thanks for posting that video, maybe some of the posters on this or the other occupy thread that are complaining about protesters being unclear or unclean or whatever inane remark will watch to better understand some of their message. the movement is gaining momentum, that much is clear.
San Diego Sports Arena - Oct 25, 2000 MGM Grand - Jul 6, 2006 Cox Arena - Jul 7, 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival - May 1, 2010 Alpine Valley Music Theater - Sep 3-4 2011 Made In America, Philly - Sep 2, 2012 EV, Houston - Nov 12-13, 2012 Dallas-November 2013 OKC-November 2013 ACL 2-October 2014 Fenway Night 1, August 2016 Wrigley, Night 1 August 2018 Fort Worth, Night 1 September 2023 Fort Worth, Night 2 September 2023 Austin, Night 1 September 2023 Austin, Night 2 September 2023
Wall Street protest movement spreads to cities across US, Canada and Europe
Occupy Wall Street protests reach Boston, LA, St Louis and Kansas City, and are planned in cities across US and abroad
Karen McVeigh in New York
Guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 October 2011
It began as the brainchild of activists across the border in Canada when an anti-consumerism magazine put out a call in July for supporters to occupy Wall Street.
Now, three weeks after a few hundred people heeded that initial call and rolled out their sleeping bags in a park in New York's financial district, they are being joined by supporters in cities across the US and beyond.
Armed with Twitter, Facebook and shared Googledocs, protesters against corporate greed, unemployment and the political corruption that they say Wall Street represents have taken to the streets in Boston, Los Angeles, St Louis and Kansas City.
The core group, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), claims people will take part in demonstrations in as many as 147 US cities this month, while the website occupytogether.org lists 47 US states as being involved. Around the world, protests in Canada, the UK, Germany and Sweden are also planned, they say.
The speed of the leaderless movement's growth has taken many by surprise. Occupytogether.org, one of several sites associated with the protest, has had to be rebuilt to accommodate the traffic.
OWS media spokesman Patrick Bruner said: "We have on our board right now 147 US cities. I don't know whether they are occupied or they are planning on being occupied. My guess would be over 30 cities are occupied."
The original call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters to occupy Wall Street drew hundreds of protesters on 17 September and 2,000 attended a march the following Saturday. But the movement, which organisers say has its roots in the Arab spring and in Madrid's Puerta del Sol protests, has been galvanised by recent media attention.
Last week, the Guardian reported that a NYPD police officer had been filmed spraying four women protesters with pepper spray. On Saturday, a peaceful march on Brooklyn bridge intended as a call to the other four boroughs of New York to join in resulted in 700 arrests. Some protesters claim the police trapped them.
There are now two investigations, including an internal police inquiry, into the pepper spraying incident.
Bruner said the protest had snowballed in the last few days: "The American people have realised that the American dream has been assassinated and the murderer is still on the loose."
A message on the occupytogether site apologises for the site rebuild and directs readers to update links. It reads: "Wow, the groups organising and occupations popping up across the country is growing exponentially by the day. So much so that, in order to have proper navigation and organisation on the site, we had to begin categorising these pages by state. Because of this, every occupation's permalink has been changed."
Thornin Caristo, of OWS, said the movement had taken hold because it had tapped into anger at inequality, unemployment and corporate greed. He predicted it would continue to grow.
Caristo said: "It was always going to be a hit or miss situation but it's a hit and I don't think it will be reversing. So much of the population has no hope and those people are desperate."
Other websites publicising the protests have also become hugely popular. One, named wearethe99percent, in reference to the statistic that 1% of the US population owns a third of the wealth, posts pictures of people holding handwritten messages daily.
One said: "Last year, my 60-year-old mother was evicted. This year I graduated with my master's. I am unemployed with over $120,000 in student loans. I no longer believe the American Dream is for me because … We are the 99 per cent."
Another person holds up a sign which reads: "When you're young, you're told you can be anything, I'm sick of being fed lies. I graduated with a BA in 2009 and I've been searching for a job ever since. My generation is lost, depressed, in debt, struggling. We are taking unpaid internships and temporary contracts with no health insurance in desperation. We will forever be living at our parent's house."
