by Nicole Capobianco

As a member of Occupy Wall Street since its beginning 7 months ago, I have been doing the balancing act between being enrolled as a full time student and being an activist. I find myself to be a small but important part of a much larger collective, one in which I believe in wholeheartedly. So what do you believe? Most of my classmates seem shockingly apathetic these days. Meanwhile, I’m keeping track of the latest right we’ve lost, the newest surveillance technique that is being used, and how the illusion of freedom melts away into an ugly reality. With that ugliness also comes my individual political will to act against injustice and instigate change for the betterment of society.

I have 25 hours of class a week. That’s 8 classes and 18 credits this semester. The work for those classes is an additional 25 hours, and my job takes up between 14-20 hours a week. Put that together and you quickly realize that even eating and sleeping healthily takes a hit from all of this activity. The rest of my time since September has been devoted to furthering the Occupy movement in various ways, as this cause has become a huge part of me. I therefore decided to compile some advice for my fellow students, in the hopes that they will use this as a tool to engage in activism while still keeping up with their commitment to academics.

The core of time management has been balance. When I began this journey in September, I had already chosen my semester’s schedule and my work schedule. Needless to say, it didn’t play to my advantage. I was doing too much, and I ended up being sick three times in a three month period. Winter break approached and I changed my schedule to one that would work best to accommodate my activism. I started cooking my food again instead of ordering out. I started to use my weekends as a time of flexibility to do school work, freelance work, or movement work. I told myself I wouldn’t miss class time to protest, realizing that I had been locked into mortgaging my future through loans that brought me to school. It sometimes seems like school is irrelevant when thinking about revolution, but this is my reality and so balance became an important part of how I manage to take the streets. And, hey, I still made the dean’s list!

The second way to be a productive student and activist is to treat campus as if it is an outreach hub. Students have a vested interest in the issues of Occupy Wall Street, even though many of them don’t know it. It’s about each person realizing that there are various things that oppress them, and that they have a stake in the future of this movement. Many students live in a bubble, with thoughts such as “I still have two more years till I graduate and have to get a job” and “This education will give me the connections and skills to pay off these loans easily” being paramount in their minds.

When challenged about Occupy, others say stuff like “My parents paid for my education upfront so I don’t have any loans to worry about.” Or, my favorite, “My parents are part of the 1%, and protestors don’t know what they are protesting about.” Whether it is subtle or loud, I can find one thousand and one ways to loop the conversation back into one about the various issues contained within Occupy and the general importance of dissent within groups of young people, like us, students.

One of the most important things you can do as a student activist is to be honest with your professors. You would be surprised how many of them will support you, even if you are involved in political actions that do not align with their personal politics. If you plan on going to an action that has the possibility of arrest, contact your professors beforehand – and ideally in person. Explain to them that you are going to the action because it is something you believe in and because it is your right to do so, and if an assignment is due, let them know that you have a classmate ready who can present your work so it is not late.

The professors that I have approached have been overwhelmingly positive with words of encouragement and support. When Liberty Plaza was evicted and I was out all night, I texted my professor at about 8 AM to let him know that I wouldn’t make my 9.30 AM class. He told me to simply get some sleep. Teachers are part of the 99% too, and they often respect your right to redress your grievances – and that you’re doing something for the greater good – even if it’s technically inconsistent with the rules of their higher education establishment.

Overall, the best advice I can give is to focus on the things that you can do. You could spend all day making up a list of things you can’t accomplish and things that can’t change, but your willingness to act will make a difference in the struggle. Know your power as a student, as someone who made the conscious choice to learn, and as someone who knows that education is a right of all human beings. Don’t wait until later. Later comes a full time job, more commitments, relationships, more excuses to justify apathy and indifference. Most importantly, do not be afraid.

On May Day I will be on strike during one of my final exams, and later that night when my 5 PM till midnight work shift is due to begin. We run the world that they own, and they enslave us with debt. As a student it is depressing to think that I haven’t spent one day of my adult life without negative dollar signs above my head. We have the power to change these structures. Join me, rise up, and occupy everything!

