The call to occupy Wall Street resonates around the world

[desertrose]

They  need  our prayers,  our  support and  our solidarity to  accomplish  what  needs  to  be  done for the sake  of  our  country  and  the injustices  being  perpetrated in  ours  names   throughout  the  World !!

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I  will also  be  including  videos  and  articles  that   embody the  reasons that have inspired movements like  the  Occupy  Movement.  Events and legislation In  our  very  recent  history to  inspire movements like  the  Occupy  Movement.  The  evil and  corruption that  has  lead   to  this moment  in time in   our  history where we  as  the  Common  Man  and   Woman / "We  The  People"  have  said   "Enough"  and   "Never Again In  Our Name"!

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/19/occu...

The call to occupy Wall Street resonates around the world

We need deeper changes to our financial system, or tent cities of people angry at corporate greed will keep appearing

 

• Micah White and Kalle Lasn
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 September 2011 07.36 EDT
• Article history
• 

  People protest during the 'Occupy Wall Street' rally at Bowling Green Plaza on 17 September. Photograph: Steven Greaves/Demotix/Corbis

  On Saturday 17 September, many of us watched in awe as 5,000 Americans descended on to the financial district of lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk towards the "financial Gomorrah" of the nation. They vowed to "occupy Wall Street" and to "bring justice to the bankers", but the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints.

  Undeterred, protesters walked laps around the area before holding a people's assembly and setting up a semi-permanent protest encampment in a park on Liberty Street, a stone's throw from Wall Street and a block from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

  Three hundred spent the night, several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day and as we write this article, the encampment is rolling out sleeping bags once again. When they tweeted to the world that they were hungry, a nearby pizzeria received $2,800 in orders for delivery in a single hour. Emboldened by an outpouring of international solidarity, these American indignados said they'd be there to greet the bankers when the stock market opened on Monday. It looks like, for now, the police don't think they can stop them. ABC News reports that "even though the demonstrators don't have a permit for the protest, [the New York police department says that] they have no plans to remove those protesters who seem determined to stay on the streets." Organisers on the ground say, "we're digging in for a long-term occupation".

  #OCCUPYWALLSTREET was inspired by the people's assemblies of Spain and floated as a concept by a double-page poster in the 97th issue of Adbusters magazine, but it was spearheaded, orchestrated and accomplished by independent activists. It all started when Adbusters asked its network of culture jammers to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens and peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. The idea caught on immediately on social networks and unaffiliated activists seized the meme and built an open-source organising site. A few days later, a general assembly was held in New York City and 150 people showed up. These activists became the core organisers of the occupation. The mystique of Anonymous pushed the meme into the mainstream media. Their video communique endorsing the action garnered 100,000 views and a warning from the Department of Homeland Security addressed to the nation's bankers. When, in August, the indignados of Spain sent word that they would be holding a solidarity event in Madrid's financial district, activists in Milan, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Israel and beyond vowed to do the same.

  There is a shared feeling on the streets around the world that the global economy is a Ponzi scheme run by and for Big Finance. People everywhere are waking up to the realisation that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to $1.3tn (50 times more than the sum of all the commercial transactions). Meanwhile, according to a United Nations report, "in the 35 countries for which data exist, nearly 40% of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year".

  "CEOs, the biggest corporations, and the wealthy are taking too much from our country and I think it's time for us to take back," said one activist who joined the protests last Saturday. Jason Ahmadi, who travelled in from Oakland, California explained that "a lot of us feel there is a large crisis in our economy and a lot of it is caused by the folks who do business here". Bill Steyerd, a Vietnam veteran from Queens, said "it's a worthy cause because people on Wall Street are blood-sucking warmongers".

  There is not just anger. There is also a sense that the standard solutions to the economic crisis proposed by our politicians and mainstream economists – stimulus, cuts, debt, low interest rates, encouraging consumption – are false options that will not work. Deeper changes are needed, such as a "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions; reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act in the US; implementing a ban on high-frequency "flash" trading. The "too big to fail" banks must be broken up, downsized and made to serve the people, the economy and society again. The financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown must be brought to justice. Then there is the long-term mother of all solutions: a total rethinking of western consumerism that throws into question how we measure progress.