Unions have have also expressed solidarity with the protests.
On Monday, the Transit Workers Union said it had applied for an injunction to stop the NYPD from forcing bus drivers to carry arrested OWS demonstrators.
On Tuesday the 700,000-strong Communication Workers of America endorsed OWS, describing it as an "appropriate expression of anger for all Americans, but especially for those who have been left behind by Wall Street".
In a statement, the group said: "We support the activists' non-violent efforts to seek a more equitable and democratic society based on citizenship, not corporate greed.
"The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are spreading throughout the country. We will support them and encourage all CWA Locals to participate in the growth of this protest movement."
Today, the protesters will join a number of unions and community organisations, including the CWA, the TWU and the United Federation of Teachers in a march on City Hall.
What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park:
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*
To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Was going to open a new thread with this but in light of the previous post this is appropriate as a satirical aside (from a corner of the internets most of you won't go near):
Occupy Wall Street: A Manifesto
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women and transgendered — and any other human who is able to elude the tyranny of work for a couple of weeks — are created equal. We gather to be free not of oppression, but of responsibility and college tuition. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that a government long established and a nation long prosperous be changed for light and transient causes. So let our demands* be submitted to a candid world.
First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness — even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context …
…but down with the modern gilded age!
We demand that a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing, with a minor in German, become a basic human right, because education is crucial and rich people can afford to fund unemployment checks until we find jobs or in perpetuity, whichever comes first.
We demand a minimum wage of $10, no … make it $20. We earned it. And we demand the end of “profiteering,” because there is no better way to end joblessness than stopping the growth of capital. We also demand a maximum wage law, because selfish American dreams need a ceiling.
We demand the institution of direct democracy, because if a bunch of people say it’s OK, it’s OK. And everyone deserves to have his or her voice heard. Except Mr. Moneybags, who we demand stop contributing his own money to candidates we disagree with, to issue groups we loathe and to lobbyists who do not work for organizations featuring “Service,“ ”Employees,“ ”International” and/or “Union” in their title.
We demand the end to bailouts and corporate subsidies, unless we’re talking about companies that feature sunflowers or sun rays in their logos, because that’s the kind of morally gratifying institution we approve of, and thus, they should totally be fast-tracked and bailed out with your money to bring the fossil fuel economy (“the economy”) to an end.
We demand the end to a corrupt Wall Street (“Apple” “your 401(k)”) because banks hold too much power. We demand that government consolidate authority so that elected officials can make prudent choices for us. All that cash in banks was printed by the war god Mars and has nothing to do with the voluntary deposits by ordinary Americans, so we do not consider this theft.
We demand the end to corporate censorship, because if we can’t force private news organizations to run the types of stories with which we agree, there can’t be a healthy democracy. So actually, we demand the end of all corporate news organizations in the name of free speech.
We demand the end to health profiteering, because everyone knows that all the wondrous and lifesaving advances in modern medicine were invented in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. Smart people work for the good of humanity, not because they’re greedy.
We demand these rights because of the mass injustice of being able to freely protest against racism and corporatism without any real fear of imprisonment in the most diverse city on earth. And to the wiseguy who walked by the other day and claimed that I‘d be writing this manifesto with a quill pen on parchment paper if it weren’t for capitalism, we have two words for you: Koch brothers. Think about it.
This is the fifth communique from the 99.9 percent. We are occupying Wall Street, and we’re not going home until it gets really cold.
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.
_____________________________
Follow @davidharsanyi.
"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles."
— Socrates
Was going to open a new thread with this but in light of the previous post this is appropriate as a satirical aside (from a corner of the internets most of you won't go near):
Occupy Wall Street: A Manifesto
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women and transgendered — and any other human who is able to elude the tyranny of work for a couple of weeks — are created equal. We gather to be free not of oppression, but of responsibility and college tuition. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that a government long established and a nation long prosperous be changed for light and transient causes. So let our demands* be submitted to a candid world.
First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness — even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context …
…but down with the modern gilded age!
We demand that a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing, with a minor in German, become a basic human right, because education is crucial and rich people can afford to fund unemployment checks until we find jobs or in perpetuity, whichever comes first.