Nicole Capobianco is a freelance photographer and web designer, facilitator of the Radical Education Collective, and a student at the Pratt Institute seeking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. She considers herself a collaborator with an aesthetic eye for composition and design. Nicole is an artist, a thinker, and a revolutionary who has been involved with Occupy Wall Street since day one. She enjoys reading, dialogue, good food, making art, and being by the ocean. Her photography can be seen on her website: nicolecapobianco.com/. Her Twitter handle is: @nbcapobia

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by Blogbot

Since April 9, Occupy Wall Street protesters have been physically occupying Wall Street. Armed with sleeping bags and a copy of the 2000 Metropolitan Council Inc. v. Safir court ruling – which sets a precedent for legal overnight street vigils – protesters have been camping out on the sidewalk at the intersection of Broad Street and Wall Street, in the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Hall National Memorial, which stand cater-corner to one another.

With temperatures rising from nighttime lows of 43 °F earlier in the week to 66 °F on Sunday evening, sleeping outdoors has been transformed into a positively pleasant prospect, which no doubt has the NYPD on edge. As one protester put it when we visited last night, sleeping on the street under these balmy conditions was actually preferable to spending the night in the confines of her dank and dusty Brooklyn basement residence.

However, the increasingly idyllic vigil got a rude awakening at around 6 AM this morning, when the NYPD apparently decided to move in and remove the protesters – despite the fact that the law appears to be on their side in this instance. Indeed, campers had taken care to ensure they complied with guidelines suggested by the National Lawyers Guild. These included taking up no more than 50 percent of the pavement so as not to block it, and not utilizing any kind of cots or structures, which might easily attract the contention of authorities.

When we left the Wall Street “Sleep-In” at around 4 AM, the atmosphere was distinctly jovial and relaxed, with protesters noting that unlike the President they were actually making a positive difference as they slept. However, less than two hours later, the NYPD apparently broke up the OWS slumber party.

OccupyWallSt.org reports:

At least four people have been arrested and Occupiers are currently assembled on the steps of Federal Hall (which is under jurisdiction of National Parks police), where they are discussing whether or not to reject demands they submit to a daily permitting regime. Consensus at this point favors delaying until additional legal help arrives on scene. For the moment, National Parks police appear to be tolerating a limited Occupy presence on Federal Hall steps, but mass arrests may be imminent. A motion for an emergency injunction against NYPD disruption of our sidewalk protests on Wall Street was reportedly filed this morning.

And New York Magazine, which carried more detail on specific arrests, noted that:

Controlling the narrative seems important for the city in the wake of last fall’s turbulent clearing of Zuccotti Park: Stamping out this new trend before it grows — and gains widespread media attention — is ideal, lest an Occupy Wall Street renaissance seem possible to not just the protesters, but to the public. For the city, fighting a few demonstrators in court might be preferable to facing growing numbers of them on the streets again.

Photography: © Nicole Powers 2012

by Nicole Powers

“Presently analysing events of tonight at #OccupyLSX. Who needs sleep!” It’s 3:26 AM GMT on Tuesday, February 28, 2012, and John Cooper, Occupy London’s chief legal advisor is awake, on Twitter, and on the case following the movement’s eviction from their marquee St Paul’s Cathedral base.

The eminent barrister and Queen’s Counsel has worked tirelessly to keep the protesters in situ since the occupation began on Saturday, October 15, 2011. The battle the occupiers faced was made all the more complicated by the provenance of the site they were camping on, which straddles land owned both by the Church of England and by the City of London Corporation (a unique and ancient semi-private municipal authority which governs London’s square mile financial district).

When the first tent was pitched, even the most optimistic of Occupiers couldn’t have predicted the encampment would remain in tact over four months later, so Occupy London’s ultimate eviction from St. Paul’s can hardly be considered a defeat. An early attempt to remove protesters was thwarted when the Cathedral’s then Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser, recognized the occupiers’ right to protest peacefully and asked the police to leave. Fraser’s actions would ultimately lead to his resignation following some rather public infighting between Church officials with conflicting affiliations and agendas.

