why we occupy, what we know

by John Bellamy Foster

Occupy Eugene rally, 15 October 2011

We are here as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in a few short weeks has become a global movement in hundreds of cities around the world.  We are part of the 99 percent not only in this country but the world.

I have been reading the mainstream, corporate media.  I have been listening to the pundits, the power brokers, the politicians.  They criticize our movement, saying we don't really know why we are here.  They claim that we are simply angry; that all we are is an "emotional outcry."  House majority leader Eric Cantor calls us "a growing mob."

Wall Street bankers interviewed by the New York Times say that we are "fringe groups"; that we will "thin out" and disperse when the weather gets colder.

A New York Times article reported yesterday that we were confused "liberal activists" fed up with partisan politics but with no real ideas of your own.  An editorial in the same paper said we were just protestors, with no clear demands.  We are well meaning, they conceded, but it is the politicians, not the people in the street, who have the job -- so they say -- of determining the future course of things, not us, not the 99%.

Foreign Affairs magazine, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that Occupy Wall Street is critical of Wall Street, but not of capitalism; they say that we do not question the system itself.

They are wrong.  We are part of the growing army of the Occupy Wall Street movement worldwide.  And we know why we are here.

• We know that U.S. society has become fundamentally unequal.  We know, though we may not all know the exact numbers, that the top 1 percent of income recipients receives almost 25 percent of all income in the society (including capital gains), and the top 10 percent receives almost 50 percent.

• We know, though we might not be able to quote the figures precisely, that, between 1950 and 1970, for every additional dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent of income earners, those in the top one hundredth of one percent received $162 dollars.  But that was back when things were more equal!  Between 1990 and 2002, for every added dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent of the population, those in the top one hundredth of one percent made an additional $18,000.

• We know about the Forbes 400.  That in the United States 400 individuals (a number far less than those here today) own as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population, some 150 million people.

• We know that when it comes to financial wealth (which excludes houses) the top 1 percent of the population in the United States owns four times as much wealth as the bottom 80 percent of the population.

• We know, though we may not know the precise details, that according to an audit by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the Federal Reserve Board provided more than $16 trillion in financial assistance in the latest financial crisis to the largest corporations in the United States and the world.  The rich were bailed out while the majority of the population was made to pay the cost!  And you are still paying!

• We know that there is over 9 percent official unemployment in the United States, while the real number of people who want full-time employment and don't have it is around twice that.

• We know that official unemployment for adolescents is 25%; for blacks 16 percent; for Latinos and Latinas 11%.  And if you double these numbers you are closer to reality.

• We know that poverty is growing and being "feminized."  We know that many people in this country are unfairly branded as "illegal immigrants."

• We know, though we may not realize its full extent, that there are 2.4 billion people globally who, according to the International Labor Organization, are unemployed, underemployed, economically inactive, or engaged in subsistence labor.  That 39 percent of the world's workers live on less than $2 a day.

• We know that multinational corporations exploit the differences in wages between countries, taking advantage of the enormous global reserve army of the unemployed, to generate humongous profits, and to hold down wages worldwide.

• We know that there is no real economic recovery; that we are in a period of economic stagnation, where only the rich are prospering.  That economic growth in the United States has been slowing down in each successive decade since the 1960s and is now virtually stagnant.  That the rich are getting bigger slices of a non-growing pie while the slices for almost everyone else are less.

• We know that the planet is being destroyed.  That the future of all species and of humanity itself is being cut off.  That, as James Hansen, the world's leading climatologist puts it, this is "our last chance to save humanity."  And that none of the governments in the rich economies are doing anything at all about it!  That oil companies and coal companies are more important to those in power than the planet itself.

• We know that the United States and its allies have been engaged recently in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.  That an intervention is being planned for Iran, and possibly Venezuela.  That U.S. military bases dot the entire globe and are increasing in numbers.  We know that the United States spends around half a billion dollars officially on the military each year, and in reality a trillion dollars a year.

• We know that we live in a plutocracy rather than a democracy, where money outvotes public opinion at every point in the political process.

• We know that unions are in the defensive in this country.  That they have been smashed by unfair legislation.  That they are struggling to find a way to fight back.

• We know that our elementary and secondary educations system in the United States is being privatized and destroyed.

• We know that we have by far the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

• We know that all of this is related to the system of economic power, to a society that believes in the Wall Street principle, "greed is good," the signature of capitalism.

