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Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here? |
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Tuesday, 22 November 2011 19:10 |
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Moore writes: "We are but ten weeks old, yet we have already changed the national conversation. This is our moment, the one we've been hoping for, waiting for. If it's going to happen it has to happen now. Don't sit this one out. This is the real deal. This is it."
Michael Moore visited Occupy Oakland three days after the crackdown, 10/28/11. (photo: KQED News)
Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here?
By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog
22 November 11
 his past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:
We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.
The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. As one of the millions of people who are participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority.
Here is what I will propose to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:
10 Things We Want
A Proposal for Occupy Wall Street
Submitted by Michael Moore
1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).
2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money.
3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays.
4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.
5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes.
6. Reorder our nation's spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives.
7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time.
8. Immediately reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century.
9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. (For any U.S. businesspeople freaking out at this idea because you think workers can't run a successful company: Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world’s leading manufacturing exporter.)
10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems we now have. These include:
a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots.
b) A constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the general public and society must always come before the interests of corporations.
c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a "second bill of rights" as proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.
Let me know what you think. Occupy Wall Street enjoys the support of millions. It is a movement that cannot be stopped. Become part of it by sharing your thoughts with me or online (at OccupyWallSt.org). Get involved in (or start!) your own local Occupy movement. Make some noise. You don't have to pitch a tent in lower Manhattan to be an Occupier. You are one just by saying you are. This movement has no singular leader or spokesperson; every participant is a leader in their neighborhood, their school, their place of work. Each of you is a spokesperson to those whom you encounter. There are no dues to pay, no permission to seek in order to create an action.
We are but ten weeks old, yet we have already changed the national conversation. This is our moment, the one we've been hoping for, waiting for. If it's going to happen it has to happen now. Don't sit this one out. This is the real deal. This is it.
Have a happy Thanksgiving!
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FOCUS | Occupy This: Learning From the Dark Side |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 22 November 2011 16:03 |
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Weissmann begins: "Over the past several years, the American government has encouraged, tutored, and funded nonviolent destabilization efforts and color revolutions from Burma and the countries around the former Soviet Union to Venezuela, Iran, and Egypt. Most of the local activists involved had righteous grievances and deserved international solidarity. But, American and allied European interventions pursued their own interests and agendas ..."
Spring Mobilization to End the Vietnam War, San Francisco, 04/15/67. (photo: API)
Occupy This: Learning From the Dark Side
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
22 November 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
"Maybe I ought to spend more time promoting changes here in the United States because we're going in a direction that doesn't look good for democracy in our own country."
-- Col. Robert Helvey, US Army (retired), Peace Magazine, Jan-Mar 2008
 ver the past several years, the American government has encouraged, tutored, and funded nonviolent destabilization efforts and color revolutions from Burma and the countries around the former Soviet Union to Venezuela, Iran, and Egypt. Most of the local activists involved had righteous grievances and deserved international solidarity. But, American and allied European interventions pursued their own interests and agendas, whether to extend control over oil, gas, and other natural resources, secure oil and gas pipelines, expand NATO into Eastern Europe, or privatize local economies.
Drawing a distinction between local movements and foreign intervention remains crucial. But, Occupy and Indignado activists can learn as much from the foxes as from the hens and roosters. Many are already learning the important lessons.
Col. Robert Helvey was clearly a fox. As a former military attaché in Burma working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was among the first in his world to see how to use nonviolent conflict in pursuit of Washington's global ambitions. You'll find the story in "Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance" in Peace Magazine, and my controversial "How Washington Learned to Love Nonviolence."
Helvey took his inspiration from Professor Gene Sharp, who greatly expanded on the pragmatic, post-Gandhi approach that student movements stumbled into at Berkeley, Stanford, and other hotbeds of 1960s activism. We tended to see non-violence primarily as a pragmatic choice of tactics, though at times we thought more strategically. In the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, for example, many of the graduate students and teaching assistants clearly saw in advance how a massive sit-in could lead to a strike that would close down the university, and how that would push a majority of the faculty to come down on our side against the administration. With that in mind, we chose our tactics, timing, and outreach to faculty members.
Gene Sharp went much farther and deeper. On the tactical side, his "198 Methods of Nonviolent Action," remains a classic to which we should add as the movement creates new forms of struggle. On the strategic side, Sharp and Helvey went even farther, reformulating "strategic nonviolence" as an ongoing strategy to promote major political change, such as bringing down a government.
At the heart of their approach was Sharp's rediscovery of a basic truth that the French anarchist thinker Étienne de La Boétie explained in the 16th Century, and that the Arab Spring, the Indignados, and the Occupy movement are bringing to life. No tyranny can endure if large numbers of people simply refuse to go along with it.
As a career military man, Helvey added a precise strategic sense to planning extended nonviolent campaigns. The best descriptions I've found are in his 4-day training of Serbian activists from OTPOR and in his book, "On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict," which was funded in part by the United States Institute of Peace, an agency of the federal government.
Helvey's language, at least in print, can seem stiff and his approach more appropriate to military staffs than to movement activists. But we need to learn from his insistence on having clear objectives and a strategy, and in following Sun Tzu's teaching in "The Art of War": "Know your enemy, know yourself."
