Seattle Mayor Issues May Day Warning
http://capitolhillseattle.com/2012/04/2 ... ay-warning
Occupy Wall Street
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by styky » 04/ 30/ 12 1:47 pm
Click here for FREEDOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
-
styky - Member
- Posts: 120244
- Joined: 03/ 10/ 03 9:21 pm
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by wildernessvoice » 04/ 30/ 12 2:50 pm
After the worst kept secret in Canada coming to light, $114 BILLIONs to the banks, I am wondering if I shouldn't join the occupy movement?
Don't forget- in November write in Ross Perot.
- wildernessvoice
- Posts: 5507
- Joined: 04/ 25/ 01 1:01 am
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by styky » 05/ 01/ 12 10:26 am
Stay home, unless you're going to a rally, Occupy organizers say
QMI Agency
First posted: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 08:01 AM EDT | Updated: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 08:51 AM EDT
Occupy groups across the country are planning a general strike on what is also International Workers' Day, calling for people to stay home from work, school, and shopping Tuesday.
Groups across the country are also planning rallies. In Ottawa, Occupiers will protest at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office.
In Toronto, protesters are planning to rally at City Hall, followed by a 24-hour reoccupation at an undisclosed location, the group says on its website.
Vancouver Occupiers are also planning a rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery Tuesday afternoon.
The Occupy movement is an international protest against economic inequality.
The largest event was Occupy Wall Street in New York City, where for weeks at the end of 2011, protesters remained in a park near the financial district and staged demonstrations.
The Occupy movement also saw a number of protests in cities across Canada.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/05/01/st ... nizers-say
QMI Agency
First posted: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 08:01 AM EDT | Updated: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 08:51 AM EDT
Occupy groups across the country are planning a general strike on what is also International Workers' Day, calling for people to stay home from work, school, and shopping Tuesday.
Groups across the country are also planning rallies. In Ottawa, Occupiers will protest at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office.
In Toronto, protesters are planning to rally at City Hall, followed by a 24-hour reoccupation at an undisclosed location, the group says on its website.
Vancouver Occupiers are also planning a rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery Tuesday afternoon.
The Occupy movement is an international protest against economic inequality.
The largest event was Occupy Wall Street in New York City, where for weeks at the end of 2011, protesters remained in a park near the financial district and staged demonstrations.
The Occupy movement also saw a number of protests in cities across Canada.
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/05/01/st ... nizers-say
Click here for FREEDOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
-
styky - Member
- Posts: 120244
- Joined: 03/ 10/ 03 9:21 pm
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by styky » 05/ 02/ 12 1:20 pm
Occutard protest
Did you survive yesterday .. the day when the 99% were going to shut down the 1%?
http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuz ... d-protest/
Did you survive yesterday .. the day when the 99% were going to shut down the 1%?
http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuz ... d-protest/
Click here for FREEDOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
-
styky - Member
- Posts: 120244
- Joined: 03/ 10/ 03 9:21 pm
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by styky » 05/ 02/ 12 1:46 pm
Seattle Mayor Issues Emergency Order After May Day Mayhem
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/01/se ... ay-mayhem/
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/01/se ... ay-mayhem/
Click here for FREEDOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
-
styky - Member
- Posts: 120244
- Joined: 03/ 10/ 03 9:21 pm
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Ogopogo » 05/ 07/ 12 10:47 pm
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/07/the- ... f-marxism/
The Masked Face of Marxism
Posted by John Perazzo Bio ↓ on May 7th, 2012 Comments ↓
40
Print This Post Print This Post
A A A
Last Tuesday, an army of left-wing radicals descended, in a violent May Day rampage, upon the city of Seattle. They smashed shop windows, vandalized banks, and even carried out a number of unprovoked assaults on innocent people who were sitting in their cars. So bad was the chaos, that Seattle mayor Mike McGinn went on television and announced that he would use his emergency powers to expand police authority to subdue the “anarchist or Black Bloc type individuals” who were now infesting his city, just as they have previously infested other cities in the U.S. and Europe.
Who exactly are these “Black Bloc” individuals cited by Mayor McGinn? Black Bloc is not an organization, but rather a protest tactic employed by anti-capitalists and anarchists. Clad in black helmets, black ski masks, and black garments to conceal their faces and whatever distinctive clothing they may be wearing underneath their dark coverings, Black Bloc radicals make their presence felt by participating in all manner of left-wing demonstrations against free-market capitalism and Western culture; they generally are far outnumbered by fellow protesters who, while likeminded, are more traditionally attired. Because the Black Blockers so carefully hide their identities, they are often able to engage in criminal behavior—most notably property destruction—with impunity. In instances where they are pursued by police—whom they contemptuously regard as nothing more than “guard dogs for the rich”—fleeing Black Bloc protesters typically shed their dark coverings and blend into the crowd.