• We know that we are the necessary, the last defense of humanity.  That you are the world's 99%.  That we will not "thin out" when the weather gets bad.  That we are not a mob.  That we are the earth, we are democracy, we are the future.  The world has been occupied too long by a tiny minority.  It is time for the people to reoccupy it.  To take it back.

In 2009, I participated in a discussion about the global financial crisis on Democracy Now!  I said then that we were in a period of long-term economic stagnation (of which the financial crisis was simply a symptom).  The closest historical precedent was the Great Depression.  I pointed out that it took about four years after the 1929 stock market crash before there was a revolt in the United States in the 1930s -- what we know as the Great Revolt from Below -- which resulted in the industrial union movement, the rise of the CIO, and the second New Deal.  The revolt didn't come in earnest until a year or more after the economic recovery had started in 1933, when people suddenly realized that the recovery was false.

I said that a similar Great Revolt from Below was likely in the United States today, given a deep and lasting economic stagnation.  But that we might have to wait three or four years, just as in the Great Depression, for it to get off the ground, and for the people to ignite.  That, just as in the Great Depression, the revolt would not materialize until people had learned that the promise of economic recovery was false, that they had been lied to and systematically robbed.  Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Eugene, Occupy the United States is the Great Revolt from Below in our time.

But what we are witnessing this time is the growth of something much larger still.  In a matter of a few weeks we have watched the emergence of an Occupy the World movement.  Everywhere people are uniting in struggle.  When I was in Australia at the beginning of October, when this all was getting started, radical activists were absolutely glued to the events in Occupy Wall Street -- even before it was being reported by the mainstream media in this country.  Why?  Australia is on the other side of the globe.  Why should they care about a resistance movement in New York?

The reason is that we in the United States live in "Fortress America," the heart of a world empire.  Revolts are not supposed to happen here!  If a break in the wall appears, if massive protests occur, here, "Inside the Monster," as José Marti called it, the whole world is suddenly uplifted and encouraged to resist.  Because then they know that the empire is crumbling.  Our struggles here are opening up space for resistance for all the people of the world.

What does occupy mean?  Why is an occupation so important?  Why is this movement so different?  It is because it means we are not going away.  We will not disperse.  We will remain.  We will win.  The world requires it.

Thank you.

 .....
reposted here without permission

the rise of the regressive right and the reawakening of america

Sunday, October 16, 2011 blatantly plagiarized from RobertReich

A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward. 

We are going to battle once again. 

Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we’re all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy. 

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today’s Republican right aren’t really conservatives. Their goal isn’t to conserve what we have. It’s to take us backwards. 

They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act. 

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s — the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the “rot” is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we’d be back in the late nineteenth century — before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the pure food and drug act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons — railroad, financial, and oil titans — ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few. 

Listen carefully to today’s Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age:  Survival of the fittest. Don’t help the poor or unemployed or anyone who’s fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy. 

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation’s wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America’s wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker’s wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers’ wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they’re conservative jurists. But they’re judicial activists bent on overturning seventy-five years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states’ rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on  local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.

Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action. 

Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.  

In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.

Perhaps this is what’s beginning to happen again across America.

plant a tree ...

This quote is from Austrian painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a challenging artist and designer who lived through Nazi Germany and whose work touched on philosophy, environmentalism, design, fashion [and even postage stamps]:

"A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. They should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of their human-substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don't visit a dead man, you visit a living being that was just transformed into a tree. You say, "This is my grandfather, this tree; it is growing well, fantastic." You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt."

The rest of this post was found on this link:

It took millions of years for vegetation to cover the sludge and toxic substances with a layer of humus, a layer of vegetation and a layer of oxygen - so that humans could live on earth.

And now ungrateful humans are bringing the sludge and toxic substances - which have been covered with tedious cosmic effort - back up to the surface.

In this way, through the misdeeds of the irresponsible human species, the end of the world [as we know it] is becoming the beginning of the end for us. We are committing suicide. Our cities are carcinomas.

We don't eat what grows near us - we import food from far away, from Africa, America, China, Chile and New Zealand.

We don't keep our "shit". Our rubbish - and our waste - is flushed far away. We are poisoning rivers, lakes and oceans with it; we transport it to complicated and expensive purification plants, or more rarely to centralized composting facilities. In other cases, our waste is destroyed. The "shit" never returns to our fields as fertilizers and compost, and consequently neither does it return to where our food comes from.

The cycle by which "food becomes shit" is functioning.

The cycle by which "shit becomes food" is broken.

When we flush our toilets - with the conviction that we are performing a hygienic act - we are breaking cosmic laws, because in reality it is a godless act, a sacrilegious gesture of death.

