on Sept. 28. Even in its first days, the littlest Occupier can represent -- The Daily noted that a onesie bearing the letters "Occupy Wall Street" was sent to the couple by the OWS Screen Guild.

Watch the infamous pepper spraying incident below, an unexpected start to love and a new little life:

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Images of "pepper-spray cop," campus police officer John Pike, blasting sitting demonstrators with orange pepper spray garnered viral attention. The district attorney determined Pike's behavior "not objectively reasonable," but did not seek criminal charges.

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Young claims that there's been multiple break-ins at his home, possibly by the nefarious forces of the Florida Consumer Action Network or the Occupy movement. He told  Craig Pittman of the Tampa Bay Times that he doesn't really know who's behind the break-ins, though he noted: "The Occupiers are after me."

Young believes that both FCAN and Occupy are "not happy" with him, after an incident where he was caught on video telling a constituent who asked him whether he'd support raising the minimum wage to "get a job." Both groups have denied involvement.

According to police, there's no evidence that there have been any break-ins:

From the Times:

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Now there's a story twist begging for inclusion in any Occupy screenplays (no doubt being penned): one of the pepper-sprayed women fell in love with the volunteer street medic who helped her that day, and they are expecting a baby.

As New York Times CityRoom editor Andy Newman reported:

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