Open Thread & News Round-Up: Debt Negotiations

Here's some of what I've been reading this morning...

We Are the 99 Percent.

Nathan Schneider in The Nation—Occupy Wall Street: FAQ.

Michael Scherer in Time—Occupy Wall Street: A Tea Party for the Left?

In its broadest outlines, this new outpouring of protest is driven by the same fuel that gave fire to the Tea Party: Anger at elites, a feeling of injustice, a concern about jobs, fear about the direction of the economy and a clear desire to take action. Whereas the Tea Party focused these furies on government, Occupy Wall Street focuses the fury on corporate America. It seems, quite simply, to be the left's answer to the right's size-of-government critique that has dominated national politics for the last two years. "If you are like me and you see the Tea Party on the television and the news all the time, and you wonder why the hell isn't there a radical left answer to the Tea Party, you should be here," says one participant, in a YouTube documentary of the Wall Street event, which is worth watching.

...No one knows what will happen next, but chances are better than even that more and more Americans will be taking an active role in making it happen. That is, after all, how politics works these days.

David Graeber, one of the initial organizers of the Occupy Wall Street protest: "In New York, according to law, any unpermitted assembly of more than 12 people is illegal in New York. Space itself is not an openly available resource. But the one resource that isn't scarce is smart people with ideas. So we're trying to reframe things away from the rhetoric of demands to a questions of visions and solutions."

Lee Fang at Think Progress—Top 5 Reasons Why The Occupy Wall Street Protests Embody Values Of The Real Boston Tea Party.

New York Times—Anti-Wall Street Protests Spreading to Cities Large and Small:

A loose-knit populist campaign that started on Wall Street three weeks ago has spread to dozens of cities across the country, with protesters camped out in Los Angeles near City Hall, assembled before the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and marching through downtown Boston to rally against corporate greed, unemployment and the role of financial institutions in the economic crisis.

...Publicity surrounding the recent arrests of hundreds in New York, near Wall Street and on the Brooklyn Bridge, has only energized the campaign. This week, new rallies and in some cases urban encampments are planned for cities as disparate as Memphis, Tenn.; Hilo, Hawaii; Minneapolis; Baltimore; and McAllen, Tex., according to Occupy Together, an unofficial hub for the protests that lists dozens of coming demonstrations, including some in Europe and Japan.

In the nation's capital, an Occupy D.C. movement began on Saturday, with plans to join forces on Thursday with a similar anticorporate and antiwar group, October 2011, for an encampment in a park near the White House.

Greg Sargent in the WaPo—White House on Occupy Wall Street: "We understand": "The story here is not what the White House said but that it was asked to weigh in on the protests at all—another sign of the remarkable speed with which it has grown from a crowd chanting at police two weeks ago."

Drew Grant in the New York Observer—Exclusive: Occupy Wall Street Activist Slams Fox News Producer In Un-Aired Interview [Video + Transcript].

The Guardian's live coverage is here.