When we go to the toilet, when we lock the door from the inside and flush away our shit, we are trying to put an end to something. What are we ashamed of? What are we afraid of? We repress what happens to our shit, just as we repress death. Perhaps the toilet hole appears to us like the gate to death; we try to get away from it as quickly as possible, forget as quickly as possible about the rottenness and decay. 

However, it is exactly the opposite! It is with "shit" that life first begins and is sustained.

.....

ME:   I buy into this.  All I have to do is look at a few images of what is happening on places like Midway Island or the "Great Pacific Gyre" to know that humans have outlived their usefulness to mother Earth.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed this public toilet for the town Kawakawa, New Zealand.
Photo by Daniel Pietzsch via flickr

555 people ..... by Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

If both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

If all the politicians are against high taxes,WHY do we have high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The President does. 
[[[ the KEY word here is PROPOSE ]]]

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations.
The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 555 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.
They have no legal authority. 
They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it.

No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.  No matter what gifts the rich donor gives, no matter how may retreats and bar-b-ques and wine-tasting parties are involved, the Supreme Court Judge determines if he is impartial.

I am now excluding the President because he/she has no legislative power. The POTUS can make suggestions, can beg, can coddle and can offer compromise, but alone the Office of the President has no actual power to make laws, including tax laws. The Congress does that and the SCOTUS backs up the Congress.

Best you not forget that.

So, these 554 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they
did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall.

No normal human being would have the coconut balls of a Speaker Boehner, who stands up and criticizes the President for creating deficits . . . the President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of
the House? For the time being {at least} it is  John Boehner.

He is the leader of the majority party. He and his fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

I can't think of a single domesticproblem that is not traceable directly to those 554 people. When youfully grasp the plain truth that 554 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it's because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan ...

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 554 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; or to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; or to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 554 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power..

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the backbone to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

.....

ME: Overly-simplistic, but this short op-ed should make us all stop and think. My favorite part is this:

" . . . the special interests and lobbyists have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a
senator, a congressman, or a Supreme Court Judge (or his wife) to do one damn thing.
I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.

The politician has the power to accept or reject it. And WE have the power to reject them.

We ARE the 99%.  We'd best not forget this.

an open letter to wall street

[blatantly lifted from Truthout . . .]

Before anything else, I would like to apologize for the mess outside your office. It's been three weeks since all those hippies and punk-rockers and students and union members and working mothers and single fathers and airline pilots and teachers and retail workers and military service members and foreclosure victims decided to camp out on your turf, and I'm sure it has been quite an inconvenience for you. How is a person supposed to spend their massive, virtually untaxed bonus money on a double latte and an eight-ball with all that rabble clogging the sidewalks, right?

Your friends at JP Morgan Chase just donated $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, the largest donation ever given to the NYPD. You'd think that much cheese would buy a little crowd control, but no. Sure, one of the "white shirt" commanding NYPD officers on the scene hosed down some defenseless women with pepper spray the other day, and a few other protesters have been roughed up here and there, and having any kind of recording device has proven to be grounds for immediate arrest, but seriously...for $4.6 million, you'd think the cops would oblige you by bulldozing these troublemakers right into the Hudson River. Better yet, pave them over with yellow bricks, so you can walk over them every day on your way in to work.

That's what you do anyway, right? Every single day. I know it. You know it. We might as well be honest about it, and if some shiny golden bricks wind up serving as anonymous tombstones for your working-class doormats, well, that's just what they call in Wisconsin "hard cheese." You're a Master of the Universe, after all, and this recess(depress)ion hasn't touched you to any great degree. Sure, you have to shoulder your way through more homeless people these days, and damn if there aren't a lot more potholes to tax the undercarriage of your Audi R8 GT, but your money is making money at a fantastic rate, and paying taxes is for other people; I mean, come on, your accountant bursts out laughing whenever he hears the words "capital gains tax," so your egregious sense of entitlement is entirely understandable.

Now is the time to bone up on your coping skills, because three weeks is nothing. The people camped out on Wall Street are not leaving unless and until they are cleared out by force. They look all kinds of silly in their outfits, and some of their statements don't make a whole lot of sense to people like you, but they have put down roots, and you better get used to them. I'm sure the whole phenomenon is quite perplexing to you - really, why don't they just go home? Don't these people have jobs?