With the Church distracted by its own internal disharmony and facing a public relations nightmare if it litigated against members of the very congregation it was supposed to serve, the powers that be at St. Paul’s – at least publicly – stepped aside and let the City of London Corporation spearhead eviction efforts through the courts. Following a hearing before Christmas, the High Court ruled in favor of the City on January 18, 2012. The occupation was granted a stay of execution pending a possible appeal, however, on February 22, three Court of Appeal judges declined to give Occupy London protesters permission to do so, setting the stage for this week’s eviction.

SuicideGirls caught up with John Cooper by phone shortly before the final ruling came down. Having butted heads with the UK establishment throughout his career (notably frustrating the ruling class’s thirst for blood sport thanks to a fox hunting prohibition act he penned), Cooper says his raison d’être is representing individuals and groups of individuals against the power of the state. A series of cases brought against the Ministry of Defense on behalf of the families of soldiers who had died in the theater of war due to unconscionably inadequate equipment earned him the honor of being short-listed as Human Rights Barrister of the Year in 2009. More recently, Cooper again gained notoriety in the halls of power when he represented those seeking to open an inquiry into the mysterious death of David Kelly, a Ministry of Defense weapons inspector who had embarrassed his employers by pointing out inconsistencies in their report on Iraq’s WMDs (or lack thereof).

Here Cooper gives an account of Occupy London’s David vs. Goliath fight, and outlines the numerous victories they have chalked up in the face of defeat. He also pragmatically comments on the changes he’d like to see in the law to fortify the battered and beleaguered rights to assembly and free speech.

Read our exclusive interview with John Cooper QC on SuicideGirls.com.

by Nicole Powers

“Omfgomfgomfgomfgomfg you have no idea how amazing you are!!!!!” was the exact turn of phrase used by my Twitter friend @EisMC2 when I told her I’d just interviewed Little Brother author Cory Doctorow and had returned with a signed copy of the book for her. Indeed it was @EisMC2 and her fiancé @JackalAnon who first turned me on to Doctorow’s epic updated spin on George Orwell’s Big Brother vision, which was first published in 2007. Uncannily prophetic, the novel serves as a veritable playbook for the Occupy movement, and with online pranksters turned hacktivists as its heroic protagonists, it is also an inspirational work for many Anons (hence the need for at least five omfgs). Combining an action packed and V-relevant plot with a solid historical perspective on activism, in retrospect, Little Brother may be considered one of the great civil liberties texts of our time.

The math, science, and sociopolitical commentary spun into the prose of Little Brother is pure genius, while the story makes for a gripping reading experience. As @EisMC2 puts it, Doctorow has a knack “for distributing the #Truth in a manner everyone can understand.” For example, during an expository paragraph regarding a key plot point, Doctorow also manages to simply and concisely explain how Bayesian mathematics (which puts the spam in your filter) is being deployed in an unscientific way to find “statistically abnormal” people to put under the security microscope – irrespective of whether they’re actually likely to have done anything wrong. Even if advanced probability theory isn’t your thing, by the time you’ve finished Little Brother, you’ll have a deep understanding of how this kind of statistical analysis – which government agencies routinely rely on to make policy and find targets in the war of terror – can be misinterpreted and manipulated with chilling effect.

Though set in an unspecified near future, much of the fictional dystopian world Doctorow depicted when he wrote Little Brother five years ago is now a reality (such as the indefinite detention of US citizens without trial or due process). It’s a tale of terrorism, society’s overreation to it, the psychology of fear, and the erosion of our constitutional rights. It also contains many elements occupiers will be all too familiar with: protests, out of control cops, pepper spray, tear gas, smoke bombs, police brutality, and a biased and lazy media “reporting” on it all.

At the start of the year, having spent some quality time at OccupyLSX, I met up with Doctorow at his North London workspace. Surrounded by cool gadgets, toys, and all manner of geek memorabilia (such as an original 1973 set of D&D boxed game instructions), I chatted at length with the author, digital rights champion, and Boing Boing co-editor about Little Brother, its forthcoming sequel Homeland, the realities of Big Brother, and how to stay under the radar when living in a surveillance state.

Read our exclusive interview with Cory Doctorow on SuicideGirls.com.

For more on Cory Doctorow visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.