The animating core belief of Black Block, as explained in the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective’s Black Bloc Papers, is that “private property—and capitalism, by extension—is intrinsically violent and repressive and cannot be reformed or mitigated.” Lamenting “all the violence committed in the name of private property rights,” the document charges that “corporate private property” in particular “is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it.” By this logic, the destruction of a storefront window can be redefined and justified as the laudable creation of “a vent to let some fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of a retail outlet.”
The origins of Black Bloc can be traced back to about 1980 in West Germany, where black-masked countercultural radicals calling themselves “Autonomen” (Autonomists) demonstrated against such despised targets as Western popular culture, conservatism, patriarchy, traditional gender roles, nuclear energy, and capitalist “greed.” They channeled their efforts chiefly toward the destruction of property belonging to corporations and financial institutions, because of their significance as symbols of capitalism.
In June 1987 a contingent of some 3,000 Black Bloc demonstrators were among the 50,000+ marchers who swarmed the streets of Berlin to condemn the policies of the conservative, pro-capitalist U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, who was visiting the city at that time. Berlin was again the scene of Black Bloc tactics fifteen months later, when demonstrators protested against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings which were being held there.
The first organized Black Bloc initiative in North America took place on October 17, 1988, when a relatively small number of black-clad protesters were among the 1,000+ demonstrators who convened outside the Pentagon to demand an end to U.S. intervention in the El Salvadoran civil war; the rally was organized by the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.
On Earth Day in 1990, Black Bloc militants were among a crowd of some 2,000 demonstrators who gathered on Wall Street in New York City to protest the allegedly anti-environmental practices of major American corporations. The protesters’ goal, as one supporter put it, was “to shut down business-as-usual in the heart of the capitalist beast.”
When the first Gulf War began in January 1991, several hundred Black Bloc demonstrators participated in a massive anti-war rally in Washington, DC. At a certain point, the Black Blockers broke away from the main hub of the protest and proceeded to smash windows at both the Treasury Department and the World Bank, to drive home the idea that “imperialist wars” are underwritten by “capitalist institutions.”
Embracing the premise that Western culture and its promoters are irredeemably evil to their core, Black Bloc demonstrators in 1992 marked the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus‘ arrival in the New World by denouncing, in numerous cities nationwide, the “five centuries of genocide” that Europeans and their descendants had brought to the Americas.
And because every anti-capitalist movement needs its Marxist heroes, Mumia Abu Jamal has become a revered figure in Black Bloc circles. In 1999, some 800 to 1,200 Black Bloc activists took part in Millions 4 Mumia, a massive Philadelphia rally in support of the convicted cop-killer and former Black Panther.
At the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) riots in Seattle, a contingent of Black Bloc anarchists trashed the storefronts of multinational corporations and helped force the WTO meetings to collapse. As one supporter puts it, the Black Bloc struck a blow against “the insulting and deadly march of corporate power,” as embodied by “irresponsible, money-starved vampire [capitalist] organizations who feed themselves by the selling and trade of increasingly trivial and noxious products.” Four years later in Cancun, Mexico, Black Bloc demonstrators played a role in forcing yet another round of WTO talks to break down.
Given the similarities between the worldviews of Black Block and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), it is not at all surprising that a number of Black Blockers have found a home in the Occupy movement—prompting some OWSers to complain that Black Block’s destructive tactics may tarnish Occupy’s reputation. In light of OWS’s well-documented history of objectionable and criminal activity—as evidenced by the thousands of arrests which have been made at Occupy sites nationwide—that complaint is laughable. Black Block and Occupy Wall Street are merely two sides of the same socialist coin.
The Masked Face of Marxism
Posted by John Perazzo Bio ↓ on May 7th, 2012 Comments ↓
40
Print This Post Print This Post
A A A
Last Tuesday, an army of left-wing radicals descended, in a violent May Day rampage, upon the city of Seattle. They smashed shop windows, vandalized banks, and even carried out a number of unprovoked assaults on innocent people who were sitting in their cars. So bad was the chaos, that Seattle mayor Mike McGinn went on television and announced that he would use his emergency powers to expand police authority to subdue the “anarchist or Black Bloc type individuals” who were now infesting his city, just as they have previously infested other cities in the U.S. and Europe.
Who exactly are these “Black Bloc” individuals cited by Mayor McGinn? Black Bloc is not an organization, but rather a protest tactic employed by anti-capitalists and anarchists. Clad in black helmets, black ski masks, and black garments to conceal their faces and whatever distinctive clothing they may be wearing underneath their dark coverings, Black Bloc radicals make their presence felt by participating in all manner of left-wing demonstrations against free-market capitalism and Western culture; they generally are far outnumbered by fellow protesters who, while likeminded, are more traditionally attired. Because the Black Blockers so carefully hide their identities, they are often able to engage in criminal behavior—most notably property destruction—with impunity. In instances where they are pursued by police—whom they contemptuously regard as nothing more than “guard dogs for the rich”—fleeing Black Bloc protesters typically shed their dark coverings and blend into the crowd.
