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[cooljeanius]

Concord. Interested in going?

I actually grew up in Concord, I'm going to school in DC now though. I bet you'll run into some people I know there though. Maybe if Concord is still being occupied by Christmas Break I'll go to it...

 

[Morn]

When it first started, sure. But I've seen at least some coverage on all the major media networks by now. MSNBC has been very active in covering it.

In LA, most of the media is laughing at it.

 

[travisbickle]

Simply because everyone has the right to speak does not mean they are worth listening to, particularly if what you're saying is incorrect or completely specious.

But it was worth listening to because you weighed up your understanding and knowledge of the situation against his and concluded that his information was incorrect/specious, which solidified the faithfulness of your knowledge. What would make it even more worthy was if you were to share your knowledge, please.

 

[magicstop]

Did you mean to link this?

lol, maybe . . .

Spoiler

Dammit!

 

[unomas]

Everyone is worth listening to, everyone has a voice.

Agreed, too many people want to shoot others down because they want to dismiss them. Everyone is worth being heard, and as a society we might want to consider that once in a great while. The guy also has plenty of valid points.

 

[chronos4590]

Not sure if this was discussed but I found this video quite interesting.
Occupy Wall Street Activist Slams Fox News Producer In Un-Aired Interview.
Not really surprising obviously but videos and similar events need as much recognition as possible. One thing that is certain is that these events need to be documented and exposed by the general public and not just by big media, otherwise we will see more controversy just like we've seen with the NY Times article and this un-aired interview. Also I am aware that Fox isn't obligated to air any interview they don't want to which clearly goes in their favor.

 

[ErasureAcer]

Well I'm pretty much going to give this a shot in Minneapolis. Count me in. The OP should be updated with which NeoGAF members are participating and where. Not really looking forward to getting arrested...so I hope that doesn't happen.

 

[water_wendi]

In LA, most of the media is laughing at it.

The media is nothing but a paid PR firm of the wealthy so no surprise there.

 

[unomas]

The media is nothing but a paid PR firm of the wealthy so no surprise there.

Agreed, and that's why this thing isn't all over the news as it should have been at a much earlier point. It's been over two weeks now, and coverage is minimal at best. The lack of media coverage shows to an even greater extent how bought and paid for the media is. The first week this thing was basically ignored completely, and not until they arrested 700 protesters did it seem to get any noticeable attention.

 

[cooljeanius]

Apparently Occupy DC shut down a Bank of America: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=2212710797114

 

[Bad_Boy]

was this posted?

Occupy Everything: 'US protests have explosive potential'

 

[Myansie]

I'm all for the protests.

Bring back regulation on Wall St to what we had 20 years ago, pre Clinton. With deregulation Wall St has become incredibly pro risk, take it back to the conservative bean counters afraid to gamble on a game of poker with friends, long term investment is key. To do this clean out the government of the major financial players. CEOs from the major banks should absolutely not be part of the President's Cabinet nor the Justice Department and SEC.

Power has shifted away from democracy, the major finance players stay in power whether the government is Democrat or Republican, this is always going to lead to disaster.

 

[dinazimmerman]

Honestly, I don't know. The best I can come up with is a tax credit for hiring, possibly funded by a temporary introduction of new taxes on firms that lay-off workers (to offset high EI costs).

This was sort of done already, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiring_Incentives_to_Restore_Employment_Act

I came across a nice article with policy recommendations at the end:

Both the continued fragility of the economy and the possibility of a sustained jobless recovery represent calls to action for immediate policy steps to expand employment and incentivize job creation. Several promising components of such a jobs creation package include increased aid to fiscally strapped states, enhanced short-run tax incentives for increased private sector employment expansion, and incentives for facilitating investments with high long-run payoffs in energy efficiency (such as some form of a “cash for caulkers” program) and infrastructure. The extremely high current unemployment rate and continued rise in long-term unemployment also make a strong humanitarian and economic case for increasing aid to the unemployed and for a longer-than-normal duration of benefits through the continuation of emergency unemployment compensation.

A net job creation tax credit (as opposed to the recently enacted tax credit for new hires of unemployed workers (note: this refers to the 2010 jobs bill, the wikipedia page of which I linked to) could provide a useful incentive to speed up private sector employment growth as the economy starts to recover. The best available evidence indicates that firms do respond to short-run reduced (marginal) wage costs by moderately expanding employment (e.g., Card 1990). Recent analyses suggest a net job creation tax credit could have a reasonably high effectiveness in terms of employment expansion per dollar of budgetary cost (Bartik and Bishop 2009; Congressional Budget Office 2010).

Source: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/katz/files/jec_testimony_katz_042910.pdf

If you have some free time, I'd read the rest of the article. It's pretty informative.

 

[XMonkey]

I'm all for the protests.

Bring back regulation on Wall St to what we had 20 years ago, pre Clinton. With deregulation Wall St has become incredibly pro risk, take it back to the conservative bean counters afraid to gamble on a game of poker with friends, long term investment is key. To do this clean out the government of the major financial players. CEOs from the major banks should absolutely not be part of the President's Cabinet nor the Justice Department and SEC.

Power has shifted away from democracy, the major finance players stay in power whether the government is Democrat or Republican, this is always going to lead to disaster.

I feel risk is an important part of a market system, but what's currently lacking in our country is any sort of significant safeguard for controlling the fallout from that risk and making sure that the risky investments don't take the house down with them. Banks got burned by the fire they helped create, but were bailed out and kept afloat and the people in charge who knew full well what they were doing was not sound have gotten away scot-free. There needs to be action taken against those who exploit the system or else it's just going to keep happening if people know they can get away with it. Asking Goldman Sachs or any other bank to pay x amount of millions of dollars in fines is an absolute joke and just reinforces their bad behavior

 

[Bloodbeard]

Source: http://owst.tumblr.com/post/11007465721/an-open-letter-from-two-white-men-to-occupywallstreet

#OCCUPYWALLST
AN OPEN LETTER FROM TWO WHITE MEN TO #OCCUPYWALLSTREET
We—two white men—write this letter conscious of the fact that the color of our skin means we will likely be taken more seriously. We write this knowing that because people of color are thought to be too biased to speak objectively on issues of race, our perspective in this context will be privileged. We write this aware of the history of colonization, genocide, and slavery upon which this country stands, which has created this oppressive reality.

We write this letter to the organizers and participants (ourselves included) of #OccupyWallStreet out of great love for humanity and for the collective struggles being waged to save it. We write this letter because of our support for this nascent movement, in the hopes that with some self-reflection and adjustment, it may come to truly represent “the 99%” and realize its full potential.