A staged version of Little Brother by The Custom Made Theatre Co. is currently playing through February 25 in San Francisco. Visit Custommade.org for full details.

by David Seaman

SG political contributor David Seaman is in New York this week. When he asked if there was anyone we’d like him to chat to, the first name that came to mind, without hesitation, was Patrick Bruner from Occupy Wall Street. We were first introduced to him last November at NYC’s New School, when he participated in a panel discussion alongside Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent William Greider, and Colorlines publisher Rinku Sen. The event, sponsored by The Nation and moderated by the magazine’s executive editor Richard Kim, was called Occupy Everywhere. It aimed to explore the new political paradigm brought about by Occupy, and the possibilities presented by the movement to redress the overbearing reach of corporate power.

Though the caliber of intellects assembled on the New School stage that evening was undeniably high, we were actually most impressed and inspired by what Bruner had to say. We are therefore thrilled that we got a chance to reconnect with him via Seaman and his video post above (which was produced with the help of Lindsey June Miller). We have a feeling we’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more from Bruner in the future, both as a skilled orator within this proudly leaderless movement, and as someone with great potential as a next generation politician.

During the course of their conversation, Seaman and Bruner discuss the misnomer that Occupy doesn’t have a message, how much of what those in the mainstream know about the movement is framed by just a handful of media conglomerates, and how the real issues are being buried by their propaganda. The pair also talk about the future of Occupy and some of the key agenda items the movement needs to bring to the fore – such as the fact that student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt, or that there are 24 foreclosed homes standing empty for every one homeless person in America.

We’ve also embedded the full Occupy Everywhere panel discussion below, which we highly recommend you view. – Nicole Powers, SG Ed.

David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and on his humble YouTube channel, DavidSeamanOnline. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.

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By 99Percent

It was a casual Sunday and I found myself walking through the local video game store. I’m always on the lookout for games that are influenced by real-world events, geopolitics or other revolutionary ideas as presented in digital form. While I’m still waiting for the ultimate game that portrays presidential elections, an upcoming release by a major global gaming studio has caught my eye and for possibly the wrong reasons.

Ubisoft is updating Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series with a new sequel in 2013. Only this time, the baddies aren’t mysterious investment bank-type Arabs pointing Kalashnikovs. After seemingly an entire generation of blowing up Muslims, we’re finally getting a reprieve from the barrage of first-person-shooters that portray all of the Middle East as though it were one big underground weapons market.

So who (or what) has become the latest enemy of the state to be deemed a necessary kill for Clancy disciples in the video game world?

It just might be the 99 Percent.

You knew this would happen sooner or later. According to early press reports and box art, the enemy of America now comes from within. Rainbow Six: Patriots is a squad-based game that paints those who fight for economic inequality as a terrorist threat.

Early simulated clips that may or may not make the final release are indeed astounding. The opening scene of the first working imagery officially released portrays a home invasion – complete with the physical assault of the mother of a newborn baby – as undertaken by a band of anti-corporate zealots. Here’s a snippet of dialogue from a YouTube preview as released by Ubisoft…

“You really did cash in on everyone else getting foreclosed didn’t you? Today, you’re going to make up for that…”

Wow. I guess we’ve all been waiting for a blockbuster shooter that paints the 1 percent as victims. Thanks Tom Clancy. If violence again rears it’s ugly head at future protests, I guess we’ll know who is throwing fuel on the fire.

For those that don’t feel like watching the preview footage, what unfolds then is an exercise in violence gone amok as an apparently American-born, kevlar-vest wearing terrorist known within the game as a “True Patriot” proceeds to strap an explosive device on a docile target. It all ends in more violence as the well-armed hero Rainbow Six team can’t seem to solve the bomb problem, so they throw the target off a bridge in New York City which may or may not be the George Washington.

Given that some consider video games like these to be military trainers, many of the people whose voices gave birth to the Occupy movement are likely to be revolted and disgusted that some of their protest messages may now be fodder for what could turn out to be a very violent and very scary simulation.

Worse, does this game further encourage the militarization of domestic policing with respect to the portrayal of anti-establishment protesters?

The “True Patriot” moniker given the American terrorists in this game seems like a mix of Tea Party and Occupy movements. Granted, the game is in very early in development, but this ripped-from-the-headlines approach should upset some of the 99 Percent who hold nonviolent civil disobedience to be one of the founding principles that helped shine a spotlight on a progressive voice of unity.