Helvey's students from Serbia knew their enemy by name, which made strategic planning fairly straightforward. The question was how to build a movement that could bring Milosevic down. In addition, Washington and its allies contributed bombing raids, propaganda broadcasts, and other forms of psychological warfare.
Occupiers face a much tougher situation. Overthrowing a tyrant is relatively easy compared to bringing down a tyrannical system, especially one that we have not yet named. Are we fighting against global finance, as suggested by the original name Occupy Wall Street? Or are we fighting against the warfare state, the giant corporations who game tax systems around the world, the student-loan system, or all of market capitalism?
If we cannot agree on who we are fighting, we will never create a workable nonviolent strategy to defeat them.
But don't despair. The movement is just beginning. It has brought the question of economic inequality to the forefront. And it has created real and virtual spaces where we can raise the hard questions and come together to find the best possible answers.
So, what do you think? Who exactly are we fighting against? And how do you see a nonviolent strategy to defeat them?
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes on international affairs.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: UC Davis Students Are Role Models |
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Tuesday, 22 November 2011 14:15 |
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Galindez writes: "It would have been easy for students at UC Davis to riot after watching their classmates being assaulted with pepper spray. Instead, they remained nonviolent. That simple act gave them the moral high ground. And that's how social change movements grow. The Occupy movement must adhere to its guidelines of nonviolence, and distance itself from acts of violence."
I am here to apologize,' Chancellor Katehi (center) told students. 'I know you may not believe anything I am telling you today, and you don’t have to. It is my responsibility to earn your trust.' 11/22/11. (photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)
UC Davis Students Are Role Models
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
22 November 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
 t would have been easy for students at UC Davis to riot after watching their classmates being assaulted with pepper spray. Instead, they remained nonviolent. That simple act gave them the moral high ground. And that's how social change movements grow.
Rewind a couple of weeks.
Occupy Oakland was in a similar situation. Police had violently cracked down on their encampment. Iraq War veteran Scott Olson almost died. They had the momentum, which led to a successful general strike that closed the Port of Oakland. As night fell on the day of that general strike, some of the protesters became violent. That violence turned public opinion, and slowed their momentum.
It reminds me of a 1988 demonstration at the Pentagon. We had a thousand people committed to nonviolent civil disobedience. We attempted to shut down the south parking lot. We went through nonviolence training prior to the action, and this was key to our success. Affinity groups were all on the same page. The action remained nonviolent and, in the words of Daniel Ellsberg, "Pentagon employees had to step over us to get to work." All went well until a small group decided to start lighting fires - some of them under transit buses. All of that hard work to keep the protest from turning violent quite literally "went up in smoke."
Problems like this have always plagued the progressive movement. The authorities know if they provoke the right groups they will become violent and public opinion will turn against whatever movement they are targeting. Those who keep wondering why the police fan the flames of the Occupy movement will learn the answer to their question if the Occupy movement responds to these provocations with violence.
The Occupy movement must strictly adhere to its guidelines of nonviolence, and publicly distance itself from acts of violence. As tempting as it may be to fight back when you are under attack, all that does is alienate future supporters.
Back to UC Davis.
Yesterday, thousands turned out on campus for a nonviolent rally, one that included an apology from Chancellor Katehi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfzQyT9nUMk
If the students reacted violently to the pepper spray, yesterday's rally would have been much smaller and much less effective. It was the nonviolent response that made people who usually don't attend protests, but are sympathetic to the cause, feel safe enough to attend and to stay.
While there is a time and a place for more militant actions like the blockade of the Pentagon, only the hardcore attend these events. If any movement is to grow and flourish, newcomers need to feel safe. One of the pepper-sprayed protesters put it best, "Do not choose the path of violence. Their only weapon is violence. We will prevail."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mse5wfBZ4j8
The authorities will continue to use violence in the hope that they can inspire a violent reaction from us. They know that scenes like the violence in Oakland after the general strike will kill the momentum of the movement.
Let us learn from Oakland, and follow the example set by Occupy Davis. Right now Oakland is struggling to maintain a camp, while Occupy Davis is back, bigger and stronger than ever.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Supercommittee's Failure: The Winners and Losers |
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Monday, 21 November 2011 19:42 |
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Allen writes: "As the professional Cassandra class bemoaned the failure of the congressional supercommittee to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit-slashing policies on Monday, there were plenty of folks in DC ready to dance a jig on the fresh legislative grave. That's because a lot of folks stood to gain - or at least lose less - from the debacle. Still, it's hard not to see Washington, Congress and the members of the supercommittee as big losers in the scorecard of national politics."
President Obama spoke on Monday after the congressional supercommittee failed to reach a deal on deficit reduction, 11/21/11. (photo: Philip Scott Andrews/NYT)
Supercommittee's Failure: The Winners and Losers
By Jonathan Allen, Politico
21 November 11
 In a short, to-the-point, White House news conference President Obama promised to veto any attempt to avoid $1.2 trillion in 'triggered cuts' after the collapse of the so-called 'Supercommittee.' In an obvious reference to plans by Congressional Republicans to bypass nearly $600 billion in defense cuts, the President said, 'I'll veto any effort to avoid automatic cuts.' -- JPS/RSN
n Washington, you can win for losing.
