An Interview with Kirkpatrick Sale
by David Kupfer
Culture Change, Summer 1996
Kirkpatrick Sale has written a book on the Luddites titled Rebels Against the Future, released in paper-back in 1996 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., U.S. $13; 320 pp.
DK: From where was your desire to write this historical interpretation of the Luddites born?
KS: If you locate the problem as being the industrial system, it's simple to say: "Well, let's go back to the industrial revolution, the big industrial revolution."
And after you make that identification, the next one is to say: "Well, did anybody ever object to this?" And you find the Luddites there.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution (about 1785), they rose up in resistance. They made a brave effort that, although it failed, was so powerful that it embedded their dream in the language.
So I decided to study the Luddites in a positive light, which had almost never been done before. The two other books on the Luddites, written in England, essentially were saying these were foolish and misguided people.
Do you think the Luddites are misunderstood today?
Of course. Everyone assumes they were bad people who were against all technology and were fools to resist it. In general the Luddite image today is negative. People will say, "Well you don't want to use a computer, then you must be a Luddite," meaning a social outcast. Or they'll say, "Well I'm no Luddite, but I can't reset the clock in my VCR," meaning "I don't want to be thought of against technology, mind you..."
The connotation of Luddism is "taking us back," while it is human nature to progress, to build on and go forth.
To believe that what has happened to humankind in the last 200 years is "progress" is to fall into an industrialist trap of: "Anything new is better and everything is better tomorrow than it is today because we have more material advantages and more ease and speed in our life and this is good."
The Luddites did not want to turn the clock back. They said, "We want to cling to this way of life; we don't want a life in which we're forced into factories, forced onto machines we can't control, and forced from village self-sufficiency into urban dependency and servitude."
A modern Luddite is also trying to hold to certain elements of the past to resurrect the community. A modern Luddite would say that, of the array of technology around, we should choose what we want and what we don't. And we will do so in a democratic basis within this community and within this bioregion on the basis of the economic, social and environmental costs. Neo-Luddites wish to resurrect some values of the past such as communitarianism, non-materialism, an understanding of nature, and a meshing with nature. These things have been largely taken from us in these last 200 years and we must fight to preserve them.
Do you think that the Luddites today are one of the last positive minorities?
I do. And I wonder how much of a minority they are — sometimes I'm persuaded they're a majority. Millions of people believe that this new industrial revolution is, as Newsweek said in February, "outstripping our capacity to cope and shifting our concept of reality."
People feeling this way range from those who simply don't like these new technologies, to people who have lost their jobs because of them, to people who understand that specific technologies — such as asbestos or nuclear power or pesticides or silicone implants that were sold to them as great benefits of technology — have turned out to hurt us. Then there are philosophical opponents of these technologies.
If you put them all together, I think we have many tens of millions of people who at least understand the dangers of this technological revolution and wish they knew how to resist it.
Do you think these neo-Luddites see themselves as such?
Not for the most part. They have come to their positions often by happenstantial ways. What I hope is that we could get a movement going by saying to them, "Yes, there are a lot of other people like you — you are not alone." They might come to proudly say, "I am a Luddite, and I have millions like me who are proudly saying they are Luddites." If it happens to be a word like Quaker or Queer that started out as insults, but for people who were insulted that way said, "I'm proud of being a Quaker," and will take that. "I'm a Quaker, I'm a Queer, and will defend proudly what that means." And that same thing may happen to the word "Luddite."
Looking at your past works, they seem to outline a path to return to some sort of tribal mode of existence.
Yes. And by "tribal" I mean small-scale and communitarian and nature-based, which is what tribal societies have always been and always will be. This is why they were so successful, the reasons they have survived for a million years and remained the form of our society for the greater part of our time on Earth.
You've written that the term "post-industrial" is a misnomer. Where did it come from? Do you think the purpose of its introduction into the lexicon was to mislead people concerned about social/technological change?
"Post-industrial" was invented by the proponents of the computer revolution to suggest that all the bad things about industry were left behind and you're now in a new age where there's nothing but good things. We don't have those belching smoke stacks anymore; we have modern, suburban, glass-walled buildings in which we use computers; this is post-industrial. But that's sleight of hand. The industry that used to belch smoke is still an industry, even if it's using computers.
Why do you think there are so few images in the popular culture for sustainability?