If the new terror threat is indeed an underclass emboldened by cries of “this is what democracy looks like,” we’re all going to be in a lot more trouble than we think. By the end of many of the Occupy encampments, some of the public opinion voiced against those protesting was clearly being molded by a media that sought to vilify the Occupy movement as a stinking underbelly that needed to be held under the boot of a police state.

If the next step is really to turn weapons – even the digital kind – upon this group, a new front has been opened up in an entertainment propaganda / information war that civic, cloud-based journalism may find impossible to counter.

Seems the 1 percent has quite a few tricks up their golden-cufflinked sleeves.

By Justin Beckner

The dawn of another brutal election year is upon us and the majority of the country has developed a feeling of distain for politics all together. Still, masses of protesters have flocked to the streets to speak out against corporate greed and corrupt government practices. Never has there been a better time for a band like Anti-Flag to make new record and gear up for another world tour.

Anti-Flag frontman, Justin Sane has relentlessly spoken out against injustice since he and his friends formed the band back in 1988. Sane has long been hailed as one of the most intelligent songwriters of our generation. While musically, Anti-Flag is a direct descendent of classic punk rock bands, lyrically they ring reminiscent of a Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg. Anti-Flag had a few minor hits with songs like “Protest Song” and “Turncoat” which could be heard being played at almost any protest demonstration during the Bush Administration. It is rather common to find Anti-Flag playing shows at protests. They recently played at an Occupy Wall Street Demonstration. Sane draws a lot of his songwriting topics from his experiences playing at and marching in these kinds of events.

Aside from his rigorous touring schedule with Anti-Flag, Sane has also put out three solo records (one full length and two EPs) and is in the process of putting together another album. In these solo records, he has found a freedom to pursue different musical directions – often this means falling back into acoustic music and dabbling in different genres. The light-hearted solo albums are a glimpse at the other side of the charismatic frontman.

In the following interview, Sane and I discuss the roots of his love of music and activism, the causes and effects of the Occupy Wall Street Protests, and the new Anti-Flag album due out this spring.

Justin Beckner: It seems to me that there are a lot of ideological similarities between traditional Irish music and punk rock music. You came from an Irish household, is that where your passion for music and social justice came from?

Justin Sane: Yeah, it really did. My dad is from Ireland and both of my mother’s parents are from Ireland so I am 110% Irish. My parents were both really involved in activism as a result of their Catholic upbringing. In Catholicism, there’s something called “Liberation Theology” and that’s the kind of theology that Jesus preached – that you should help out in your community and work with the poor and stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves or give a voice to those who don’t have a voice in the world. With the British occupation of Ireland for hundreds and hundreds of years, there’s always been that drive in the Irish people to work for their own liberation. I think that the idea of fighting for people who are oppressed was carried along with those who left Ireland. Those ideas have been well documented in Irish folk music which is something I grew up listening to and playing. My parents had nine kids because Catholics don’t use birth control. I was the youngest of the nine and we all played instruments. It was like our own version of The Pogues or Flogging Molly within our own family. I’m not Catholic myself, I’m not really religious, but I think that I was influenced by that Liberation Theology that my parents were so profoundly influenced by. They fought for civil rights and fought to make the environment clean for their kids.

JB: Were there any non-political bands that you were influenced by on a more technical level?

JS: Yeah, I mean I’ve always loved KISS. I thought they were really cool. I’m sure there were others – I listened to Jackson Browne a lot. I listened to much of the same music my older brothers and sisters listened to and a lot of it wasn’t political. The Beatles were a band that was unanimously liked by everyone in my family and they had their political songs and their non-political songs. So there was a lot of non-political music that I drew influence from.

JB: You’ve spent a fair amount of time at the Occupy Wall Street Protests. Do you think the message that is being sent by the protesters is getting through to those who need to hear it?

