Author: Rivera Sun

by Rivera Sun Occupy Radio interviewed reporter Kevin Gosztola on the NATO 3 trial, the surveillance state, the rise of counter-terrorism operations, and the use of terrorism law in relation to activists. Listen here: http://occupythemedia.podomatic.com/entry/2014-02-20T00_23_50-08_00 Cops need criminals. Otherwise, there’s no reason for police to exist. Likewise, counter-terrorism agencies need terrorists to justify the billions […]

I feel like shaking everyone and saying, don’t you get it? We don’t need a Movement of Movements – we are a movement of movements. My friends, we have been trapped in old dominant paradigm thinking. We have been steeped in warmongering, hierarchical, competitive, control-based mindsets since birth. We think we are lacking something, or […]

Is the NSA a secret admirer . . . or a stalker who needs a restraining order? After recording a dozen Love Letters to the NSA for Occupy Radio’s Valentine special, co-host Rivera Sun wrote down a letter of her own. Listen to the podcast.  Dear NSA, This is awkward. All these years, you’ve been […]

“Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” -Mahatma Gandhi While interviewing Jill Stein, Green Party Presidential Candidate in 2012, for the weekly Occupy Radio show that I co-host (listen here), it seems that she, like many of […]

Enough! Enough of this senseless criticizing of one another. A Dandelion Insurrectionist who is imprisoned and beaten by the police is no more revolutionary than the mother who gets up in the morning and feeds her child. We all have tasks that are imperatives of our times and we must do them with humility. Those […]

We wait . . . we wait for another scandal to validate our suspicions of corruption . . . as if the abuse of power is not enough to demand impeachment and reform. We wait for a courageous Thomas Jefferson to declare our independence . . . as if we did not already know the […]

Occupy Radio co-hosts Rivera Sun and David Geitgey Sierralupe interviewed Pancho Ramos Stierle on radical kindness, Little Revolutionary Gardens (Jardincitos Revolucionarios), and fearless love in East Oakland. Listen to the podcast here: http://occupythemedia.podomatic.com/entry/2014-01-29T23_42_56-08_00 “If you want to be a rebel, be kind.” – Pancho Ramos Stierle Facing the severity of corporate-political domination and the wanton […]

Occupy Radio co-host Rivera Sun reflects on interviewing fugitive philosopher Katherine Ann Power In the late 1960’s, Katherine Ann Power engaged in an armed robbery to finance a revolutionary movement to overthrow the US Government. While leaving the bank, one of the men in her group shot and killed a police officer, Walter Schroeder. Katherine […]

“We don’t have a fracking problem. We have a democracy problem.” – Thomas Linzey, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Every week on Occupy Radio, my co-host and I discuss the issues of our times: corporate politics, economic injustice, environmental destruction, the police state, government surveillance, and more. Over the episodes, one thing has become clear: […]

We have been losing ground. Corporate politics has invaded many sectors of our lives. In times of tactical retreat (in preparation for later advances), the military uses a tactic called blowing up the armory to describe a situation in which they will destroy any unsecured weapons and munitions to prevent their opponents from capturing them and using […]

There is a formula for revolution. The corporate-political elite are following it to perfection: steal the money, corrupt the power, imprison the people, starve the children, poison the water, pillage the resources, enslave the workers, eviscerate justice, stalk the citizens, stifle dissent, and inject terror in the bloodstream of society. Massive unrest and movements for […]

The Love-In-Action Network welcomes you! Welcome! We are a network of locally organized, interconnected groups dedicated to nonviolent action. The Love-In-Action Network empowers citizens through education, discussion, and action, providing opportunities to collectively and individually study nonviolent action, and preparing for the necessary struggle to ensure our health, well-being, and a future for humanity. “You are […]

There are subjects that break my heart and pull my pen toward them like gravity. The prison system is one of them. As a social protest novelist, I took my first novel, Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars, into the human impact of high incarceration rates and the policy effects of the private prison industry’s […]

Wishful thinking and random action will not topple the corrupt and powerful collusion of extreme capitalism, the wealthy elite, and military force. For all the courage shown thus far by people across the country in demonstrating, petitioning, even throwing their bodies in the line of danger, I call upon an even greater courage now … […]

It is not enough to hurl your rage at tyranny . . . every bully knows how to dodge a hothead. Anger is the alcohol of emotions. We flush, courageous in its drunken heat, but our blows miss, we flail, and our opponent easily dispatches us. I’ve had my share of schoolyard skirmishes. I’ve been […]

“This country is ready to be reborn. Something fresh and new is fomenting in the fertile crumbling of the old.” – The Dandelion Insurrection Two years after the rise and demise of Occupy, we are still spinning around wondering what happened . . . and what comes next. The discussion runs in tail-chasing circles so […]

In other years, Thanksgiving has found me ranting about Black Friday’s commercialization of greed during a holiday of gratitude. I have written historical exposes of the historical Thanksgiving and the genocide of the native tribes. I have explored the inner convolutions of emotions that come along with being an American. This year, I chose to […]

Note: Usually this blog post features a companion article to our weekly Occupy Radio interview. This week, however, Radley Balko, senior writer and investigative reporter for the Huffington Post, hit upon a concept so powerful that, with all due respect, I had to detour from discussing his bestselling book about the militarization of our police […]

“Imagine!” Philippe Duhamel urges excitedly, “The natural gas industry is coming and instead of the usual blockade of activists, there could be a row of grannies in rocking chairs knitting!” The whole scene whips through my mind lightning fast: the police come to arrest the protesters. The grannies lock down, not to natural gas drilling […]

There is a despair that grips the heart as I watch them fall around me: the too-thin young mother looking for work; the pain-ridden woman, ill, with no healthcare; the husband without answers to his wife’s worried questions; the preacher who weeps as he prays for God’s help; the youth sentenced harshly in a mockery […]

“The Quakers read the Bible like Jesus intended, shared it with Tolstoy, who inspired Gandhi, who set the state for Dr. King. We’ve got a tradition and we all gotta learn it, study it, and walk in it all our days.” – The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun George Lakey was first arrested in the […]

by Rivera Sun Soft-spoken and humble is the new heroic. This realization hits me as I interview Jamila Raqib, the Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution. I find myself in awe of her living wisdom as my Occupy Radio co-host and I question her about the strategies of nonviolent struggle, the seminal writings of […]

(An article by Rivera Sun, written at the request of Khem Aryal as a guest post on his blog Red Stanza. Please visit his wonderful site, if you have a moment.) There is no safe route through these wild times we live in. The North Pole is a lake, Australia’s center bakes with heat, drought […]