Occupy Wall Street has grown from a very small protest this past summer, thanks in large part to a brutal over-reaction by New York City police. On September 1, a small, sort of pre-protest was held, to test how it would be to hold peaceful, legal protests by occupying public sidewalks 24 hours in New York City. The protesters encamped relying on a previous decision, METROPOLITAN COUNCIL, INC v. HOWARD SAFIR, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, et al., 99 F. Supp. 2d 438 (S.D. NY, 2000). Nine of the protesters were arrested when they refused to disperse. They videotaped the event, and I have to say the police were quite polite.

On September 17, Occupy Wall Street worked with US Day of Rage, which was, despite its name, launched a peaceful protest. In a well-planned and supported protest, the group organized an occupation of a growing swath of New York City to protest a variety of issues. The group has acted in a democratic fashion to allow the protesters to articulate what they think the protest is about, so the issues are sometimes shifting and sometimes murky. But most agree about the unequal distribution of wealth (”We are the 99″ is one common slogan, referring to 99% of the population in contrast to the 1% that has the vast majority of the wealth).

Eventually, a few of the New York City police did act brutally toward some of the protesters, and were caught on video. These reports came out on September 25, and galvanized the protests in New York and elsewhere. Suddenly, the protest seemed much more important.

Occupy Boston sprang up (and last night was rousted out of its expansion onto the Rose Kennedy Greenway by Boston Police). On their website, they claim that there are now 120 Occupy sites throughout the country. I know there is one in Atlanta, Charleston, Chicago, Dallas, Humboldt (California), Knoxville, Los Angles, Oakland, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Fe. Actually, the cities in California have a shared website, Occupy California. To find out what is happening, you can check into Twitter and use the general hashtag #occupy.

In a related movement, Lawrence Lessig and Mark McKinnon have called for for a Constitutional Convention to be hosted at Harvard. The post linked here actually appeared last spring, so this movement began earlier than the Occupy Wall Street, but it arises from the same frustration.

Washington is hopelessly addicted to money and thus to the status quo; drunk with power and incapable of getting sober and fixing itself. Its time for an interventionby the states.

Politically, we two disagree on just about everything. But the one thing we do agree on is that the institutions of government in Washington have become corrupt, held hostage by well-funded special interests. Its no wonder that only 17 percent of the American public in a recent Gallup survey said they had a favorable opinion of Congress. American voters believe, and rightly so, that corporations, labor unions and moneyed special interests have a chokehold on politicians. Voters are disillusioned and discouraged because they dont believe Washington represents the will of the people. And the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C.which permits unlimited independent corporate campaign expenditureswill only make this worse.

And so too many throw up their hands and say, We give up. Congress wont fix itself. And theres nothing that we can do about it.

But there is something we can do. We, the People, can take back the power we gave to Congress. We can take it back through the states.

The framers left open a path to amendment that doesnt require the approval of Congress: a convention. Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose amendments if 34 state legislatures demand it. Any proposed amendment would then have to be ratified by both houses of 38 state legislatures (three-fourths of the states).

(snip) Even if 34 states dont call for a convention, history teaches that a real threat is often enough to get Congress to act. The only amendment in our history that changed the structure of Congress (the 17th, making the Senate an elected body) was proposed by Congress because the states were close (just one state short) to calling for a convention. If nothing else, the possibility of a body they cant control is enough to get Congress to pay attention.

Some will resist the idea of a convention because they fear a runaway in which fringe elements would take over the agenda and propose radical amendments. But the framers anticipated such a danger and established a very high bar against it. Amendments are ratified by legislatures (or state conventions), not by referenda. And if even one chamber in 12 state legislatures refused to ratify an amendment, it would die. There will always be twelve solid blue states and twelve solid red states in America. Theres thus no danger that one extreme can overtake the other.Conventional wisdom will argue that constitutional conventions or amendments are just impossible. Just like it was impossible to wrest a republic from the grip of monarchy or abolish slavery. Or impossible to elect Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. But conventional minds are always wrong about pivotal moments in a nations history. And this is a pivotal moment in ours, when a movement to restore democracy is possible.

Indeed, the movement has already begun. Legislators in South Carolina, Virginia, Oregon, Rhode Island and Florida are already throwing sparks that could soon become a brush fire across the country. More and more are coming to see that if reform is necessaryas most all of us, whether from the right or left believethis is the only way.

Interestingly enough, when I searched for information on Occupy Wall Street, the top item returned was a Wikipedia entry reminding readers of Article Five of the Constitution, giving the citizens the power amend the Constitution or to call a constitutional convention. It was a sponsored link.

The New York Times reports on a totally cool new use of QR codes pioneered by Wikipedia. On September 28, Wikipedia announced on their Wikimedia blog an easy method for users to generate QR codes for Wikipedia articles, and paste them where needed. OTJ readers probably already are familiar with QR codes and know that they can be easily read by smart phones, which then will display the wikipedia article, or whatever is linked to the code. The phone has a setting that tells the QR code what language is required for Wikipedia’s article. If there is not a copy of the article in your preferred language, it will select “the most relevant article instead.” It would be interesting to test the relevance selecting software! But the Wikimedia article explains that the multilingual feature allowed the Derby Museum and Gallery in England to install labels that worked to support visitors from all over the world (here is a link to the map showing their visitors for this project), at very low cost. This is a terrific and very useful new way to use QR codes that could extend the reach of libraries (we keep our fingers crossed that nothing gets linked to sites that get vandalized!).The image of a QR code is from http://megcanavan.wordpress.com/tag/qr-codes/

As Nunberg points out, it’s hard to imagine a new edition of a dictionary causing such an uproar today. When I left home for college in 1969, one of the things I was sure to pack was my brand new dictionary, a standard high school graduation gift of the era. Does anyone still bring a dictionary to college? “The dictionary simply doesn’t have the symbolic importance it did a half-century ago, when critics saw the Third as a capitulation to the despised culture of middlebrow … That was probably the last great eructation of cultural snobbery in American public life.” I have to confess I consult the Urban Dictionary more often than I consult traditional printed dictionaries in order to look up words and terms (frequently somewhat obscene) used in the mass media and by my students. Nunberg gives a number of examples of classic dictionaries that have responded to fears of irrelevance by lowering their standards of admission; they keep up with changing times and “don’t keep words waiting in the vestibule long.” Such words and phrases as “wassup,” “BFF,” “muffin top,” “freegan, “geek chic,” and “staycation” now appear in venerable dictionaries such as the O.E.D. The Internet is in many ways the ideal medium for a dictionary. Online dictionaries can be updated constantly and cheaply, they can incorporate audio and video to illustrate the use of words and model correct pronunciation, they can be accessed easily by users of handheld devices, and open-source projects such as the Wex legal encyclopedia and dictionary demonstrate that they can be the result of group collaboration.