"Sustainable" is essentially the opposite of "industrial." Sustainability implies a non-exploitive relationship with nature and a basic self-sufficiency in life. Well, industrialism can't allow that to exist because that kind of living would not create, manufacture, use or consume. Sustainability, community and self-sufficiency are antithetical to industrialism.
Yes, they have come up with this idea now called "sustainable development," but it is actually the most odious oxymoron going around. Development of the kind that is meant in industrial civilization is destructive of communities, people's lands, and eventually, of people's livelihoods. Sustainable development is a convenient industrial myth. It really means that corporations try to get people in the great world south to become consumers so they can keep this Ponzi scheme of industrialism going.
Ponzi scheme?
That's the con game of taking from one investor and paying off another. It's a con game, this industrialism. It needs the constant creation of different needs and finding different populations to force into consumptive ways. So the industrial system tries to make these people in the less developed world think there's nothing more wonderful than having a car. Thoughts, such as that there are a billion Chinese who might drive cars, are what sustains the entire industrial economy.
Finding new markets has always been the industrialist's necessity. But if a billion Chinese drove cars, or even a half a billion, the resulting pollution would cause the air to be unbreathable around the world. This seems to have escaped the notice of these people, or they don't care as long as they can make their profits in the short term.
It is seldom realized that 5 percent of the world's population here in North America uses up between 35 and 40 percent of the world's resources to sustain our way of life. If you then have another 5 percent at this level, then 70 to 80 percent of the world's resources would be used up. And if you have 15 percent of the world's population living at this level, that would use up 120 percent of the world's resources, which means global destruction and we all die. The logic of industrial progress is therefore the logic of global destruction.
In its attempts to oppose this destruction, what do you think is the environmental movement's greatest strength?
I don't think the environmental movement is proving to be very strong or imaginative these days. I think the mainstream environmental movement — the Washington lobbying kind of environmentalism — has reached a kind of dead end.
That the mindset of 20th century industrial society is the problem has to be drilled into the minds of environmental movement — but I don't see that happening. It's a profound realization, and very difficult to realize because it's like fish being able to say that the water that they swim in is polluted when fish don't even know that they're swimming in water.
It's a profound thing for people to say that this Western Civilization, which is all they know and all they ever have known, is itself polluted and that it needs to be dispensed with. But we have to understand that the enemy is much larger than what we've ever identified it to be before.
It does harken back to the appropriate technology movement which emphasized the need to recreate all our basic political systems ...
Except there was a sense back then that technology was the answer. I think that we have come beyond that because technology so often led into this mindset of science and technology providing solutions for us. A dangerous way to think.
But we still have leaders such as Paul Hawken saying we need to work with the corporations, convert them and make them sustainable.
Unless we start with the presumption that the corporations, and the legislatures that protect those corporations, are the enemy and the problem, there will never be hope for environmentalism. Even though there are good people, perhaps, in the corporate system — who are not themselves evil — it is the nature of the corporation to be evil because that's how it survives. Its task is to use up the resources of the earth in the swiftest and most efficient way at the greatest profit. And it has developed technologies that enable them to do that in a spectacular way.
I grant you that there is a certain liberal tradition that says we will compromise and we'll let them have this over here if they will let us stop them from building a dam here. There have been certain modest victories from working with the legislatures and corporations. But this is a dead end because you never win the victories. They can always put the dam in and always decide that they're not going to preserve that forest. They're going to cut it down, and you're not changing the mindset that allows them, this society, to have its assaults on nature.
Environmentalists also must realize the true glories in life are in nature, and that we must get ourselves back into nature in a communitarian way. Far from being a difficult and repressive kind of future, that is the most enlightening, liberating kind possible. This is not a common way of thinking among mainstream environmentalists, or even the grassroots. But it must be part of the vision if there's going to be any kind of sustainable future.
David Kupfer is a long-time environmental activist and journalist, semi-nomadic but now based in Selma, Ore.
environment, environmentalism, human rights, ecoanarchism
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts
December 27, 2011
December 9, 2011
The War of the Banks Against the People
Michael Hudson writes at Counterpunch, "Europe’s Deadly Transition from Social Democracy to Oligarchy":
What banks want is for the economic surplus to be paid out as interest, not used for rising living standards, public social spending or even for new capital investment. Research and development takes too long. Finance lives in the short run. This short-termism is self-defeating, yet it is presented as science. The alternative, voters are told, is the road to serfdom: interfering with the “free market” by financial regulation and even progressive taxation.