#OccupyWallStreet has shown itself to be a potent force. The movement—which we consider ourselves part of—has already won great victories. New occupations spring up across the continent every day, and the movement for true democracy and radical social change is gathering steam worldwide.

According to the main websites associated with #OccupyWallStreet, it is “one people, united,” a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions,” and an “open, participatory and horizontally organized process.” In other words, it professes to be the universal protest against the greed and corruption rampant in our society, open for anyone to join and shape.

But a quick survey of the movement so far shows that that the good intentions outlined do not reflect the reality of the situation. There is indeed an organizational structure and a core group that makes leadership decisions in #OWS (and we think this is a good thing). They are the media team at the media command center, the committee facilitators and the people who have been actually occupying the park for the past three weeks. One only needs to take a good look around to see that the leadership and the core group—which has managed to attract enormous national and international media attention—is overwhelmingly white (and largely male), and as a result the voices and perspectives of #OccupyWallStreet reflect that reality more generally.

Luckily, some people who have felt excluded or erased from “the 99%” have spoken up, alerting us to the notion that the anti-corporate occupation in Liberty Park may not be as welcoming to all as its image of consensus-bound activists, non-hierarchical structure, and free food has suggested to many (see http://bit.ly/q9q10C; http://bit.ly/oABMbQ; and http://bit.ly/oTBcfs for some examples).

One striking example of the marginalization of non-white voices within the movement was seen at the march on Friday against police brutality. Because this march was organized by activist groups in conjunction with #OWS, it was by far the most diverse rally yet. But towards the end of the march, when organizers were speaking to the group at One Police Plaza, a black woman near the speakers was clearly agitating for her voice to be heard. Despite the line of white people speaking before her, a white #OWS organizer spoke to the crowd and informed them that within a few minutes, the march would be over and everyone should leave peacefully. Of course, that meant that as soon as he was finished speaking everyone got up to leave. As the black woman (the lone black voice speaking in a march against police brutality) got up to speak, her voice was lost because by that point no one was paying attention.

In this case, the marginalization was not intentional: a PSA was made to inform people to ensure the rally’s peaceful closure. But most racial marginalization is indeed “unintentional.” In this case the silenced black woman was going to speak about her close relative, who was killed by police. She was the only person speaking with a personal relationship to police brutality at a level almost unimaginable to the people occupying Zucotti Park, and her voice was not heard.

This unintended marginalization is occurring daily at #OWS. We know this may be hard for some people to understand. Of course, who could expect us to understand what it is like to be reminded of your skin color every time you leave your home? Who could expect white people to understand that the spaces we feel so comfortable in may feel exclusive or even hostile to people of color? After all, we are never told; we are not forced to learn that our skin color is related to our social status; and we are not taught black and brown history, so many of us do not know how we got here—and cannot imagine it any other way.

But as Audre Lorde wrote, it is not the responsibility of the oppressed to educate the oppressors about our mistakes. White people may not be to blame for the privileged position we occupy, but we must be accountable for the liberties and benefits we enjoy at the expense of our black and brown brothers and sisters.

We would like to add our voices to the chorus of constructive critiques coming from communities of color. We believe the white people of #OccupyWallStreet need to understand something: the feelings of economic insecurity, political powerlessness, and lack of support that have brought so many of us to the protests at Liberty Park have been lived by many of the people of color in this country for centuries. Without an active effort to address racial issues from the core of #OccupyWallStreet, the protest will fail.


The People of Color / Unified Communities working group at #OccupyWallStreet was created on October 1, 2011. Their e-mail is unified.ows@gmail.com, their website is pococcupywallstreet.tumblr.com and they meet every Sunday at 3pm in Zucotti Park. Let’s be truly revolutionary allies and firmly support them to bring a racial analysis to the core of one of the most potent people’s movement in our country today—before it is too late.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

 

[cooljeanius]

Source: http://owst.tumblr.com/post/11007465721/an-open-letter-from-two-white-men-to-occupywallstreet

There were black/mixed people at OccupyDC, at least...

 

[Bad_Boy]

Well written statement imo. I had no idea race was really an issue with the protests though. But then again, I wasnt at the protests.

 

[ErasureAcer]

Source: http://owst.tumblr.com/post/11007465721/an-open-letter-from-two-white-men-to-occupywallstreet

stupid. next.

 

[TrounceX]

Well I'm pretty much going to give this a shot in Minneapolis. Count me in. The OP should be updated with which NeoGAF members are participating and where. Not really looking forward to getting arrested...so I hope that doesn't happen.

I'll be there.

I don't feel like getting arrested though either so I might wait a few days and take a look at the situation then.

 

[SolKane]

Source: http://owst.tumblr.com/post/11007465721/an-open-letter-from-two-white-men-to-occupywallstreet

I think their intentions are noble, but their only evidence for racial exclusions comes from a single anecdote. And what do they mean by the "leadership"? I thought these organizations were de facto leaderless movements.

 

[demon]

Looks like there's a facebook page for Occupy Madison. Living a block from the capitol building I saw the Scott Walker protests grow to the tens of thousands and it will be interesting to see how this compares to the protests last winter.

 

[Karma Kramer]

I really can't understand these tea party/occupy comparisons. The reason why the demographic of the tea party is relevant is because a) the tea party seems mostly bothered by Obama's policies, when the previous white president had very similar policies and produced big government programs b) the whole birth certificate thing.

The only comparison you could make is that occupy wallstreet is mostly younger people, which allows the media and others to generalize these younger people as "lazy" or "hippies." These classifications are just as moronic as calling all tea party followers racists. I am not defending their behavior when they tell lies as truth and when they remain willfully ignorant. I have no problem calling out that kind of attitude as racism. But back to the point about occupy being mostly younger people, I don't think that is really surprising when our generation has become a kind of lost generation due to the economic conditions.

Occupy wallstreet is a cry for America to wake up and pay more attention to what caused this problem. That is why the message is less on point compared to the tea party, because it isn't grounded in one ideology.

 

[remnant]

I really can't understand these tea party/occupy comparisons. The reason why the demographic of the tea party is relevant is because a) the tea party seems mostly bothered by Obama's policies, when the previous white president had very similar policies and produced big government programs b) the whole birth certificate thing.