I hate to be the Irony Police, but that's pretty much the whole point. They can't, and they don't. Have homes and jobs, I mean. There was a guy out there a few days ago holding a sign in front of a mortgage-lending institution that read "These People Took My Parent's Home." There are all sorts of people walking around Wall Street yelling their lungs out at you because, well, they really would like the opportunity to find gainful employment, as well as a future, but that nifty shell game you and yours pulled off (on our dime) wound up immolating the economy of the common man/woman, and so the common man/woman has decided - in lieu of anything else better to do - to spend their you-created idle hours on your doorstep.

Let's face it: the mess outside your office is your doing. You and your friends bought this democracy wholesale - ah, yes, the irony of freedom is found in the way you were able to corrupt so many legislators with your money, always legally, because the legislators you bought are the ones writing the laws covering political contributions, and thus the wheel of corruption turns and turns - and now you want this democracy to do your bidding after the bill for your excess and fathomless greed has come due.

You are always taken care of - see the Citizens United decision, which unleashed you in a way not seen since the dregs of the Roman Empire - but, still, there are those pesky protesters, exercising their freedom of expression in order to expose you for the brigands that you are.

They're staying put, with many more on the way - to New York as well as every major city from sea to shining sea -  and none of them are going anywhere else until people like you are taken from your citadels in handcuffs and made to pay for the ongoing rape of what was once quaintly called the American Dream...a dream that used to be something other than a dated metaphor, and can be something true and real and genuine once again, but only after we pave you under, and walk over you, on our way to a better, brighter future.

~~ William Rivers Pitt

William Rivers Pitt is a Truthout editor and columnist.  He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know," "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence" and "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation." He lives and works in Boston.

things so impossible

The following post has been taken from a post made on Blogspot long, long ago, back on February 7, 2008, in regards to so-called “Super Tuesday” 2008. 

The blog entry reads:  “I have a commitment to (and a belief in) the American Dream (or more precisely, the Dream that is America) that is so profound that it is difficult for me to talk of it without getting choked up.

It’s not the dream of a chicken in every pot, nor the dream of two cars in the driveway.

Rather, it is the Dream of many peoples coming together to achieve something larger, and leave something better for those that follow. This is the true soul of America, and embodied in our Nation's Motto: E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many One.

We may celebrate the Declaration of Independence, but our true character and what we should aspire to live by is best captured in the preamble to our Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

We the People does not refer to the 51% of the 64% who vote that agree with us, but it refers to all that we are and all that we will be. Not Red States or Blue States, but the United States. Not the welfare of those that vote for us or give us donations, but the general Welfare. Not a southern strategy or swift boating a military hero, but to form a more perfect Union.

The past 20 years have been a long dark night for those of us that believe in We the People. The lessons and successes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove (shamefully applied by both parties) have put our nation on a path to Balkanization, and manipulated the American Dream into a micro-targeted nightmare. More frighteningly, over the past decade the tactics of division have moved beyond partisan politics to an Orwellian exploitation of fear, and set the last great superpower on a path that could easily spiral to neo-facism.

While we face many challenges and dangers in this world, I believe the greatest threat to what we are is to forget who we are. When we fracture ourselves and "win" by causing someone else to "lose", we spiral ever deeper into the zero-sum night.

We stepped back from the same precipice in the 1890s (greed) and 1950s (fear). Each time, the moment was right to elevate a leader and a voice that rejected the politics of division and the policy of the ends justify the means, and reminded us that we are at our best when we grow the pie, not when we fight over the scraps; that our manifest destiny is born of our shared values and dreams, not conflicting fears and greed.

I have been waiting for that leader and that voice for the past 20 years. While I have done my best to live the example of the greater good — of people coming together to accomplish more than they thought possible — I had nearly lost hope.

I believe that leader is Barack Obama.

Even if he falls short of the ideals he has set forth, there is still a glow on the horizon, waking those who believe more in the Dream than they fear the darkness. As that glow grows into full light, we are indeed the people we have been waiting for.”

Following is a portion of a speech given by then Senator Obama that night ~~~

“You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. It will not be resolved on even a Super Duper Tuesday. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who've been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can.

We are the hope of the father who goes to work before dawn and lies awake with doubt that tells him he cannot give his children the same opportunities that someone gave him. Yes, he can.

We are the hope of the woman who hears that her city will not be rebuilt, that she cannot somehow claim the life that was swept away in a terrible storm. Yes, she can.

We are the hope of the future, the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided, that we cannot come together, that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

We know that we have seen something happen over the last several weeks, over the past several months. We know that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored — that will not be deterred, that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation — repair this world, make this time different than all the rest. Yes, we can.

Let's go to work.”

We ARE the 99%.  Let's get to work. WE are the ones we have been waiting for.