There is an alternative, of course. It is what European civilization from the 13th-century Schoolmen through the Enlightenment and the flowering of classical political economy sought to create: an economy free of unearned income, free of vested interests using special privileges for “rent extraction.” At the hands of the neoliberals, by contrast, a free market is one free for a tax-favored rentier class to extract interest, economic rent and monopoly prices. ...
If the euro breaks up, it is because of the obligation of governments to pay bankers in money that must be borrowed rather than created through their own central bank. Unlike the United States and Britain which can create central bank credit on their own computer keyboards to keep their economy from shrinking or becoming insolvent, the German constitution and the Lisbon Treaty prevent the central bank from doing this.
The effect is to oblige governments to borrow from commercial banks at interest. This gives bankers the ability to create a crisis – threatening to drive economies out of the Eurozone if they do not submit to “conditionalities” being imposed in what quickly is becoming a new class war of finance against labor.
One of the three defining characteristics of a nation-state is the power to create money. A second characteristic is the power to levy taxes. Both of these powers are being transferred out of the hands of democratically elected representatives to the financial sector, as a result of tying the hands of government.
The third characteristic of a nation-state is the power to declare war. What is happening today is the equivalent of warfare – but against the power of government! It is above all a financial mode of warfare – and the aims of this financial appropriation are the same as those of military conquest: first, the land and subsoil riches on which to charge rents as tribute; second, public infrastructure to extract rent as access fees; and third, any other enterprises or assets in the public domain. ...
Bankers do not want to take responsibility for bad loans. This poses the financial problem of just what policy-makers should do when banks have been so irresponsible in allocating credit. But somebody has to take a loss. Should it be society at large, or the bankers? ...
At least in the most badly indebted countries, European voters are waking up to an oligarchic coup in which taxation and government budgetary planning and control is passing into the hands of executives nominated by the international bankers’ cartel.
What banks want is for the economic surplus to be paid out as interest, not used for rising living standards, public social spending or even for new capital investment. Research and development takes too long. Finance lives in the short run. This short-termism is self-defeating, yet it is presented as science. The alternative, voters are told, is the road to serfdom: interfering with the “free market” by financial regulation and even progressive taxation.
There is an alternative, of course. It is what European civilization from the 13th-century Schoolmen through the Enlightenment and the flowering of classical political economy sought to create: an economy free of unearned income, free of vested interests using special privileges for “rent extraction.” At the hands of the neoliberals, by contrast, a free market is one free for a tax-favored rentier class to extract interest, economic rent and monopoly prices. ...
If the euro breaks up, it is because of the obligation of governments to pay bankers in money that must be borrowed rather than created through their own central bank. Unlike the United States and Britain which can create central bank credit on their own computer keyboards to keep their economy from shrinking or becoming insolvent, the German constitution and the Lisbon Treaty prevent the central bank from doing this.
The effect is to oblige governments to borrow from commercial banks at interest. This gives bankers the ability to create a crisis – threatening to drive economies out of the Eurozone if they do not submit to “conditionalities” being imposed in what quickly is becoming a new class war of finance against labor.
One of the three defining characteristics of a nation-state is the power to create money. A second characteristic is the power to levy taxes. Both of these powers are being transferred out of the hands of democratically elected representatives to the financial sector, as a result of tying the hands of government.
The third characteristic of a nation-state is the power to declare war. What is happening today is the equivalent of warfare – but against the power of government! It is above all a financial mode of warfare – and the aims of this financial appropriation are the same as those of military conquest: first, the land and subsoil riches on which to charge rents as tribute; second, public infrastructure to extract rent as access fees; and third, any other enterprises or assets in the public domain. ...
Bankers do not want to take responsibility for bad loans. This poses the financial problem of just what policy-makers should do when banks have been so irresponsible in allocating credit. But somebody has to take a loss. Should it be society at large, or the bankers? ...
At least in the most badly indebted countries, European voters are waking up to an oligarchic coup in which taxation and government budgetary planning and control is passing into the hands of executives nominated by the international bankers’ cartel.
December 2, 2011
The creditor class v. humanity
There are a couple of excellent history articles at Counterpunch this weekend:
Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped by MICHAEL HUDSON
Wall Street’s Failed 1934 Coup by MICHAEL DONNELLY
Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped by MICHAEL HUDSON
Wall Street’s Failed 1934 Coup by MICHAEL DONNELLY
November 29, 2011
Historical Trends in Income Inequality
From "A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality" by Chad Stone, Hannah Shaw, Danilo Trisi, and Arloc Sherman, November 28, 2011, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized:
The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized:
- The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity.
- Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.
- The income gap between those high up the income ladder and those on the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period.
- Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened.
- Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.
- The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen more than 80 years ago (during the "Roaring Twenties").
- Wealth (the value of a household's property and financial assets net of the value of its debts) is much more highly concentrated than income, although the wealth data do not show a dramatic increase in concentration at the very top the way the income data do. ...
November 22, 2011
From Athens Polytechnic to UC Davis
Linda Katehi a few months ago helped to end Greek restrictions on police entering university campuses. She was a student at Athens Polytechnic during the 1973 uprising there which led to the downfall of the military junta. What a disturbed individual.
http://johnquiggin.posterous.com/athens-polytechnic-comes-to-uc-davis
http://johnquiggin.posterous.com/athens-polytechnic-comes-to-uc-davis
November 21, 2011
Goldman Sachs taking over Europe
Goldman Sachs has already established itself at the reins of the U.S. government (e.g., director of the National Economic Council Robert Rubin under Clinton, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson under Bush, and Timothy Geithner, president of the NY Federal Reserve Bank under Bush and Treasury Secretary under Clinton and Obama's chief economic adviser and former National Economic Council director Larry Summers, who was also Treasury Secretary under Bush); they are increasingly part of Europe's governments as well, as reported in "What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe", The Independent, 18 Nov. 2011.
For example, Italy's new prime minister, Mario Monti, was on the GS board of international advisers. (He is also European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission.) Greece's new prime minister, Lucas Papademos, ran Greece's Central Bank when it made derivatives deals with GS to hide size of Greece's debt. (He too, is a member of the Trilateral Commission.) The head of Greece's debt management agency, Petros Christodoufou, is a GS alumus. The new head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, was vice chairman and managing director of GS International.
One is compelled to wonder how much of the Euro crisis was actually manufactured by Goldman Sachs to maintain the U.S. dollar's dominance as world currency.
See also "Just Another Goldman Sachs Take Over" by Paul Craig Roberts.
For example, Italy's new prime minister, Mario Monti, was on the GS board of international advisers. (He is also European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission.) Greece's new prime minister, Lucas Papademos, ran Greece's Central Bank when it made derivatives deals with GS to hide size of Greece's debt. (He too, is a member of the Trilateral Commission.) The head of Greece's debt management agency, Petros Christodoufou, is a GS alumus. The new head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, was vice chairman and managing director of GS International.
One is compelled to wonder how much of the Euro crisis was actually manufactured by Goldman Sachs to maintain the U.S. dollar's dominance as world currency.
See also "Just Another Goldman Sachs Take Over" by Paul Craig Roberts.
November 20, 2011
Obama: Refrain from violence against peaceful protestors — hah!
Obama calls on authorities to refrain from violence against peaceful protestors. In January. In Egypt. Not now in Egypt or U.S. [via The New Civil Rights Movement]
Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt
January 28, 2011
State Dining Room
Good evening, everybody. My administration has been closely monitoring the situation in Egypt, and I know that we will be learning more tomorrow when day breaks. As the situation continues to unfold, our first concern is preventing injury or loss of life. So I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protestors.
The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.
I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the Internet, to cell phone service and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.
At the same time, those protesting in the streets have a responsibility to express themselves peacefully. Violence and destruction will not lead to the reforms that they seek.
Now, going forward, this moment of volatility has to be turned into a moment of promise. The United States has a close partnership with Egypt and we’ve cooperated on many issues, including working together to advance a more peaceful region. But we’ve also been clear that there must be reform — political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people.
In the absence of these reforms, grievances have built up over time. When President Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people tonight, he pledged a better democracy and greater economic opportunity. I just spoke to him after his speech and I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.
Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people. And suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. What’s needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people: a meaningful dialogue between the government and its citizens, and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.
Now, ultimately the future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people. And I believe that the Egyptian people want the same things that we all want — a better life for ourselves and our children, and a government that is fair and just and responsive. Put simply, the Egyptian people want a future that befits the heirs to a great and ancient civilization.
The United States always will be a partner in pursuit of that future. And we are committed to working with the Egyptian government and the Egyptian people — all quarters — to achieve it.
Around the world governments have an obligation to respond to their citizens. That’s true here in the United States; that’s true in Asia; it is true in Europe; it is true in Africa; and it’s certainly true in the Arab world, where a new generation of citizens has the right to be heard.