The only comparison you could make is that occupy wallstreet is mostly younger people, which allows the media and others to generalize these younger people as "lazy" or "hippies." These classifications are just as moronic as calling all tea party followers racists. I am not defending their behavior when they tell lies as truth and when they remain willfully ignorant. I have no problem calling out that kind of attitude as racism. But back to the point about occupy being mostly younger people, I don't think that is really surprising when our generation has become a kind of lost generation due to the economic conditions.

Occupy wallstreet is a cry for America to wake up and pay more attention to what caused this problem. That is why the message is less on point compared to the tea party, because it isn't grounded in one ideology.

So the reason why the tea party and this are different is becuase you think everyone in the TP is racist?

Yeah this is really going to unite the nation.

 

[XMonkey]

What? You need to read that again, remnant.

 

[Clevinger]

What? You need to read that again, remnant.

He read it just fine. Look at his other posts in this thread.

 

[Karma Kramer]

So the reason why the tea party and this are different is becuase you think everyone in the TP is racist?

Yeah this is really going to unite the nation.

No, I just said it is moronic to classify the entire group as racists. However when individuals or a large portion of a group refuse to believe Obama is an American citizen, it adds the question of bias or racism. Either they are so annoyed that a Democrat defeated their candidate or they dislike black people. To willfully accept such bullshit as fact confirms a bias.

 

[kame-sennin]

Source: http://owst.tumblr.com/post/11007465721/an-open-letter-from-two-white-men-to-occupywallstreet

This is what social responsibility looks like.

 

[Bad_Boy]

Step by Step of the Brooklyn Bridge 700 Arrests

Now don't get me wrong, I like cops. Not all, but the majority I like. But wtf is this shit? Fuck whoever gave the order to allow this. And fuck the cops that followed those orders.

700 entrapment arrests and the media says nothing. There is something seriously wrong with this.

 

[Karma Kramer]

Step by Step of the Brooklyn Bridge 700 Arrests

Now don't get me wrong, I like cops. Not all, but the majority I like. But wtf is this shit? Fuck whoever gave the order to allow this. And fuck the cops that followed those orders.

700 entrapment arrests and the media says nothing. There is something seriously wrong with this.

This is clear as day. Could there be lawsuits over this?

 

[remnant]

What? You need to read that again, remnant.

No I don't. He said the TP existed becuase of 2 issues. Disapproving of Obama economic policies despite white pres. doing it similar things and the northern shit. Both are issues based on race. Read it again.

He then continues to say he doesn't agree with people calling them racist, but that "spreading lies and staying ignorant does make them racist.

So in short TP exists on racist issues, spreads lies and is willfully ignorant.

 

[kame-sennin]

I think their intentions are noble, but their only evidence for racial exclusions comes from a single anecdote. And what do they mean by the "leadership"? I thought these organizations were de facto leaderless movements.

They're not trying to say the movement is racist. What they're trying to say is that the majority of the people who are in leadership positions are white males (which they acknowledge was not intentional). That means that the protest is more likely to project the views of white males and less likely to project the views of others. The other important point is that black and brown people have been dealing with the economic problems that spurred these protests for centuries. If we're to address the immorality of the current power structure, we must address the racial inequalities produced by this power structure as well. The letter is just a reminder to not forget about issues of race, not so much a critique.

stupid. next.

This type of comment is below the standards of this debate (standards you yourself have easily met until now) and is not fitting with the spirit of these protests. If this is to be an inclusive movement, we should at least be willing to hear each other out, and if we disagree - do so respectfully and with substance.

 

[Karma Kramer]

No I don't. He said the TP existed becuase of 2 issues. Disapproving of Obama economic policies despite white pres. doing it similar things and the northern shit. Both are issues based on race. Read it again.

He then continues to say he doesn't agree with people calling them racist, but that "spreading lies and staying ignorant does make them racist.

So in short TP exists on racist issues, spreads lies and is willfully ignorant.

Do you deny the Tea Party is largely an anti-obama movement?

Individuals in the tea party can be anti-obama and anti-bush. Look at Ron Paul, who I have supported in the past and still do to some extent.

What I was saying before is the demographic of the tea party is relevant because it further confirms a racial bias within the tea party movement. The movement is based on a message that if anything should be in some ways beneficial to minorities or blacks (end the war on drugs aka big government). However extremists within the tea party show more interest in discussing Obama's citizenship and that kind of behavior is either a racial bias or party bias. That is why the demographic is relevant, it tells us more about this strange behavior. So in conclusion so this is clear, I don't think the Tea Party is the KKK, but I think some behavior within the Tea Party could be described as racism. What do you think? If someone told you they believed Obama was born in Kenya...

 

[Karma Kramer]

They're not trying to say the movement is racist. What they're trying to say is that the majority of the people who are in leadership positions are white males. That means that the protest is more likely to project the views of white males and less likely to project the views of others. The other important point is that black and brown people have been dealing with the economic problems that spurred these protests for centuries. If we're to address the immorality of the current power structure, we must address the racial inequalities produced by this power structure as well. The letter is just a reminder to not forget about issues of race, not so much a critique.

Ah this makes a good amount of sense now. I feel bad for skimming that and assuming it was a critique.

 

[Bad_Boy]

This is clear as day. Could there be lawsuits over this?

I really hope so.

 

[Myansie]

I feel risk is an important part of a market system, but what's currently lacking in our country is any sort of significant safeguard for controlling the fallout from that risk and making sure that the risky investments don't take the house down with them. Banks got burned by the fire they helped create, but were bailed out and kept afloat and the people in charge who knew full well what they were doing was not sound have gotten away scot-free. There needs to be action taken against those who exploit the system or else it's just going to keep happening if people know they can get away with it. Asking Goldman Sachs or any other bank to pay x amount of millions of dollars in fines is an absolute joke and just reinforces their bad behavior

Totally my friend, dealing in Triple A credit that you know full well is dog shit is a crime beyond robbing a bank at gun point. Deception of the market to create a ponzi scheme is financial suicide for everyone, but the top 1% who are in the know that they are dealing out crap. Dealing doomed credit as AAA to Super funds, ordinary people's life savings, so the Wall St fat cats can fuck prostitutes and snort cocaine is a crime, it is stealing.

 

[Bloodbeard]

http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/03/so-real-it-hurts-notes-on-occupy-wall-street/

I first went down to Occupy Wall Street last Sunday, almost a week after it had started. I didn’t go down before because I, like many of my other brown friends, were wary of what we had heard or just intuited that it was mostly a young white male scene. When I asked friends about it they said different things: that it was really white, that it was all people they didn’t know, that they weren’t sure what was going on. But after hearing about the arrests and police brutality on Saturday and after hearing that thousands of people had turned up for their march I decided I needed to see this thing for myself.