As the professional Cassandra class bemoaned the failure of the congressional supercommittee to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit-slashing policies on Monday, there were plenty of folks in DC ready to dance a jig on the fresh legislative grave.
That's because a lot of folks stood to gain - or at least lose less - from the debacle.
Still, it's hard not to see Washington, Congress and the members of the supercommittee as big losers in the scorecard of national politics.
Here's a look at how POLITICO ranks the losers and winners.
THE LOSERS
The military industrial complex - The Pentagon and its contractors now face the harsh prospect of up to $600 billion in cuts beginning in January 2013. The supercommittee represented an opportunity for lawmakers to slash entitlements or raise revenues in a way that could have spared the defense industry from a painful sequester of funds. While Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and defense-minded lawmakers have argued that such cuts would be debilitating for the Pentagon, there's no assurance that they will be able to block the cuts before they are scheduled to go into effect.
And even though Republicans are generally supportive of national defense spending, the new appetite for budget restraint suggests that House conservatives might not be terribly amenable to busting spending caps for the Pentagon. Any effort to shift cuts from defense to domestic spending will run into resistance from Democrats in the House and Senate.
Members of the supercommittee - No one looks worse in this mess than the 12 lawmakers who were handed nearly unlimited power to reshape federal taxation and spending for years to come and couldn't find a penny's worth of common ground. Some were looked at as deal-makers, others as deal-breakers, but in the end there was no deal to make or break.
Speaker John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and incumbents - "Failure," Boehner said repeatedly, "is not an option." But despite legitimate efforts to strike a deal over the course of several months - and through a supercommittee, two commissions, a gang, a group and ad hoc dinner parties - the leaders in Congress could never prod the process to fruition. As a result, the majority party in each chamber appears set to head into the next election without having been able to forge the kind of bipartisan compromise that has historically given voters a reason to keep the same folks in charge. Reid has a much tougher challenge in keeping control in his chamber - Democrats are defending 23 of their seats in 2012 - but all incumbents can expect that Washington "outsider" candidates across the country will be ready to hammer them for the failure of the supercommittee to solve the nation's budgetary problems.
"It's hard to say that there are any winners in Washington these days and therefore, the biggest winner is anyone not working here," said one Democratic aide. "It will be fairly easy to tap into national frustration and paint your opponent as part of the problem in Washington. I would not want to be an incumbent in a tough district this cycle. We could be looking at yet another wave election in Congress."
The month of December - T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, but Congress and many Americans may have reason to view December that way this year. The supercommittee had been viewed as a good venue for extending a series of laws that affect the middle class and are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. They include the alternative minimum tax policy, a provision known as the "doc fix" that prevents a sharp reduction in Medicare reimbursement rates paid to doctors, unemployment insurance and President Barack Obama's payroll tax cut. Now, Congress has a month to come up with a plan to extend some or all of those laws - and to offset their costs.
THE WINNERS
Thanksgiving pardon recipients - To avoid the automatic cuts of domestic and defense spending, the supercommittee would have had to come up with dollar-for-dollar savings targeting specific programs. For those with their necks on the line, the supercommittee's surrender statement was received like a last-minute pardon.
"The biggest winners were the groups that were still on the chopping block as of this weekend," a top Washington lobbyist said. "Federal employees groups, agriculture, groups that depended on postal rates, and airlines that dodged bullets on higher user fees and taxes."
AARP and Americans for Tax Reform - Here's how AARP described its lobbying efforts in a registration form filed with the Senate: AARP "lobbied Congress on excluding cuts to Social Security from the deficit-reduction package." Since Social Security can't be cut by sequestration under the debt-limit law enacted earlier this year, only a supercommittee decision could have raised revenue or cut spending by altering its structure.
In particular, the supercommittee looked at adopting a new consumer-price-index model - called "chained CPI" - that would have slightly reduced payments to seniors. That's now off the table, and AARP and its allies can rest easy. Similarly, Americans for Tax Reform and other groups dedicated to preventing tax increases have to be pretty pleased with the outcome. Under the trigger, all of the deficit-reduction measures come from the spending side of the federal ledger.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi - There was no reason for either leader to want to hand a political victory to their majority-party counterparts in the form of a deficit-reduction deal that would allow both sides to run as tax-reformers and budget-cutters. Anti-incumbent backlash is generally good for minority leaders, who can seek to capitalize on the failures of the folks in charge. In addition, both McConnell and Pelosi sent strong messages to their respective political bases that they stand for their values. For McConnell, that means taxes aren't going up. For Pelosi, that means Social Security is safe and any changes to Medicare will be minimal.
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et me be among the first 40- foot helium- filled balloons to kick- start our national parade of giving thanks. That’s right, we’re just about to butt heads with Turkey Holocaust Day, and to be perfectly honest, its about time. A little tryptophan poisoning might be the perfect prescription for these trying times.