When I was in Cairo, shortly after I was elected President, I said that all governments must maintain power through consent, not coercion. That is the single standard by which the people of Egypt will achieve the future they deserve.
Surely there will be difficult days to come. But the United States will continue to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people and work with their government in pursuit of a future that is more just, more free, and more hopeful.
Thank you very much.
January 28, 2011
State Dining Room
Good evening, everybody. My administration has been closely monitoring the situation in Egypt, and I know that we will be learning more tomorrow when day breaks. As the situation continues to unfold, our first concern is preventing injury or loss of life. So I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protestors.
The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.
I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the Internet, to cell phone service and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.
At the same time, those protesting in the streets have a responsibility to express themselves peacefully. Violence and destruction will not lead to the reforms that they seek.
Now, going forward, this moment of volatility has to be turned into a moment of promise. The United States has a close partnership with Egypt and we’ve cooperated on many issues, including working together to advance a more peaceful region. But we’ve also been clear that there must be reform — political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people.
In the absence of these reforms, grievances have built up over time. When President Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people tonight, he pledged a better democracy and greater economic opportunity. I just spoke to him after his speech and I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.
Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people. And suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. What’s needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people: a meaningful dialogue between the government and its citizens, and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.
Now, ultimately the future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people. And I believe that the Egyptian people want the same things that we all want — a better life for ourselves and our children, and a government that is fair and just and responsive. Put simply, the Egyptian people want a future that befits the heirs to a great and ancient civilization.
The United States always will be a partner in pursuit of that future. And we are committed to working with the Egyptian government and the Egyptian people — all quarters — to achieve it.
Around the world governments have an obligation to respond to their citizens. That’s true here in the United States; that’s true in Asia; it is true in Europe; it is true in Africa; and it’s certainly true in the Arab world, where a new generation of citizens has the right to be heard.
When I was in Cairo, shortly after I was elected President, I said that all governments must maintain power through consent, not coercion. That is the single standard by which the people of Egypt will achieve the future they deserve.
Surely there will be difficult days to come. But the United States will continue to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people and work with their government in pursuit of a future that is more just, more free, and more hopeful.
Thank you very much.
November 18, 2011
We are here to denounce the control of our government by the 1%
We are Occupy Memphis. We stand with the Occupy Wall Street Movement and all other nonviolent democratic uprisings around the world.
We are here to denounce the control of our government by the 1%. We the People have a right to govern ourselves; that right has been usurped by corporations, big banks, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the wealthiest 1% of our population. These elites put profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality.
They say we have a budget crisis, but what we have is a priority crisis. They say we have a fiscal deficit, but what we have is a deficit of democracy. They have taken our silence for consent, but no more.
We are seniors, teachers, small business owners, clergy, and union members. We are clerks, firefighters, nurses, police, and immigrants. We are service workers, veterans, entrepreneurs, students, the unemployed, and recipients of Social Security benefits.
We are mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, friends, and neighbors. We are those who do all the work and keep this society running. We are you and you are one of us. We are the 99%. We are here to peacefully Occupy Memphis until our demands are heard.
We demand that Wall Street be held accountable for its role in the destruction of the global financial system.
We demand that the 1% pay their fair share of taxes, that all tax loopholes benefiting the super-rich are closed, and that those who try to skirt our country’s tax laws are tried and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
We demand that corporations not be afforded the same First Amendment rights as individuals; that corporations not be allowed to influence elections through campaign contributions.
We demand equal treatment from our justice system at all levels and at every stage, from investigations, through trials and sentencing, regardless of race or social class.
We demand that our government recognize health care as a basic human right. It is shameful that our city’s infant mortality rate is higher than in many developing countries.
We demand an end to Tennessee’s regressive labor laws, such as right-to-work and at-will employment, which keep us in poverty. We demand an ordinance mandating that no city services can be privatized; any outsourced services should be brought back in-house.
We demand affordable and fair housing for all and that Wells Fargo be held accountable for its racist, predatory lending practices in Memphis.
We demand that those Memphians who experienced foreclosures due to the illegal activities of banks and other financial institutions be adequately compensated and their debt forgiven.
We demand that the city use our money for education and public services rather than corporate incentives and tax freezes for companies like Bass Pro or Electrolux. Memphis gives away more public dollars in corporate welfare than any other city in the state, yet our unemployment rate is at 12.1%.
We demand a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Our concerns will be addressed. Our demands will be met. We will not be discouraged. We will not be intimidated. We will not be ignored. We are the 99%.