So I went down for the first time on Sunday September 25th with my friend Sam. At first we couldn’t even find Occupy Wall Street. We biked over the Brooklyn Bridge around noon on Sunday, dodging the tourists and then the cars on Chambers Street. We ended up at Ground Zero and I felt the deep sense of sadness that that place now gives me: sadness over how, what is now in essence, just a construction site changed the world so much for the worse. A deep sense of sadness for all the tourists taking pictures around this construction site that is now a testament to capitalism, imperialism, torture, oppression but what is also a place where many people died ten years ago.

Sam and I get off our bikes and walk them. We are looking for Liberty Plaza. We are looking for somewhere less alienating. For a moment we feel lost. We walk past the department store Century 21 and laugh about how discount shopping combined with a major tourist site means that at any moment someone will stop short in front of us and we will we bang our bikes against our thighs. A killer combination, that of tourists, discount shopping and the World Trade Center.

The landscape is strange. I notice that. We are in the shadow of half built buildings. They glitter and twist into the sky. But they also seem so naked: rust colored steel poking its way out their tops, their sides, their guts spilling out for all to see.

We get to Liberty Plaza and at first it is almost unassuming. We didn’t entirely know what to do. We wandered around. We made posters and laid them on the ground (our posters read: “We are all Troy Davis” “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “Tired of Racism” “Tired of Capitalism”)

And I didn’t know anyone down there. Not one person. And there were a lot of young white kids. But there weren’t only young white kids. There were older people, there were mothers with kids, and there were a lot more people of color than I expected, something that made me relieved. We sat on the stairs and watched everyone mill around us. There was the normal protest feeling of people moving around in different directions, not sure what to do with themselves, but within this there was also order: a food table, a library, a busy media area. There was order and disorder and organization and confusion, I watched as a man carefully changed each piece of his clothing folding each piece he took off and folding his shirt, his socks, his pants and placing them carefully under a tarp. I used the bathroom at the McDonalds up Broadway and there were two booths of people from the protest carrying out meetings, eating food from Liberty Plaza, sipping water out of water bottles, their laptops out. They seemed obvious yet also just part of the normal financial district hustle and bustle.

But even though at first I didn’t know what to do while I was at Liberty Plaza I stayed there for a few hours. I was generally impressed and energized by what I saw: people seemed to be taking care of each other. There seemed to be a general feeling of solidarity, good ways of communicating with each other, less disorganization than I expected and everyone was very very friendly. The whole thing was bizarre yes, the confused tourists not knowing what was going on, the police officers lining the perimeter, the mixture of young white kids with dredlocks, anarchist punks, mainstream looking college kids, but also the awesome black women who was organizing the food station, the older man who walked around with his peace sign stopping and talking to everyone, a young black man named Chris from New Jersey who told me he had been there all week and he was tired but that he had come not knowing anyone, had made friends and now he didn’t want to leave.

And when I left, walking my bike back through the streets of the financial district, fighting the crowds of tourists and men in suits, I felt something pulling me back to that space. It was that it felt like a space of possibility, a space of radical imagination. And it was energizing to feel like such a space existed.

And so I started telling my friends to go down there and check it out. I started telling people that it was a pretty awesome thing, that just having a space to have these conversations mattered, that it was more diverse than I expected. And I went back.

On Wednesday night I attended my first General Assembly. Seeing 300 people using consensus method was powerful. Knowing that a lot of people there had never been part of a consensus process and were learning about it for the first time was powerful. We consens-ed on using the money that was being donated to the movement for bail for the people who had been arrested. I was impressed that such a large group made a financial decision in a relatively painless way.

After the General Assembly that night there was both a Talent Show (“this is what a talent show looks like!”) on one side of the Plaza and an anti-patriarchy working group meeting (which became the safer-spaces working group) on the other. (In some ways the juxtaposition of both these events happening at once feels emblematic of one of the splits going on down there: talent shows across the square from anti-patriarchy meetings, an announcement for a zombie party right after an announcement about the killing of Troy Davis followed by an announcement that someone had lost their phone. Maybe this is how movements need to maintain themselves, through a recognition that political change is also fundamentally about everyday life and that everyday life needs to encompass all of this: there needs to be a space for a talent show, across from anti-patriarchy meetings, there needs to be a food table and medics, a library, everyone needs to stop for a second and look around for someone’s phone. That within this we will keep centrally talking about Troy Davis and how everyone is affected by a broken, racist, oppressive system. Maybe, maybe this is the way? )

I went to the anti-patriarchy meeting because even though I was impressed by the General Assembly and its process I also noticed that it was mostly white men who were in charge of the committees and making announcements and that I had only seen one women of color get up in front of everyone and talk. A lot was said at the anti-patriarchy meeting about in what ways the space of the occupation was a safe space and also not. Women talked about not feeling comfortable in the drum circle because of men dancing up on them and how to change this, about how to feel safe sleeping out in the open with a lot of men that they didn’t know, about not-assuming gender pronouns and asking people which pronouns they would prefer.

Here is the thing though: I’ve had these conversations before, I’m sure a lot of us in activist spaces have had these conversations before, the ones that we need to keep having about how to make sure everyone feels comfortable, how to not assume gender pronouns and gender roles. But there were plenty of people in this meeting who didn’t know what we were doing when we went around and asked for people’s names and preferred gender pronoun. A lot of people who looked taken aback by this. Who stumbled through it, but also who looked interested when we explained what we were doing. Who listened to the discussion and then joined the conversation about what to do to make sure that Occupy Wall Street felt like a space safe for everyone. Who said that they had similar experiences and were glad that we were talking about it.

This is important because I think this is what Occupy Wall Street is right now: less of a movement and more of a space. It is a space in which people who feel a similar frustration with the world as it is and as it has been, are coming together and thinking about ways to recreate this world. For some people this is the first time they have thought about how the world needs to be recreated. But some of us have been thinking about this for a while now. Does this mean that those of us who have been thinking about it for a while now should discredit this movement? No. It just means that there is a lot of learning going on down there and that there is a lot of teaching to be done.

On Thursday night I showed up at Occupy Wall Street with a bunch of other South Asians coming from a South Asians for Justice meeting. Sonny joked that he should have brought his dhol so we could enter like it was a baarat. When we got there they were passing around and reading a sheet of paper that had the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street on it. I had heard the “Declaration of the Occupation” read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn’t realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there. When I heard it the night before with Sonny we had looked at each other and noted that the line about “being one race, the human race, formally divided by race, class…” was a weird line, one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated. But Sonny and I had shrugged it off as the ramblings of one of the many working groups at Occupy Wall Street.

