Why Join The Occupy Atlanta, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Together Movements?
There’s an old Wall Street saying, “If you aren’t at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Big players on Wall Street have reserved seats with politicians at tables in Congress and the White House – paid for by many large election campaign donations. Middle-class, working-poor and unemployed poor people no longer have places at those tables. We’ve been excluded by:
(1) DECADES OF BIPARTISAN, NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMIC POLICIES THAT CONCENTRATE WEALTH AND POLITICAL POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE RICHEST 1%. These include: Legalization of predatory lending and interest rate usury; corporate concentration of smaller family farms into gigantic industrial farms; “free trade” offshoring of our middle-class manufacturing jobs; deregulation of “too big to fail” speculatory banks, derivatives and corporate polluters; historically unprecedented wartime tax cuts for the super-rich; hundreds of billions of dollars of yearly foreign borrowing plus interest; run amok military spending on foreign policy neo-conservatism (basically globalized militarized economic neo-liberalism); Federal Reserve bailouts to big U.S. banks, crony corporations, foreign banks and the foreign exchange market; and privatization of public resources for speculatory purposes and to extract fees, rents & tolls from the working-class and the poor.
(2) THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SUPREME COURT RULING IN
BUSH vs. GORE. This ruling established an un-Constitutional precedent for the Supreme Court to interfere with the presidential election process and appoint its choice of candidate to the presidency.
(3) THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SUPREME COURT RULING IN
CITIZENS UNITED vs. FEC. This decision promotes rule by corporate elites via their crony politicians by means of unlimited corporate spending on political attack ads (combined with preexisting corporate dominance of donations directly to the election campaigns of politicians). It also enshrines the legal fiction of “corporate personhood” that grants the rights and liberties of human beings to corporations, while permitting corporations to avoid legal liabilities & culpabilities that individual human beings cannot.
If you recognize that you do not have a place at the table of representative democracy; that the existing system isn’t working for you, your family or community, then come and help build the nearest OCCUPY TOGETHER movement. If you can’t find a job, then find an OCCUPATION.
Why? What can we do Together?
OCCUPY TOGETHER movements all across the country are peoples’ movements of great cultural and political diversity. They engage in sustained encampments (similar to the encampments in Tunisia and Spain in early 2011) that use a discipline of non-violence to build public support for a society that includes all members at the same table to meet their vital needs.
There is a strong stream of support within the original #OCCUPY WALL STREET movement for peacefully building the type of society they want to inhabit from the occupation parks outward to facilitate more and more local self-sufficiency and community resilience.
There are hurdles to this, but a growing number of exciting possibilities as well. Many of us within the movement are learning more about the types of economic models (local co-operatives, Mondragon regional level unionized co-operatives, participatory economic workers’ enterprises and urban/organic farms, etc.) that we can build in and around our localities to help create an economic and social system that is as independent, economically fair and socially just as possible.
Such a system would develop its own community general assemblies, economic goods and services, modes and mediums of exchange, co-operative banks and credit unions, multi-media journalism, educational system, arts and literature, mutual legal and medical aid, etc., that endeavor to serve the needs of the remnant middle-class, working-poor, and unemployed.
Why? Because (1) the present neo-liberal/neo-conservative economic and political system more and more exclusively serves plutocrats and their professional service providers in the upper-middle-class, and (2) it applies one separate and unequal, upscale, crony-infested, anti-regulatory “rule of law” and system of government for those elites, and an increasingly different, tone-deaf, more punitive one to working-class and poor people at the expense of public institutions, public services, public spaces, the environment and the common good.
Occupy Together Movements seek to be inclusive:
OCCUPY TOGETHER seeks to include everyone rendered jobless, pensionless, or subjected to needless or illegal home foreclosures by fraudulent Wall Street speculators and the politicians who deregulate them; those denied shelter; those denied timely, adequate health care; those economically barred from receiving high-quality education and related employment opportunities; those discriminated against for their race, religion, sexual preference or gender identity; those exposed to industrially contaminated air, food and water; those who are marginalized, silenced or unjustly incarcerated, and the victims and families, respectively, of those physically or psychologically injured or killed by illegal wars, police brutality or unjust courts.
In short, we stand in solidarity with all those betrayed by bipartisan, globalized neo-liberal capitalism and neo-conservative militarism (that generates bloody unresolved quagmires, worsens existing failed States and creates new ones, proliferates religiously extremist terrorism AND State-sanctioned terrorism at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of displaced refugees and $Trillions of dollars).
We stand against the increasingly anti-democratic, oligarchic power those toxic policies and their bankrollers have over our society.
What about the Wall Street Issues Raised by Occupy Wall Street?
If you are unfamiliar with economic issues like the Glass-Steagall Act; the Federal Reserve’s TARP, TALF and FOREX bailouts; “quantitative easing”; the World Trade Organization (WTO); international banking organizations like the IMF and World Bank; “fiscal austerity”; proposals for an EU “banktatorship” to allow EU central bankers to trump national budgetary sovereignty in smaller, poorer EU countries with impunity; the idea of a Green New Deal; the Taft-Hartley Act, and the difference between classical capitalist “comparative free trade” vs. neo-liberal capitalist “absolute advantage free trade,” then come and explore these and many other issues and ideas with us!
The OCCUPY TOGETHER movement plants new gardens of democracy that encourage thought and expression outside the inflexible, amoral and anti-democratic corporatist, militarist box. Come and let’s imagine and build a new experiment in democracy together!