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” —Martin Luther King, Jr
En Español: La Primera Declaración de la Ocupación de Memphis
We are here to denounce the control of our government by the 1%. We the People have a right to govern ourselves; that right has been usurped by corporations, big banks, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the wealthiest 1% of our population. These elites put profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality.
They say we have a budget crisis, but what we have is a priority crisis. They say we have a fiscal deficit, but what we have is a deficit of democracy. They have taken our silence for consent, but no more.
We are seniors, teachers, small business owners, clergy, and union members. We are clerks, firefighters, nurses, police, and immigrants. We are service workers, veterans, entrepreneurs, students, the unemployed, and recipients of Social Security benefits.
We are mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, friends, and neighbors. We are those who do all the work and keep this society running. We are you and you are one of us. We are the 99%. We are here to peacefully Occupy Memphis until our demands are heard.
We demand that Wall Street be held accountable for its role in the destruction of the global financial system.
We demand that the 1% pay their fair share of taxes, that all tax loopholes benefiting the super-rich are closed, and that those who try to skirt our country’s tax laws are tried and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
We demand that corporations not be afforded the same First Amendment rights as individuals; that corporations not be allowed to influence elections through campaign contributions.
We demand equal treatment from our justice system at all levels and at every stage, from investigations, through trials and sentencing, regardless of race or social class.
We demand that our government recognize health care as a basic human right. It is shameful that our city’s infant mortality rate is higher than in many developing countries.
We demand an end to Tennessee’s regressive labor laws, such as right-to-work and at-will employment, which keep us in poverty. We demand an ordinance mandating that no city services can be privatized; any outsourced services should be brought back in-house.
We demand affordable and fair housing for all and that Wells Fargo be held accountable for its racist, predatory lending practices in Memphis.
We demand that those Memphians who experienced foreclosures due to the illegal activities of banks and other financial institutions be adequately compensated and their debt forgiven.
We demand that the city use our money for education and public services rather than corporate incentives and tax freezes for companies like Bass Pro or Electrolux. Memphis gives away more public dollars in corporate welfare than any other city in the state, yet our unemployment rate is at 12.1%.
We demand a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Our concerns will be addressed. Our demands will be met. We will not be discouraged. We will not be intimidated. We will not be ignored. We are the 99%.
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” —Martin Luther King, Jr
En Español: La Primera Declaración de la Ocupación de Memphis
November 13, 2011
We Are The Many, by Makana
We occupy the courts
We occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
October 27, 2011
Tax the Rich! End the Wars!
How to end the federal budget crisis:
Tax the Rich.
End the Wars.
(And tax "capital gains" the same as wages and other income.)
End the Wars.
(And tax "capital gains" the same as wages and other income.)
October 24, 2011
Solidarity from Cairo
We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.
[[[[ ]]]]
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.
Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.
An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.
The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people’s right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.
So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.
In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting –these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst.
What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.
But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.
We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.
If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.
By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.
Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.
—from solidarity statement, by courtesy of South/South
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.
Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.
An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.
The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people’s right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.
So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.
In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting –these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst.
What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.
But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.
We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.
If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.
By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.
Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.
October 17, 2011
News Quiz — 475:1
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October 14, 2011
Political Disobedience: Indignez-Vous!
[Scroll down, or click here, for English translation of excerpts from Stéphane Hessel's "Indignez-vous"]
Bernard Harcourt writes:
Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.
And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ ... What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.
One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
[[[[ ]]]]
And Stéphane Hessel writes in "Indignez-vous":
The National Council of Resistance ... had adopted a program on 15 March 1944, offering for liberated France a group of principles and values on which would rest the modern democracy of our country. We need those principles and values today more than ever.
It is up to us together to make sure that our society remains a society of which we are proud: not this society of undocumented aliens, of extraditions, of suspicion of immigrants, not this society which threatens pensions, social security, not this society where the media are in the hands of the monied, all things that we would have refused to allow if we were the true heirs of the National Council of Resistance. ... All of the bases of the social triumphs of the Resistance are under threat today.
Some dare to say to us that the State can no longer meet the costs of such measures for its citizens. But how can there be a lack of money today to maintain and extend these triumphs since the production of wealth has considerably grown since the Liberation, a time when Europe was in ruins? Instead it is because the power of money, so much opposed by the Resistance, has never been so bloated, arrogant, selfish, with its own servants in the highest spheres of the State. The banks, now privatized, show themselves to be primarily concerned with their dividends, and the huge salaries of their directors, not the general interest. The separation between the most poor and the most rich has never been so great, and the race for money, competition, so encouraged.