But now we were realizing that this was actually a really important document and that it was going to be sent into the world and read by thousands of people. And that if we let it go into the world written the way it was then it would mean that people like me would shrug this movement off, it would stop people like me and my friends and my community from joining this movement, one that I already felt a part of. So this was urgent. This movement was about to send a document into the world about who and what it was that included a line that erased all power relations and decades of history of oppression. A line that would de-legitimize the movement, this would alienate me and people like me, this would not be able to be something I could get behind. And I was already behind it this movement and somehow I didn’t want to walk away from this. I couldn’t walk away from this.

And that night I was with people who also couldn’t walk away. Our amazing, impromptu, radical South Asian contingency, a contingency which stood out in that crowd for sure, did not back down. We did not back down when we were told the first time that Hena spoke that our concerns could be emailed and didn’t need to be dealt with then, we didn’t back down when we were told that again a second time and we didn’t back down when we were told that to “block” the declaration from going forward was a serious serious thing to do. When we threatened that this might mean leaving the movement, being willing to walk away. I knew it was a serious action to take, we all knew it was a serious action to take, and that is why we did it.

I have never blocked something before actually. And the only reason I was able to do so was because there were 5 of us standing there and because Hena had already put herself out there and started shouting “mic check” until they paid attention. And the only reason that I could in that moment was because I felt so urgently that this was something that needed to be said. There is something intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people, but there is something even more intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people with whom you feel aligned and you are saying something that they do not want to hear. And then it is even more intense when that crowd is repeating everything you say– which is the way the General Assemblies or any announcements at Occupy Wall Street work. But hearing yourself in an echo chamber means that you make sure your words mean something because they are being said back to you as you say them.

And so when we finally got everyone’s attention I carefully said what we felt was the problem: that we wanted a small change in language but that this change represented a larger ethical concern of ours. That to erase a history of oppression in this document was not something that we would be able to let happen. That we knew they had been working on this document for a week, that we appreciated the process and that it was in respect to this process that we wouldn’t be silenced. That we demanded a change in the language. And they accepted our change and we withdrew our block as long as the document was published with our change and they said “find us after and we will go through it” and then it was over and everyone was looking somewhere else. I stepped down from the ledge I was standing on and Sonny looked me in the eye and said “you did good” and I’ve never needed to hear that so much as then.

Which is how after the meeting ended we ended up finding the man who had written the document and telling him that he needed to take out the part about us all being “one race, the human race.” But its “scientifically true” he told us. He thought that maybe we were advocating for there being different races? No we needed to tell him about privilege and racism and oppression and how these things still existed, both in the world and someplace like Occupy Wall Street.

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to.

This all has been said by many many strong women of color before me but every time, every single time these levels of power are confronted it I think it needs to be written about, talked about, gone through over and over again.

And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it. I’m going to say that again: we had to fight for it. But it felt worth it. It felt worth it to sit down on the on a street corner in the Financial District at 11:30 pm on a Thursday night, after working all day long and argue for the changing of the first line of Occupy Wall Street’s official Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. It felt worth it not only because we got the line changed but also because while standing in a circle of 20, mostly white men, and explaining racism in front of them: carefully and slowly spelling out that I as a women of color experience the world way differently than the author of the Declaration, a white man, that this was not about him being personally racist but about relations of power, that he needed to, he urgently needed to listen and believe me about this, this moment felt like a victory for the movement on its own.

And this is the other thing. It was hard, and it was fucked up that we had to fight for it in the way we did but we did fight for it and we won. The line was changed, they listened, we sat down and re-wrote it and it has been published with our re-write. And when we walked away, I felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed a movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see– one that takes into account historical and current inequalities, oppressions, racisms, relations of power, one that doesn’t just recreate liberal white privilege but confronts it head on. And if I have to fight to make that happen I will. As long as my people are there standing next to me while I do that.

Later that night I biked home over the Brooklyn Bridge and I somehow felt like the world was, just maybe, at least in that moment, mine, as well as everyone dear to me and everyone who needed and wanted more from the world. I somehow felt like maybe the world could be all of ours.

Much love (and rage)

Manissa

 

[Rocket Scientist]

The protestors still haven't stated what they want.

Go fuck yourself business insider.

 

[ErasureAcer]

I'll be there.

We will make NeoGAF proud.

 

[remnant]

Do you deny the Tea Party is largely an anti-obama movement?

I think it's largely an anti-incumbent movement. Do you think the TP wouldn't exist if John Edwards was president or Hillary Clinton.

Individuals in the tea party can be anti-obama and anti-bush. Look at Ron Paul, who I have supported in the past and still do to some extent.

What I was saying before is the demographic of the tea party is relevant because it further confirms a racial bias within the tea party movement. The movement is based on a message that if anything should be in some ways beneficial to minorities or blacks (end the war on drugs aka big government). However extremists within the tea party show more interest in discussing Obama's citizenship and that kind of behavior is either a racial bias or party bias. That is why the demographic is relevant, it tells us more about this strange behavior. So in conclusion so this is clear, I don't think the Tea Party is the KKK, but I think some behavior within the Tea Party could be described as racism. What do you think? If someone told you they believed Obama was born in Kenya...

No i don't think so. The birther movement was never big, even in the TP. Look at polls asking TP members or any TP candidate and it's always a niche group. To me they are no different than the occupy protestors who have their own crazy niche ideas. Either way I don't believe either are an accurate view of either side, nor can they be used as a basis to say why this is so different/better.

If someone told me they believed Obama was born in Kenya, i would ask them why? i wouldn't assume they are racist. I don't assume people who hear my name and think I was born in Nigeria are racist.

 

[Slavik81]

This was sort of done already, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiring_Incentives_to_Restore_Employment_Act

I came across a nice article with policy recommendations at the end:

Source: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/katz/files/jec_testimony_katz_042910.pdf

If you have some free time, I'd read the rest of the article. It's pretty informative.

That is quite well written. I had a vague sense of most of it already, but thst is much more detailed.

The trouble is that any sort of retraining funding, employment subsidies or infrastructure investment have to come out of government coffers. Which means higher taxes, because I don't think you could really much while being revenue-neutral.

But getting higher taxes past the House? That won't happen in a million years.

If foreign citizens can't donate why is it ok for multinational corporations to?

The laws for both those situations are very, very complicated. I won't claim to understand them, let alone pass judgement on them.