We demand a minimum wage of $10, no … make it $20. We earned it. And we demand the end of “profiteering,” because there is no better way to end joblessness than stopping the growth of capital. We also demand a maximum wage law, because selfish American dreams need a ceiling.
We demand the institution of direct democracy, because if a bunch of people say it’s OK, it’s OK. And everyone deserves to have his or her voice heard. Except Mr. Moneybags, who we demand stop contributing his own money to candidates we disagree with, to issue groups we loathe and to lobbyists who do not work for organizations featuring “Service,“ ”Employees,“ ”International” and/or “Union” in their title.
We demand the end to bailouts and corporate subsidies, unless we’re talking about companies that feature sunflowers or sun rays in their logos, because that’s the kind of morally gratifying institution we approve of, and thus, they should totally be fast-tracked and bailed out with your money to bring the fossil fuel economy (“the economy”) to an end.
We demand the end to a corrupt Wall Street (“Apple” “your 401(k)”) because banks hold too much power. We demand that government consolidate authority so that elected officials can make prudent choices for us. All that cash in banks was printed by the war god Mars and has nothing to do with the voluntary deposits by ordinary Americans, so we do not consider this theft.
We demand the end to corporate censorship, because if we can’t force private news organizations to run the types of stories with which we agree, there can’t be a healthy democracy. So actually, we demand the end of all corporate news organizations in the name of free speech.
We demand the end to health profiteering, because everyone knows that all the wondrous and lifesaving advances in modern medicine were invented in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. Smart people work for the good of humanity, not because they’re greedy.
We demand these rights because of the mass injustice of being able to freely protest against racism and corporatism without any real fear of imprisonment in the most diverse city on earth. And to the wiseguy who walked by the other day and claimed that I‘d be writing this manifesto with a quill pen on parchment paper if it weren’t for capitalism, we have two words for you: Koch brothers. Think about it.
This is the fifth communique from the 99.9 percent. We are occupying Wall Street, and we’re not going home until it gets really cold.
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.
_____________________________
Follow @davidharsanyi.
This was really good. I agree with this just as much as I agree with the actual statements of the actual protesters. I could accurately represent my thoughts and beliefs on this situation with the common area of a Venn Diagram made from both of these statements.
I am glad that some thing woke these guys up. Hopefully this will catch on and the left will enjoy the infusion of enthusiasm like the right has with the tea party. More people involved in politics can only mean a more educated electorate. Good luck to all the protesters...Standing up for what you believe in...there is nothing more American than that...keep it civil and make your voices heard.
Let them know you have had enough. Good luck.
All that being said, I think the anger is misguided.
that’s right! Can’t we all just get together and focus on our real enemies: monogamous gays and stem cells… - Ned Flanders
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
yea.they are very peaceful..bum rushed the police on wall street and knocked a cop off his bike..then they get hit with the clubs and they cry police brutality????????????
fucking bums
i post on the board of a band that doesn't exsist anymore .......i need my head examined.......
yea.they are very peaceful..bum rushed the police on wall street and knocked a cop off his bike..then they get hit with the clubs and they cry police brutality????????????
fucking bums
Fonzie's on the motorcycle. Time for these people to go home. They will be creating more ill will than helping their cause at this point.
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
Comments
This has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, time and time again, not to be the case.
Agreed
So if these people without jobs, were selling their PJ backpack for a lot of money, would everyone on here still jump all over them for it?
Yes, they would. That's how lost we are as a country.
If they didn't have a job, they shouldn't have bought a PJ backpack in the first place.
The problem is people are voting for "Hope and Change" and "Yes we Can".
Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Video 1&2 is there... then 3&4 here
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/meltdown- ... ying-price
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/meltdown- ... after-fall
sickening.....just an example or pure greed
wah wah you have to walk around protesters.
their is nothing positive to say about these people ...