The motive at the base of the Resistance was indignation. We, veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them, Take our place, Get angry! Political and economic leaders, intellectuals, and all of society do not have to submit to, nor allow their oppression by, the international dictatorship of financial markets that truly threatens peace and democracy.
I wish for each of you, each one of you, to have your own motive for indignation. It is precious. When something angers you as I was angered by nazism, then you become militant, strong, and engaged. You rejoin the flow of history, and the grand course of history continues thanks to each one of you. And that course moves toward greater justice, greater freedom, and not the unbridled liberty of the fox in the henhouse. ...
For a peaceful insurrection
I have noted – and I am not alone – the reaction of the Israeli government confronted every Friday by the way the citizens of Bil'in march, without throwing rocks, without using force, to the wall against which they protest. The Israeli authorities have classified this march as "nonviolent terrorism". Not bad – Israel has to call it terrorism, this nonviolence. They must be especially embarrassed by the effectiveness of nonviolence as it provokes support, understanding, the support of everyone in the world who are the enemies of oppression.
The production mindset of the West has drawn the world into a crisis from which it needs to emerge by a radical break from the drive for "always more", in the financial domain, but also the domain of science and technology. It is high time that ethical concerns, justice, lasting balance come to the fore. ...
How to conclude this call to get angry? By remembering again what, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Program of the National Council of Resistance, we said on 8 March 2004, we veterans of the Resistance movement and combat forces of Free France, that surely "nazism is vanquished, thanks to the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and the nations united against fascist barbarism. But that menace has not completely disappeared, and our anger against injustice remains intact".
No, that menace has not completely disappeared. Therefore, we are always called to "a true peaceful insurrection against the means of mass communication that offer our youth only a future of mass consumption, scorn for the weakest, general amnesia, and brute competition of all against all".
To those men and women who will shape the twenty-first century, we say with our affection:
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
Bernard Harcourt writes:
Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.
And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ ... What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.
One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
And Stéphane Hessel writes in "Indignez-vous":
The National Council of Resistance ... had adopted a program on 15 March 1944, offering for liberated France a group of principles and values on which would rest the modern democracy of our country. We need those principles and values today more than ever.
It is up to us together to make sure that our society remains a society of which we are proud: not this society of undocumented aliens, of extraditions, of suspicion of immigrants, not this society which threatens pensions, social security, not this society where the media are in the hands of the monied, all things that we would have refused to allow if we were the true heirs of the National Council of Resistance. ... All of the bases of the social triumphs of the Resistance are under threat today.
Some dare to say to us that the State can no longer meet the costs of such measures for its citizens. But how can there be a lack of money today to maintain and extend these triumphs since the production of wealth has considerably grown since the Liberation, a time when Europe was in ruins? Instead it is because the power of money, so much opposed by the Resistance, has never been so bloated, arrogant, selfish, with its own servants in the highest spheres of the State. The banks, now privatized, show themselves to be primarily concerned with their dividends, and the huge salaries of their directors, not the general interest. The separation between the most poor and the most rich has never been so great, and the race for money, competition, so encouraged.
The motive at the base of the Resistance was indignation. We, veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them, Take our place, Get angry! Political and economic leaders, intellectuals, and all of society do not have to submit to, nor allow their oppression by, the international dictatorship of financial markets that truly threatens peace and democracy.
I wish for each of you, each one of you, to have your own motive for indignation. It is precious. When something angers you as I was angered by nazism, then you become militant, strong, and engaged. You rejoin the flow of history, and the grand course of history continues thanks to each one of you. And that course moves toward greater justice, greater freedom, and not the unbridled liberty of the fox in the henhouse. ...
For a peaceful insurrection
I have noted – and I am not alone – the reaction of the Israeli government confronted every Friday by the way the citizens of Bil'in march, without throwing rocks, without using force, to the wall against which they protest. The Israeli authorities have classified this march as "nonviolent terrorism". Not bad – Israel has to call it terrorism, this nonviolence. They must be especially embarrassed by the effectiveness of nonviolence as it provokes support, understanding, the support of everyone in the world who are the enemies of oppression.
The production mindset of the West has drawn the world into a crisis from which it needs to emerge by a radical break from the drive for "always more", in the financial domain, but also the domain of science and technology. It is high time that ethical concerns, justice, lasting balance come to the fore. ...