We—two white men—write this letter conscious of the fact that the color of our skin means we will likely be taken more seriously.

White privilege doesn't really work when you try to explicitly use it...

 

[alstein]

Things won't change until the rich fear lack of change more. How you get there- I see many ways, each of them has drawbacks though.

 

[XMonkey]

Things won't change until the rich fear lack of change more. How you get there- I see many ways, each of them has drawbacks though.

If this movement keeps gaining traction, I'd like to see calls for boycotts of certain companies. It's a good non-violent way to have some impact on the bottom line.

 

[Puddles]

I support this movement. In spite of their somewhat conflicting and not-quite-coherent manifesto, I think that there is a central message that needs to be conveyed. For the last several decades, and to a greatest extent over the last three years, the American way of life has been in decline.

- Our real unemployment rate remains over 15%. Our corporations have returned to their pre-2008 profit levels, but with far fewer employees on payroll. They have achieved this through a combination of outsourcing, which is no longer confined to blue-collar manufacturing, but which is affecting white-collar departments like IT and accounting, as well as productivity increases, which to a large degree depend on employees working longer hours for the same pay. How many of you know people who work 10-12 hour days, who take their work home with them, and who aren’t paid for their overtime hours? How many of you know people who are doing the work that 2-3 people used to do? How many of you know people who work at companies that really should hire more people, but won’t because they know their overworked employees are just happy to have a job right now?

- More and more college graduates are taking unpaid internships that violate the Fair Labor Standards Act and don’t lead to full-time positions at their conclusion.

- Healthcare remains out of reach for 16% of the population. Premiums are soaring, deductibles are increasing, and the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that might mitigate some of the damage are years away from being implemented, if the whole act isn’t repealed first.

- Education has become so expensive that a college degree might not even be a net gain for many young people. The entry-level jobs that used to be available for college graduates of any major are disappearing or being converted into unpaid internships. Only science and engineering graduates have any real certainty that they’ll be able to find decent jobs after college.

- Millions of homes are being foreclosed on. Some of these homeowners were irresponsible, to be sure. But many more were making their payments before their interest rates increased. Many were doing fine until a member of the household lost a job. Our government was willing to spend billions bailing out failed financial institutions, but investors are throwing a fit at the idea of allowing judges to lower a family’s mortgage payments to a sustainable level, and our politicians are listening to them.

Americans have been told that this is the new normal. That globalization means that we all have to sacrifice. And yet through all this, there is one group of people who haven’t sacrificed anything. In fact, their standard of living has risen over the past few years. These are the top 1%. But people are increasingly finding this arrangement unacceptable. If we all have to sacrifice, shouldn’t the people who already have the most make the biggest sacrifices? Shouldn’t a profitable company be willing to take a lower profit margin before it slashes payrolls? Shouldn’t a CEO decrease his own salary or bonus before he or she implements layoffs?

The social contract in America is broken. It used to be “work hard and you’ll be able to support a family.” Now it’s “take what we give you, and be happy about it.” Many politicians have convinced their constituents to support policies and economic ways of thinking that run directly against their own interests. They’ve indoctrinated them with a Randian philosophy that states that everything we have comes from our wealthy benefactors who create jobs, invent new products, and make our way of life possible. They dub the wealthiest Americans “producers” and the rest of us “moochers”, failing to acknowledge that every working American is a producer, and that there are millions more who would love nothing more than to be working and producing, but cannot because of the economic crisis caused largely by our financial industry. They fail to acknowledge that a social contract that excessively rewards the wealthy for investment and job creation only works if jobs are created and investments are made. If this isn't happening, then clearly it's time to re-evaulate the way we run our society.

Many of our politicians have turned the bottom 99% against each other. Look no further than the way they refer to our social programs as “entitlements”, conjuring up the image of a spoiled child demanding something he doesn’t deserve. Look at how they’ve attacked the very concepts of organized labor and collective bargaining, which were central to improving working conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They’ve dubbed our struggle for a greater share of the rewards of our societal production as “class warfare”.

They insist that a deficit of over $1 trillion can only be balanced by cuts to our social programs and to our infrastructure and education spending. They’ve proven themselves willing to risk our country’s default to prevent any tax increase on the only Americans who haven’t had to make sacrifices in this time of struggle. They seem oblivious to our declining social mobility, to our lowered standard of living for all but the wealthiest, to our banana republic levels of inequality, and to the diminishing opportunities that young Americans can look forward to. They effectively tell us that the only way we can get back to the American economic reality that our parents grew up with is to make the rich richer, to abandon our ideas about protecting the environment and our workers, and to allow mega-corporations free rein to engage in any anti-consumer, anti-employee practices they so choose.

The voices of the people are being drowned out. One of the most popular aspects of Obama's healthcare reform was the public option. It was bargained away to prevent healthcare corporations from running an ad campagin against the whole thing. One of Bush's accomplishments, Medicare Part D, contained a clause prohibiting the federal government from negotiating bulk discounts with pharmaceutical companies. The Senator who pushed that clause through was given a 7-figure job with the pharmaceutical industry a year later. A majority of Americans would rather increase the top tax rate than cut Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security benefits, but their voices aren't being heard.

This protest is about putting a stop to that. It’s about recognizing that our country is driven by the everyday people who work hard expecting nothing more than a decent standard of living for themselves and their children. It’s about recognizing that the top 1% would have nothing without the rest of society, and that if sacrifices are to be made, then they should be made by all, and not only by those with the least to give. Most of all, it’s about demanding that our politicians be accountable to all of the people, not just to their campaign donors, and that they put the interests of the working class above the interests of their political parties.

 

[Baraka in the White House]

I support this movement. In spite of their somewhat conflicting and not-quite-coherent manifesto, I think that there is a central message that needs to be conveyed. For the last several decades, and to a greatest extent over the last three years, the American way of life has been in decline.

- Our real unemployment rate remains over 15%. Our corporations have returned to their pre-2008 profit levels, but with far fewer employees on payroll. They have achieved this through a combination of outsourcing, which is no longer confined to blue-collar manufacturing, but which is affecting white-collar departments like IT and accounting, as well as productivity increases, which to a large degree depend on employees working longer hours for the same pay. How many of you know people who work 10-12 hour days, who take their work home with them, and who aren’t paid for their overtime hours? How many of you know people who are doing the work that 2-3 people used to do? How many of you know people who work at companies that really should hire more people, but won’t because they know their overworked employees are just happy to have a job right now?

- More and more college graduates are taking unpaid internships that violate the Fair Labor Standards Act and don’t lead to full-time positions at their conclusion.