  If the current economic woes in Europe and the US spiral into a prolonged global recession, people's encampments will become a permanent fixtures at financial districts and outside stock markets around the world. Until our demands are met and the global economic regime is fundamentally reformed, our tent cities will keep popping up.

  Bravo to those courageous souls in the encampment on New York's Liberty Street. Every night that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET continues will escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.

   

   

   

  

    globalrevolution

  This channel will feature live streams from global non violent revolution spreading across the globe, with the first broadcasts from Wall Street Occupa... (more)

  Now  

  Occupy Wall Street $eptember 17th
  
  http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

[desertrose]

Fault Lines: Occupy Wall Street: Surviving the Winter Part 2

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Mar 27, 2012

Fault Lines follows key Occupy organisers through the winter as they continue to build a movement even after violent evictions across the country.

[desertrose]

Fault Lines: History of an occupation Part 1

Uploaded by AlJazeeraEnglish on Mar 21, 2012

Fault Lines tells the definitive history of Occupy Wall Street from its early days through the movement's rapid spread up to the brutal crackdown by state authorities.

[desertrose]

Outlaw Occupy: US set to strangle protests with jail threats

Uploaded by RussiaToday on Mar 19, 2012

New York City police are investigating death threats made against staff through the phone and on twitter. This after officers forcibly arrested more than 70 people during an Occupy Wall Street protest. Since the start of the movement, nationwide protests have faced numerous cases of police brutality with batons and tear gas often used to disperse crowds. As the movement continues, so too does Washington's desire to silence the American public, as RT's Marina Portnaya explains.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4IySuIhU3E

[desertrose]

Uploaded by RTAmerica on Feb 29, 2012

On Wednesday dozens gathered in New York City to protest the influence money and corporations have on US politics. The occupiers gathered outside several banks and chanted slogans condemning US corporations influence on the US government. All across the nation people coordinated similar protests and over a dozen people were arrested in the largest coordinated effort since the fall.

Dozens arrested at occupy corporations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37WW48guVF8

[desertrose]

Activism for the End Times: Mass Actions or Focused Campaigns?

By George Lakey

http://www.nationofchange.org/activism-end-times-mass-actions-or-fo...

It’s not only voices on the religious right who claim we’re in the end times. There’s no doubt that major changes are needed in order to confront a range of deepening ecological and political crises. One response to this is despair—always a seductive option when we feel powerless. Another is to join some stampede into hasty action that doesn’t actually make a difference, although it may feel better than cynical withdrawal.

The good news, for now, is that the Occupy movement’s general assemblies have a process of decision making that is highly democratic and minimizes the chance of hasty actions that accomplish nothing—or worse. And, so far, the collective spirit of the assemblies has been sufficient to stave off despair. But as the movement prepares for the coming spring, there’s a real danger that its mood, and its patience, might change for the worse.

I definitely understand the appeal of the thought of periodic national mass protests at places where the 1 percent or their henchmen gather, like the upcoming G8 summit in Chicago and the national party conventions. On an emotional level, I understand the attraction and have my own warm memories from mass protests I’ve been part of. At this historical moment, however, the Occupy movement might do better to prioritize actions that make more strategic sense and accelerate our learning curve. Here are some reasons why:

• Same-old, same-old. Don’t let the freshness of the Occupy movement fall into familiar patterns. Why put the new wine of Occupy into the old wineskins of predictably boring contests with city police? The media will cover it with its well-worn template from the past, and the new politics of Occupy will risk being forgotten.
• One reason Gandhi was able to force Britain to give up control of India was his number-one strategic principle: It’s always better to stay on the offensive. Rather than simply being reactive, a movement should choose its own space for struggle. Going to the sites where the powerholders meet is not only reactive, but it emphasizes their power, as compared with the movement’s. The workers who recently occupied a plant owned by Bank of America in Chicago, for instance, forced the bank to deal with them on their terms.
• Mass bashes can endanger local causes. One of the strengths of the Occupy movement has been its balance between working on local issues and doing so in the context of a national framework. This has rarely been the case with mass bashes. After the Philadelphia Republican National Convention in 2000—in which I was intimately involved—it took years of community organizing to knit the local activist community back together from the fallout. (Read about a good sub-campaign that happened in Philadelphia and was drowned out by the general disaster.)

[desertrose]

Who’s Really Violent? Tips for Controlling the Narrative

By George Lakey

http://www.nationofchange.org/who-s-really-violent-tips-controlling...