How to conclude this call to get angry? By remembering again what, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Program of the National Council of Resistance, we said on 8 March 2004, we veterans of the Resistance movement and combat forces of Free France, that surely "nazism is vanquished, thanks to the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and the nations united against fascist barbarism. But that menace has not completely disappeared, and our anger against injustice remains intact".
No, that menace has not completely disappeared. Therefore, we are always called to "a true peaceful insurrection against the means of mass communication that offer our youth only a future of mass consumption, scorn for the weakest, general amnesia, and brute competition of all against all".
To those men and women who will shape the twenty-first century, we say with our affection:
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
October 13, 2011
October 11, 2011
October 10, 2011
Occupy… links
Proposed grievances
Proposed demands posted on October 7, 2011, at Occupy Chicago:
1. PASS HR 1489 REINSTATING GLASS-STEAGALL. – A depression era safeguard that separated the commercial lending and investment banking portions of banks. Its repeal in 1999 is considered the major cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008-2009.
2. REPEAL BUSH TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY
3. FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.
4.OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED v. US. – A 2010 Supreme Court Decision which ruled that money is speech. Corporations, as legal persons, are now allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns in the exercise of free “speech.”
5. PASS THE BUFFET RULE ON FAIR TAXATION, CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOPHOLES, PROHIBIT HIDING FUNDS OFFSHORE.
6. GIVE THE SEC STRICTER REGULATORY POWER, STRENGTHEN THE CONSUMER PROTECTION BUREAU, AND PROVIDE ASSISTANCE FOR OWNERS OF FORECLOSED MORTGAGES WHO WERE VICTIMS OF PREDATORY LENDING.
7. TAKE STEPS TO LIMIT THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATE THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION.
8. ELIMINATE RIGHT OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS OR INDUSTRIES THEY ONCE REGULATED.
9. ELIMINATE CORPORATE PERSONHOOD.
10. INSIST THE FEC STAND UP FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN REGULATING PRIVATE USE OF PUBLIC AIRWAVES to help ensure that political candidates ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME for free at reasonable intervals during campaign season.
11. REFORM CAMPAIGN FINANCE WITH THE PASSAGE OF THE FAIR ELECTIONS NOW ACT (S.750, H.R. 1404).
12. FORGIVE STUDENT DEBT. – The same institutions that gave almost $2T in bailouts and then extended $16T of loans at little to no interest for banks can surely afford to forgive the $946B of student debt currently held. Not only does this favor the 99% over the 1%, it has the practical effect of more citizens spending money on actual goods, not paying down interest.
1. PASS HR 1489 REINSTATING GLASS-STEAGALL. – A depression era safeguard that separated the commercial lending and investment banking portions of banks. Its repeal in 1999 is considered the major cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008-2009.
2. REPEAL BUSH TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY
3. FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.
4.OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED v. US. – A 2010 Supreme Court Decision which ruled that money is speech. Corporations, as legal persons, are now allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns in the exercise of free “speech.”
5. PASS THE BUFFET RULE ON FAIR TAXATION, CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOPHOLES, PROHIBIT HIDING FUNDS OFFSHORE.
6. GIVE THE SEC STRICTER REGULATORY POWER, STRENGTHEN THE CONSUMER PROTECTION BUREAU, AND PROVIDE ASSISTANCE FOR OWNERS OF FORECLOSED MORTGAGES WHO WERE VICTIMS OF PREDATORY LENDING.
7. TAKE STEPS TO LIMIT THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATE THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION.
8. ELIMINATE RIGHT OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS OR INDUSTRIES THEY ONCE REGULATED.
9. ELIMINATE CORPORATE PERSONHOOD.
10. INSIST THE FEC STAND UP FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN REGULATING PRIVATE USE OF PUBLIC AIRWAVES to help ensure that political candidates ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME for free at reasonable intervals during campaign season.
11. REFORM CAMPAIGN FINANCE WITH THE PASSAGE OF THE FAIR ELECTIONS NOW ACT (S.750, H.R. 1404).
12. FORGIVE STUDENT DEBT. – The same institutions that gave almost $2T in bailouts and then extended $16T of loans at little to no interest for banks can surely afford to forgive the $946B of student debt currently held. Not only does this favor the 99% over the 1%, it has the practical effect of more citizens spending money on actual goods, not paying down interest.
October 8, 2011
October 6, 2011
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