- Healthcare remains out of reach for 16% of the population. Premiums are soaring, deductibles are increasing, and the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that might mitigate some of the damage are years away from being implemented, if the whole act isn’t repealed first.

- Education has become so expensive that a college degree might not even be a net gain for many young people. The entry-level jobs that used to be available for college graduates of any major are disappearing or being converted into unpaid internships. Only science and engineering graduates have any real certainty that they’ll be able to find decent jobs after college.

- Millions of homes are being foreclosed on. Some of these homeowners were irresponsible, to be sure. But many more were making their payments before their interest rates increased. Many were doing fine until a member of the household lost a job. Our government was willing to spend billions bailing out failed financial institutions, but investors are throwing a fit at the idea of allowing judges to lower a family’s mortgage payments to a sustainable level, and our politicians are listening to them.

Americans have been told that this is the new normal. That globalization means that we all have to sacrifice. And yet through all this, there is one group of people who haven’t sacrificed anything. In fact, their standard of living has risen over the past few years. These are the top 1%. But people are increasingly finding this arrangement unacceptable. If we all have to sacrifice, shouldn’t the people who already have the most make the biggest sacrifices? Shouldn’t a profitable company be willing to take a lower profit margin before it slashes payrolls? Shouldn’t a CEO decrease his own salary or bonus before he or she implements layoffs?

The social contract in America is broken. It used to be “work hard and you’ll be able to support a family.” Now it’s “take what we give you, and be happy about it.” Many politicians have convinced their constituents to support policies and economic ways of thinking that run directly against their own interests. They’ve indoctrinated them with a Randian philosophy that states that everything we have comes from our wealthy benefactors who create jobs, invent new products, and make our way of life possible. They dub the wealthiest Americans “producers” and the rest of us “moochers”, failing to acknowledge that every working American is a producer, and that there are millions more who would love nothing more than to be working and producing, but cannot because of the economic crisis caused largely by our financial industry. They fail to acknowledge that a social contract that excessively rewards the wealthy for investment and job creation only works if jobs are created and investments are made. If this isn't happening, then clearly it's time to re-evaulate the way we run our society.

Many of our politicians have turned the bottom 99% against each other. Look no further than the way they refer to our social programs as “entitlements”, conjuring up the image of a spoiled child demanding something he doesn’t deserve. Look at how they’ve attacked the very concepts of organized labor and collective bargaining, which were central to improving working conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They’ve dubbed our struggle for a greater share of the rewards of our societal production as “class warfare”.

They insist that a deficit of over $1 trillion can only be balanced by cuts to our social programs and to our infrastructure and education spending. They’ve proven themselves willing to risk our country’s default to prevent any tax increase on the only Americans who haven’t had to make sacrifices in this time of struggle. They seem oblivious to our declining social mobility, to our lowered standard of living for all but the wealthiest, to our banana republic levels of inequality, and to the diminishing opportunities that young Americans can look forward to. They effectively tell us that the only way we can get back to the American economic reality that our parents grew up with is to make the rich richer, to abandon our ideas about protecting the environment and our workers, and to allow mega-corporations free rein to engage in any anti-consumer, anti-employee practices they so choose.

The voices of the people are being drowned out. One of the most popular aspects of Obama's healthcare reform was the public option. It was bargained away to prevent healthcare corporations from running an ad campagin against the whole thing. One of Bush's accomplishments, Medicare Part D, contained a clause prohibiting the federal government from negotiating bulk discounts with pharmaceutical companies. The Senator who pushed that clause through was given a 7-figure job with the pharmaceutical industry a year later. A majority of Americans would rather increase the top tax rate than cut Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security benefits, but their voices aren't being heard.

This protest is about putting a stop to that. It’s about recognizing that our country is driven by the everyday people who work hard expecting nothing more than a decent standard of living for themselves and their children. It’s about recognizing that the top 1% would have nothing without the rest of society, and that if sacrifices are to be made, then they should be made by all, and not only by those with the least to give. Most of all, it’s about demanding that our politicians be accountable to all of the people, not just to their campaign donors, and that they put the interests of the working class above the interests of their political parties.

Fucking real talk right here. Deserves to be quoted, on the front page, even.

 

[jamesinclair]

What do you guys think of this:
Open letter and warning from a former tea partier to the OWS movement
I'm normally against conspiracy theories, and I'm a bit dismissive of this, yet I'm not sure. Some of the reasoning is sound, and I really wonder about the potential truth behind this.
Thoughts?

This is actually pretty damn true.

The political part is whats scary. The Tea Party movement didnt start as a GOP thing, it was anti "fat cat wall street big wigs and their bailouts". AKA: the exact same thing as the occupy movement.

And then the GOP hijacked it and turned it around into.....more tax cuts for the corporations!

Democrats will do the same.

 

[MikeOfTheLivingDead]

I don't think that is really surprising when our generation has become a kind of lost generation due to the economic conditions.

I'm part of the original lost generation.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, in the early 90's unemployment amongst folks 24 and under was as high. Granted not quite as high as today, but high enough that none of my friends in a city of millions could find work; certainly higher than any other point in the last two decades. My friends were going out and protesting: Guf War I, Bush I, Clinton... I hustled instead.

Fuck the 1% and fuck the government. Life is short and these protests will mean fuck all 6 months from now. If you think thousands of people holding up signs and tweeting and facebooking are going to reverse the gears on trillions of dollars of industry you will be sorely disappointed. Democrats Republicans it doesn't matter. The government will do nothing for you. Get over yourself and stop worrying about who's getting over on you. Go look out for yourself, build the world you want to live in for yourself, no one is going to do it for you and no protest is going to get it done. If you aren't working now and have time to go sit in a park and hope Radiohead is going to show up you are not trying nearly hard enough.

 

[remnant]

I came across a nice article with policy recommendations at the end:

Source: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/katz/files/jec_testimony_katz_042910.pdf

If you have some free time, I'd read the rest of the article. It's pretty informative.

Both the continued fragility of the economy and the possibility of a sustained jobless recovery represent calls to action for immediate policy steps to expand employment and incentivize job creation. Several promising components of such a jobs creation package include increased aid to fiscally strapped states, enhanced short-run tax incentives for increased private sector employment expansion, and incentives for facilitating investments with high long-run payoffs in energy efficiency (such as some form of a “cash for caulkers” program) and infrastructure. The extremely high current unemployment rate and continued rise in long-term unemployment also make a strong humanitarian and economic case for increasing aid to the unemployed and for a longer-than-normal duration of benefits through the continuation of emergency unemployment compensation.