Occupy Wall Street is similar to many movements in contending that its opponent—for Occupy, the 1 percent—is maintaining a system whose structural, systematic violence far exceeds any violence exhibited by the movement itself. For example, movements will say that class oppression or sexism or racism hurt people in the daily course of life, pointing to statistics like each percentage point of unemployment resulting in increased suicide, homicide and domestic abuse. However, especially when the movement is still young and only beginning to get its message out, the powers that be in politics and the media will often succeed in dismissing such charges and in blaming every appearance of violence on the campaigners. Reversing this narrative in the public perception is one of a growing movement’s most important challenges.

For nearly a year, for example, the Syrian government has been sending its tanks to kill demonstrators while claiming that the violence mainly comes from the pro-democracy forces. The Russian government publicly agrees. The reason why defenders of oppression the world over charge activists with violence—even if they have to make it up—is because it’s a potent accusation. The oppressor doesn’t want the “violence” label to stick to its own side. Those who presently are undecided or passive might move to support the campaigners because they don’t want to support “violence.”

In some circumstances, although not all, who wins the struggle depends on who most believably asserts that the other side is violent. Occupy Wall Street got a tremendous boost in the early days when mainstream media were largely ignoring them, thanks to the blatant violence committed by New York City police. Many influential and uncommitted people swung immediately to the side of Occupy and gave it extraordinary momentum.

Those in power, however, are at an advantage in this contest with campaigners. They usually control or hugely influence the media coverage. They start out with some legitimacy won through elections or asserted through authoritarian cultural institutions—often religious ones. In the Global Nonviolent Action Database, we recount dozens of cases in which oppressive regimes have persisted against activist challenge for years, even decades, before the campaigners’ charge of “violence” finally stuck and key middle groups swung over.

[desertrose]

Occupy Wall Street Calls for May Day General Strike

By Nathan Schneider

http://www.nationofchange.org/occupy-wall-street-calls-may-day-gene...

At the General Assembly meeting last night, Occupy Wall Street’s dreamer contingent got a very special valentine: the GA endorsed the Direct Action Working Group’s proposal to call for a general strike on May Day—May 1, 2012. Occupiers celebrated with cheers and Valentine’s Day balloons.

The text approved by the GA is as follows:

May Day 2012 Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: *No Work *No School *No Housework *No Shopping *No Banking TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!

The prospect of an Occupy general strike has been circulating for a while already. One of the several Facebook event pages devoted to it has more than 10,000 attendees. Occupy Los Angeles began calling for a May 1 general strike as early as last November, and Occupy Oakland joined at the end of January. Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action group tried to take a strategic approach to the idea; though many of its members had little hesitation about calling for it, they took steps to ensure there was consultation, and therefore buy-in, among some of those whose participation would be vital. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve been holding twice-weekly meetings—with as many as 150 people crowded into a church or a union-office basement—which included labor organizers, immigrants’ rights groups, artists and anarchists.

Together, these stakeholders debated what a general strike could even mean in 2012, given the poor state of organized labor, and whether making such an ambitious call would turn into anything other than an embarrassment. “It has to happen on a huge enough scale that retaliation is unthinkable,” a person noted at one of the initial meetings on January 11. While one voice that night argued that “you use this tool to gain specific ends”—the tool of a general strike—another preferred to “not issue any demands, but rather take what is ours.” From these discussions, it was agreed that the more open-ended language of “a day without the 99 percent” should stand alongside that of “general strike.”

[desertrose]

Occupy Draws Strength From the Powerless

By Chris Hedges

http://www.nationofchange.org/occupy-draws-strength-powerless-13292...

There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations—the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts—to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM—Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement—or front groups acting in the name of the movement—to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process. 

Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily about, in the old cliché, hearts and minds. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar to those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. These operatives are, in fact, often the same people. The state has expended external resources to break the movement. It is reasonable to assume it has expended internal resources to break the movement.......

[desertrose]

Occupying Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power

By Bill Quigley

http://www.nationofchange.org/occupying-corporations-how-cut-corpor...

“Corporations are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world.   Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to? 

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people.  Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people.  For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights.  There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood.  At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation.  Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1^st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4^th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5^th amendment rights to due process; 14^th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses

[Keith H]

Plots and subplots, who can tell?