JS: I think it’s definitely getting through because the protesters are being addressed quite often with brutal physical force by a police force that has traditionally been used to work for the elite. I think what we have now is a police force that is propping up a corporatocracy. Let’s look at it from this perspective – if there were protests in North Korea where protesters were trying to make a statement by occupying a square in North Korea and the police came in a brutally beat people up and pepper sprayed them and hit them with non-lethal weapons, the State Department here in the US would be on Fox news decrying the authoritarian rulers of North Korea. But we have that exact same thing happening right here in a democracy where we supposedly have the right to free speech. We have peaceful protesters making a peaceful statement and they’re being beat down by police. I think that says something about the state of our nation and it says something about the concern that those in power have about a message like that being freely spoken. If they didn’t think that message was dangerous, they wouldn’t be sending the police out there to shut those people up. There’s a very clear and directed initiative to suppress that speech and I think that’s really tragic. I’m really proud of the people who are out there making that statement because it obviously needs to be made. People are waking up and realizing that the rich in this country have been taking advantage of the poor for a very long time. So, they’re waking up and making the statement that things in this country are very out of balance – in that respect I think it’s very important that statement be made.

JB: That sense of injustice and imbalance has certainly been getting much harder for people to ignore in recent years. The top 1% of Americans control 42% of the country’s wealth and assets. That’s a pretty staggering figure.

JS: Yeah it is and I think in America there’s a sense of fairness – that everybody has an opportunity to get ahead and that’s based on an assumption that there’s a level playing field that we all start out on. Now people are looking around and seeing that there isn’t a level playing field, things are vastly out of balance, and people with a lot of money are actually breaking the law in many cases and doing things that should be illegal to make more money – all this while the rest of us are just trying to scrape by. I think Americans are pretty fair minded – most people are just saying that they want a level playing field and that’s why we see a lot of protests popping up recently.

JB: Over the past couple weeks I’ve noticed major news networks belittling the protesters on Wall Street. How do you feel when you hear people say that the Occupy Protesters don’t know what they want?

JS: I think a lot of people have a hard time verbalizing it, but in their gut they know there’s something out of whack. That’s where I think the media does a really great disservice by putting out things like, “There’s these occupiers out there but they don’t know what they want.” Because the reality is that if you spent five minutes at any of the Occupy events and walked around and talked to some of the protesters, you’d very quickly find out that there are incredibly articulate people who can tell you exactly what they think the problem is, what should change, and they’d give you statistics to back it up. They’d tell you that the corporations have bought and paid for our politicians to the point that they don’t represent us anymore, they represent corporations, and we want corporate money out of politics so we can have our politicians back. Those are the messages that we don’t see on Fox or CNN. When I go to Occupy Wall Street, as I have a number of times in several different cities, I talk to people who are really articulate, and then I turn on the news and they’re interviewing some guy who can hardly talk and doesn’t seem to know why he’s there. It makes me wonder why the hell aren’t they running interviews with the people I talked to when I was there. But those people at the top of the food chain at Fox news and places like that don’t want a clear message coming out of there. They’re doing their best to make people look stupid but the amount of knowledgeable people down at these protests is unbelievable. I just wonder why we’re not hearing those voices on the news.

JB: With the dawn of another election year upon us I’ve got to ask, how do you think these protests are going to influence the elections in 2012?

JS: One thing that was really clever about the way the Occupy movement was structured was that there is no figurehead leading the movement. That’s a good thing because leaders can be coopted, they can be bought, they can be bribed, they can be stroked in different ways. The Occupy movement is a true democratic process and a true movement of the people. I think that politicians today are just too corrupt to bring this country back to some degree or normalcy. However they will do what they need to do to get reelected and in that sense the Occupy movement is a message of what the people want. It’s not a message of what the corporations want. Ultimately politicians have to bow to the will of the people, and little by little, as a result of the Occupy movement, we see that happening. So it’s a step in the right direction. I think that what the Occupy movement is going to do is change things on a broad scale and politicians in turn will be pulled in and forced to think about what the people want if they want to get elected.