Wall Street is not evil, some people are...so they should focus their protest
i like how he said that he liked that fox if finally paying attention to the issues that the other 99% of the population is paying attention to...
i can see why fox didn't air this segment on greta van sustern's show...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/0 ... 92406.html
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
it has become another tourist attraction...everyone else is just walking by w/out looking
btw...the whole block is beginning to stink a tad....(i'm serious)
i don't know why they keep saying they are protesting on wall street..they are 6 blocks away by the wtc
thanks for posting that video, maybe some of the posters on this or the other occupy thread that are complaining about protesters being unclear or unclean or whatever inane remark will watch to better understand some of their message. the movement is gaining momentum, that much is clear.
MGM Grand - Jul 6, 2006
Cox Arena - Jul 7, 2006
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival - May 1, 2010
Alpine Valley Music Theater - Sep 3-4 2011
Made In America, Philly - Sep 2, 2012
EV, Houston - Nov 12-13, 2012
Dallas-November 2013
OKC-November 2013
ACL 2-October 2014
Fenway Night 1, August 2016
Wrigley, Night 1 August 2018
Fort Worth, Night 1 September 2023
Fort Worth, Night 2 September 2023
Austin, Night 1 September 2023
Austin, Night 2 September 2023
Only if you blow up the voting booth.
Wall Street protest movement spreads to cities across US, Canada and Europe
Occupy Wall Street protests reach Boston, LA, St Louis and Kansas City, and are planned in cities across US and abroad
Karen McVeigh in New York
Guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 October 2011
It began as the brainchild of activists across the border in Canada when an anti-consumerism magazine put out a call in July for supporters to occupy Wall Street.
Now, three weeks after a few hundred people heeded that initial call and rolled out their sleeping bags in a park in New York's financial district, they are being joined by supporters in cities across the US and beyond.
Armed with Twitter, Facebook and shared Googledocs, protesters against corporate greed, unemployment and the political corruption that they say Wall Street represents have taken to the streets in Boston, Los Angeles, St Louis and Kansas City.
The core group, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), claims people will take part in demonstrations in as many as 147 US cities this month, while the website occupytogether.org lists 47 US states as being involved. Around the world, protests in Canada, the UK, Germany and Sweden are also planned, they say.
The speed of the leaderless movement's growth has taken many by surprise. Occupytogether.org, one of several sites associated with the protest, has had to be rebuilt to accommodate the traffic.
OWS media spokesman Patrick Bruner said: "We have on our board right now 147 US cities. I don't know whether they are occupied or they are planning on being occupied. My guess would be over 30 cities are occupied."
The original call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters to occupy Wall Street drew hundreds of protesters on 17 September and 2,000 attended a march the following Saturday. But the movement, which organisers say has its roots in the Arab spring and in Madrid's Puerta del Sol protests, has been galvanised by recent media attention.
Last week, the Guardian reported that a NYPD police officer had been filmed spraying four women protesters with pepper spray. On Saturday, a peaceful march on Brooklyn bridge intended as a call to the other four boroughs of New York to join in resulted in 700 arrests. Some protesters claim the police trapped them.
There are now two investigations, including an internal police inquiry, into the pepper spraying incident.
Bruner said the protest had snowballed in the last few days: "The American people have realised that the American dream has been assassinated and the murderer is still on the loose."
A message on the occupytogether site apologises for the site rebuild and directs readers to update links. It reads: "Wow, the groups organising and occupations popping up across the country is growing exponentially by the day. So much so that, in order to have proper navigation and organisation on the site, we had to begin categorising these pages by state. Because of this, every occupation's permalink has been changed."
Thornin Caristo, of OWS, said the movement had taken hold because it had tapped into anger at inequality, unemployment and corporate greed. He predicted it would continue to grow.
Caristo said: "It was always going to be a hit or miss situation but it's a hit and I don't think it will be reversing. So much of the population has no hope and those people are desperate."
Other websites publicising the protests have also become hugely popular. One, named wearethe99percent, in reference to the statistic that 1% of the US population owns a third of the wealth, posts pictures of people holding handwritten messages daily.
One said: "Last year, my 60-year-old mother was evicted. This year I graduated with my master's. I am unemployed with over $120,000 in student loans. I no longer believe the American Dream is for me because … We are the 99 per cent."
Another person holds up a sign which reads: "When you're young, you're told you can be anything, I'm sick of being fed lies. I graduated with a BA in 2009 and I've been searching for a job ever since. My generation is lost, depressed, in debt, struggling. We are taking unpaid internships and temporary contracts with no health insurance in desperation. We will forever be living at our parent's house."