A net job creation tax credit (as opposed to the recently enacted tax credit for new hires of unemployed workers (note: this refers to the 2010 jobs bill, the wikipedia page of which I linked to) could provide a useful incentive to speed up private sector employment growth as the economy starts to recover. The best available evidence indicates that firms do respond to short-run reduced (marginal) wage costs by moderately expanding employment (e.g., Card 1990). Recent analyses suggest a net job creation tax credit could have a reasonably high effectiveness in terms of employment expansion per dollar of budgetary cost (Bartik and Bishop 2009; Congressional Budget Office 2010).

Most if not all of those ideas were tried with Obama stimulus and failed(some of them are repeats of Bush ideas.) Especially increasing unemployment benefit time.

 

[rush777]

I support this movement. In spite of their somewhat conflicting and not-quite-coherent manifesto, I think that there is a central message that needs to be conveyed. For the last several decades, and to a greatest extent over the last three years, the American way of life has been in decline.

- Our real unemployment rate remains over 15%. Our corporations have returned to their pre-2008 profit levels, but with far fewer employees on payroll. They have achieved this through a combination of outsourcing, which is no longer confined to blue-collar manufacturing, but which is affecting white-collar departments like IT and accounting, as well as productivity increases, which to a large degree depend on employees working longer hours for the same pay. How many of you know people who work 10-12 hour days, who take their work home with them, and who aren’t paid for their overtime hours? How many of you know people who are doing the work that 2-3 people used to do? How many of you know people who work at companies that really should hire more people, but won’t because they know their overworked employees are just happy to have a job right now?

- More and more college graduates are taking unpaid internships that violate the Fair Labor Standards Act and don’t lead to full-time positions at their conclusion.

- Healthcare remains out of reach for 16% of the population. Premiums are soaring, deductibles are increasing, and the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that might mitigate some of the damage are years away from being implemented, if the whole act isn’t repealed first.

- Education has become so expensive that a college degree might not even be a net gain for many young people. The entry-level jobs that used to be available for college graduates of any major are disappearing or being converted into unpaid internships. Only science and engineering graduates have any real certainty that they’ll be able to find decent jobs after college.

- Millions of homes are being foreclosed on. Some of these homeowners were irresponsible, to be sure. But many more were making their payments before their interest rates increased. Many were doing fine until a member of the household lost a job. Our government was willing to spend billions bailing out failed financial institutions, but investors are throwing a fit at the idea of allowing judges to lower a family’s mortgage payments to a sustainable level, and our politicians are listening to them.

Americans have been told that this is the new normal. That globalization means that we all have to sacrifice. And yet through all this, there is one group of people who haven’t sacrificed anything. In fact, their standard of living has risen over the past few years. These are the top 1%. But people are increasingly finding this arrangement unacceptable. If we all have to sacrifice, shouldn’t the people who already have the most make the biggest sacrifices? Shouldn’t a profitable company be willing to take a lower profit margin before it slashes payrolls? Shouldn’t a CEO decrease his own salary or bonus before he or she implements layoffs?

The social contract in America is broken. It used to be “work hard and you’ll be able to support a family.” Now it’s “take what we give you, and be happy about it.” Many politicians have convinced their constituents to support policies and economic ways of thinking that run directly against their own interests. They’ve indoctrinated them with a Randian philosophy that states that everything we have comes from our wealthy benefactors who create jobs, invent new products, and make our way of life possible. They dub the wealthiest Americans “producers” and the rest of us “moochers”, failing to acknowledge that every working American is a producer, and that there are millions more who would love nothing more than to be working and producing, but cannot because of the economic crisis caused largely by our financial industry. They fail to acknowledge that a social contract that excessively rewards the wealthy for investment and job creation only works if jobs are created and investments are made. If this isn't happening, then clearly it's time to re-evaulate the way we run our society.

Many of our politicians have turned the bottom 99% against each other. Look no further than the way they refer to our social programs as “entitlements”, conjuring up the image of a spoiled child demanding something he doesn’t deserve. Look at how they’ve attacked the very concepts of organized labor and collective bargaining, which were central to improving working conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They’ve dubbed our struggle for a greater share of the rewards of our societal production as “class warfare”.

They insist that a deficit of over $1 trillion can only be balanced by cuts to our social programs and to our infrastructure and education spending. They’ve proven themselves willing to risk our country’s default to prevent any tax increase on the only Americans who haven’t had to make sacrifices in this time of struggle. They seem oblivious to our declining social mobility, to our lowered standard of living for all but the wealthiest, to our banana republic levels of inequality, and to the diminishing opportunities that young Americans can look forward to. They effectively tell us that the only way we can get back to the American economic reality that our parents grew up with is to make the rich richer, to abandon our ideas about protecting the environment and our workers, and to allow mega-corporations free rein to engage in any anti-consumer, anti-employee practices they so choose.

The voices of the people are being drowned out. One of the most popular aspects of Obama's healthcare reform was the public option. It was bargained away to prevent healthcare corporations from running an ad campagin against the whole thing. One of Bush's accomplishments, Medicare Part D, contained a clause prohibiting the federal government from negotiating bulk discounts with pharmaceutical companies. The Senator who pushed that clause through was given a 7-figure job with the pharmaceutical industry a year later. A majority of Americans would rather increase the top tax rate than cut Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security benefits, but their voices aren't being heard.

This protest is about putting a stop to that. It’s about recognizing that our country is driven by the everyday people who work hard expecting nothing more than a decent standard of living for themselves and their children. It’s about recognizing that the top 1% would have nothing without the rest of society, and that if sacrifices are to be made, then they should be made by all, and not only by those with the least to give. Most of all, it’s about demanding that our politicians be accountable to all of the people, not just to their campaign donors, and that they put the interests of the working class above the interests of their political parties.

Excellent post Puddles, this is exactly how I and many others look at the situation.

 

[ErasureAcer]

This type of comment is below the standards of this debate (standards you yourself have easily met until now) and is not fitting with the spirit of these protests. If this is to be an inclusive movement, we should at least be willing to hear each other out, and if we disagree - do so respectfully and with substance.

Dude's post was saying this is run by white men. Dude obviously hasn't checked out any of the coverage on youtube, live streams or anything else for that matter. I stand by my comment. Dude was a troll and got a response given to trolls.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

One company with billions of dollars is more powerful than billions of people with no money. Sad, but true.

Do I support 'em though? You bet. Do I think they'll accomplish anything? Nope.