It’s going to take time and it’s going to happen as a result of attitudes and ideas changing. One of those ideas that has to change is that we can have corporate money in politics – we just can’t. There are huge payoffs for these politicians. Say I get elected to the senate and I vote with a chemical company in my area even though I know it’s really bad for my constituents. I know that even if I get voted out of office the next term, I’ll still have a cushy job at that chemical company where I can use the friends I made in Washington to benefit my company. This is what happens over and over again. Our former senator or Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, who is running for president right now, is a poster child for this type of thing. Dick Cheney is another stellar example – he was with Halliburton, then in the Senate, went back to Halliburton, and then was vice president. That is how these corporations use their influence – what we have right now is not a democracy, it’s a corporatocracy and it needs to change. The Occupy movement gives me a lot of hope. I think people went to the ballot box expecting change from Barack Obama and they didn’t get it. They’re realizing that change isn’t going to come from the ballot box and they’re going to find a new way to move the country in a different direction – it’s really exciting and I feel optimistic for the first time in twelve years!

JB: Switching gears back to music, I’ve been told the new Anti-Flag album is in the mixing process right now. Do you have a title or a release date?

JS: Yeah we’re tentatively titling it The General Strike. A general strike is generally where a city or a country is shut down to make a point that progress will not move forward without the people’s labor. The UK had a massive general strike which wasn’t even mentioned in this country’s news. They shut the entire country down. The idea behind calling the new album The General Strike is that it’s a worldwide general strike and Anti-Flag is a band that is talking about unity between all people. I think there really is a group of people who have unified in this world around the idea of equality for all people – and that’s the concept that the title came from.

JB: A lot has happened in the world since your last album; is there any certain subject matter that you focused on with the writing of the new record?

JS: After going to a number of Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations and witnessing the recurring theme of police oppression and the masses of cops working as a tools for what I refer to as the corporate state, that was certainly on my mind when I was writing for the new album. Because I’ll tell you what, when you’ve had a billy club shoved in your face or been pepper sprayed or witnessed innocent people being beat down for absolutely no reason – the videos are on The Daily Show so you don’t have to look very hard to see it – it makes you angry. Especially when it happens to an old lady or people you know, and when you see this happening day after day to peaceful people who are just expressing their democratic right to free speech. So writing about police oppression was something that happened on this record as a result of that. I’ve been having a really hard time looking at police and feeling good about them. It’s really unfortunate because I have police officers in my family and when police do their job and serve their community and protect people, it’s really nice to see them. But we keep seeing over and over again police acting outside what their role is. It’s really enraging and it’s something I’ve been putting pen to paper about because that’s my way of dealing with it.

We’ve also been writing about the exciting events that have been happening around the world like the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the ousting of Moammar Gaddafi, and the changes happening in Saudi Arabia. And then we’ve got a song about skateboarding (laughs). There’s a general theme that the songs are about what’s going on in the world, but we like to have some fun too. It should be out sometime in the spring of 2012.

JB: There will be a tour ensuing the release of that album I’d imagine?

JS: Yeah, we’re looking at starting in Australia and then playing Indonesia for the first time which we’re pretty excited about. Then we’ll definitely be doing our dates in the states and the Europe. After that we’ll see what happens, were always looking forward to meeting new people, seeing new places, and experiencing new things.

JB: I also understand you’ve been writing some songs for a solo record. What do you get out of writing songs for a solo album that you don’t get from writing Anti-Flag songs?

JS: We had an idea when we started Anti-Flag that we wanted it to be a political punk rock band and when people started to follow the band that was the impression they got as well. When we stray from that formula people don’t accept it very well, some react pretty viscerally to it. On the record Bright Lights of America, which we released a few years back, we really tried to expand and go in some different directions and people either liked that about it or they hated it. [Instead of] trying to force people [to hear[ something that they don’t want from Anti-Flag, I write solo albums. With my solo albums, if I want to write about my cat or my girlfriend I can do that. With Anti-Flag I don’t feel free to write songs like that. Another thing is the ability to write different types of music. In my family we listened to so much music and it was so diverse that it almost makes more sense to come across me playing an acoustic guitar in an Irish pub than playing electric guitar in a punk rock band.

The solo albums give me a chance to do something else and that freedom is really exciting. It’s an opportunity for people to know the personal side of me. Sometimes in Anti-Flag people get to thinking that we’re just these serious political robots all the time – it’s kind of funny. Anyways, I’m hoping to get a solo album together in 2012.