Unions have have also expressed solidarity with the protests.
On Monday, the Transit Workers Union said it had applied for an injunction to stop the NYPD from forcing bus drivers to carry arrested OWS demonstrators.
On Tuesday the 700,000-strong Communication Workers of America endorsed OWS, describing it as an "appropriate expression of anger for all Americans, but especially for those who have been left behind by Wall Street".
In a statement, the group said: "We support the activists' non-violent efforts to seek a more equitable and democratic society based on citizenship, not corporate greed.
"The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are spreading throughout the country. We will support them and encourage all CWA Locals to participate in the growth of this protest movement."
Today, the protesters will join a number of unions and community organisations, including the CWA, the TWU and the United Federation of Teachers in a march on City Hall.
What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park:
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*
To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
Occupy Wall Street: A Manifesto
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women and transgendered — and any other human who is able to elude the tyranny of work for a couple of weeks — are created equal. We gather to be free not of oppression, but of responsibility and college tuition. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that a government long established and a nation long prosperous be changed for light and transient causes. So let our demands* be submitted to a candid world.
First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness — even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context …
…but down with the modern gilded age!
We demand that a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing, with a minor in German, become a basic human right, because education is crucial and rich people can afford to fund unemployment checks until we find jobs or in perpetuity, whichever comes first.
We demand a minimum wage of $10, no … make it $20. We earned it. And we demand the end of “profiteering,” because there is no better way to end joblessness than stopping the growth of capital. We also demand a maximum wage law, because selfish American dreams need a ceiling.
We demand the institution of direct democracy, because if a bunch of people say it’s OK, it’s OK. And everyone deserves to have his or her voice heard. Except Mr. Moneybags, who we demand stop contributing his own money to candidates we disagree with, to issue groups we loathe and to lobbyists who do not work for organizations featuring “Service,“ ”Employees,“ ”International” and/or “Union” in their title.
We demand the end to bailouts and corporate subsidies, unless we’re talking about companies that feature sunflowers or sun rays in their logos, because that’s the kind of morally gratifying institution we approve of, and thus, they should totally be fast-tracked and bailed out with your money to bring the fossil fuel economy (“the economy”) to an end.
We demand the end to a corrupt Wall Street (“Apple” “your 401(k)”) because banks hold too much power. We demand that government consolidate authority so that elected officials can make prudent choices for us. All that cash in banks was printed by the war god Mars and has nothing to do with the voluntary deposits by ordinary Americans, so we do not consider this theft.
We demand the end to corporate censorship, because if we can’t force private news organizations to run the types of stories with which we agree, there can’t be a healthy democracy. So actually, we demand the end of all corporate news organizations in the name of free speech.
We demand the end to health profiteering, because everyone knows that all the wondrous and lifesaving advances in modern medicine were invented in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. Smart people work for the good of humanity, not because they’re greedy.
We demand these rights because of the mass injustice of being able to freely protest against racism and corporatism without any real fear of imprisonment in the most diverse city on earth. And to the wiseguy who walked by the other day and claimed that I‘d be writing this manifesto with a quill pen on parchment paper if it weren’t for capitalism, we have two words for you: Koch brothers. Think about it.
This is the fifth communique from the 99.9 percent. We are occupying Wall Street, and we’re not going home until it gets really cold.
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.
_____________________________
Follow @davidharsanyi.
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2011/10/04 ... ore-151510
— Socrates
SHOW COUNT: (164) 1990's=3, 2000's=53, 2010/20's=108, US=118, CAN=15, Europe=20 ,New Zealand=4, Australia=5
Mexico=1, Colombia=1
This was really good. I agree with this just as much as I agree with the actual statements of the actual protesters. I could accurately represent my thoughts and beliefs on this situation with the common area of a Venn Diagram made from both of these statements.
Let them know you have had enough. Good luck.
All that being said, I think the anger is misguided.
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
fucking bums
Fonzie's on the motorcycle. Time for these people to go home. They will be creating more ill will than helping their cause at this point.