“You took our stuff. Now give it back.” Why #OccupyWallStreet has left Washington (and the media) behind.
Category: Power to the People
We are the 99%
The Declaration of the Occupation, set to music and performed by Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir:
Debt forgiveness
Yes!
Head of Wisconsin’s firefighters union considering a run against Scott Walker in potential recall election.
A devotion for Wall Street
The more I read the Gospels, the more they seem to confront the very patterns of the world we live in. At one point Mary, pregnant with Jesus cries out: “God casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly… God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty…” You can’t help but think if she were alive in contemporary America some folks would try to accuse the Virgin Mother of being Marxist or promoting class warfare. But all through Scripture we see this – over 2000 verses about how God cares for the poor and most vulnerable.
What would Jesus say about Wall Street?
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Irvine City Council: ‘Occupy tents are a form of speech’
Late last night after a 5 and-a-half hour marathon city council meeting, in which 72 speakers took the floor to express the need for the Occupy OC Tent Village to be accepted as a form of free speech, the city council passed an emergency motion to add the needs of The 99% to their official agenda. This was a feat which, according to one more conservative Councilman, he had never seen in 7 years of service.
The council members each spoke in turn to the civility, articulateness and peaceful process represented by the Irvine Occupation at contrast with the several other Occupational Villages in California, which were, at that very moment being tear-gassed. The general sentiment being: This is quite clearly the model. And the occupation most in tune with city needs.
One councilman stated clearly, I disagree with most of what you’re saying. But you’ve clearly shown that this is an issue of free speech. So if you need to sleep on our lawn by all means sleep on our lawn.
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See how that works?
UPDATE: Max Keiser says it’s all a sham.
When you refuse to make your citizens pay for the banks’ gambling debts?
Holy shit
Look at the number of people who showed up to volunteer for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.
Last night
So I talked to Will Bunch about his new Kindle book on #OWS last night : October 1, 2011: The Battle of Brooklyn Bridge.” It’s only $.99 and you don’t need a Kindle to read it.
‘How I learned to love the goddamned hippies’
Andrew Sullivan on Occupy Wall Street:
Unlike in Europe, crude redistribution from rich to poor is still highly unpopular in America—and even more so in the last few years. Americans still rightly want merit to be rewarded and don’t like class warfare. But raising taxes on those who have benefited the most from the past 30 years to help reduce the debt is not class warfare. It’s an obviously pragmatic attempt to get some fiscal sanity back, which is why the Republicans have been sounding a little less intransigent on Capitol Hill lately. In that sense, Occupy Wall Street is also Restore Main Street. Some on the fringes seem skeptical of capitalism as a whole, but most seem to believe that what we currently have is not real capitalism, but a mixture of debt, cronyism, and corruption. The collapse of faith in big government is hard to distinguish from the collapse of support for big business—especially when the tax code reads like a conspiracy between them against the rest of us. And once the public loses trust in the core fairness of the economic and political system, we’re in deeper trouble than we realize.
There is simply a limit beyond which economic inequality threatens democratic life, when the majority suspect that a tiny minority has fixed the system beyond repair through the existing institutions, and when the powerful minority begins to think of its own interests as distinct from the interests of its compatriots. That moment is one of real danger, especially when those elites can move themselves and their money more easily across the planet than ever before, and it is a sign of responsibility, not irresponsibility, to focus on it. Among the oldest authorities insisting on just such an issue was Aristotle, whose emphasis on the middle classes as the core strength of a viable democracy remains as true today as it was thousands of years ago. And Aristotle was not a hippie. Nor were Disraeli or Bismarck, two 19th-century conservatives who deployed government to prevent their countries from splitting into alienated haves and have-nots, and fearful of real radicals who could come along to exploit the gap.
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