The animating core belief of Black Block, as explained in the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective’s Black Bloc Papers, is that “private property—and capitalism, by extension—is intrinsically violent and repressive and cannot be reformed or mitigated.” Lamenting “all the violence committed in the name of private property rights,” the document charges that “corporate private property” in particular “is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it.” By this logic, the destruction of a storefront window can be redefined and justified as the laudable creation of “a vent to let some fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of a retail outlet.”
The origins of Black Bloc can be traced back to about 1980 in West Germany, where black-masked countercultural radicals calling themselves “Autonomen” (Autonomists) demonstrated against such despised targets as Western popular culture, conservatism, patriarchy, traditional gender roles, nuclear energy, and capitalist “greed.” They channeled their efforts chiefly toward the destruction of property belonging to corporations and financial institutions, because of their significance as symbols of capitalism.
In June 1987 a contingent of some 3,000 Black Bloc demonstrators were among the 50,000+ marchers who swarmed the streets of Berlin to condemn the policies of the conservative, pro-capitalist U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, who was visiting the city at that time. Berlin was again the scene of Black Bloc tactics fifteen months later, when demonstrators protested against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings which were being held there.
The first organized Black Bloc initiative in North America took place on October 17, 1988, when a relatively small number of black-clad protesters were among the 1,000+ demonstrators who convened outside the Pentagon to demand an end to U.S. intervention in the El Salvadoran civil war; the rally was organized by the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.
On Earth Day in 1990, Black Bloc militants were among a crowd of some 2,000 demonstrators who gathered on Wall Street in New York City to protest the allegedly anti-environmental practices of major American corporations. The protesters’ goal, as one supporter put it, was “to shut down business-as-usual in the heart of the capitalist beast.”
When the first Gulf War began in January 1991, several hundred Black Bloc demonstrators participated in a massive anti-war rally in Washington, DC. At a certain point, the Black Blockers broke away from the main hub of the protest and proceeded to smash windows at both the Treasury Department and the World Bank, to drive home the idea that “imperialist wars” are underwritten by “capitalist institutions.”
Embracing the premise that Western culture and its promoters are irredeemably evil to their core, Black Bloc demonstrators in 1992 marked the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus‘ arrival in the New World by denouncing, in numerous cities nationwide, the “five centuries of genocide” that Europeans and their descendants had brought to the Americas.
And because every anti-capitalist movement needs its Marxist heroes, Mumia Abu Jamal has become a revered figure in Black Bloc circles. In 1999, some 800 to 1,200 Black Bloc activists took part in Millions 4 Mumia, a massive Philadelphia rally in support of the convicted cop-killer and former Black Panther.
At the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) riots in Seattle, a contingent of Black Bloc anarchists trashed the storefronts of multinational corporations and helped force the WTO meetings to collapse. As one supporter puts it, the Black Bloc struck a blow against “the insulting and deadly march of corporate power,” as embodied by “irresponsible, money-starved vampire [capitalist] organizations who feed themselves by the selling and trade of increasingly trivial and noxious products.” Four years later in Cancun, Mexico, Black Bloc demonstrators played a role in forcing yet another round of WTO talks to break down.
Given the similarities between the worldviews of Black Block and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), it is not at all surprising that a number of Black Blockers have found a home in the Occupy movement—prompting some OWSers to complain that Black Block’s destructive tactics may tarnish Occupy’s reputation. In light of OWS’s well-documented history of objectionable and criminal activity—as evidenced by the thousands of arrests which have been made at Occupy sites nationwide—that complaint is laughable. Black Block and Occupy Wall Street are merely two sides of the same socialist coin.
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Ogopogo - Posts: 19694
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Re: Occupy Wall Street
by styky » 05/ 09/ 12 10:41 am
The Moral Infrastructure
By Thomas Sowell
The "Occupy" movement, which the Obama administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach far beyond the passing sensation it has created.
The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people's lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment's requirement that the government provide "equal protection of the laws" to all its citizens.
How did the "Occupy" movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1 percent........http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 14071.html
By Thomas Sowell
The "Occupy" movement, which the Obama administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach far beyond the passing sensation it has created.
The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people's lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment's requirement that the government provide "equal protection of the laws" to all its citizens.
How did the "Occupy" movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1 percent........http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 14071.html
Click here for FREEDOMINION FORUM RULES
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
-
styky - Member
- Posts: 120244
- Joined: 03/ 10/ 03 9:21 pm
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Ogopogo » 05/ 12/ 12 1:11 pm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -manifesto
The 'GlobalMay manifesto' of the Occupy movement
The global Occupy movement wants a better world. Such a world is possible, and here's how …
Share 1740
Email
Occupy movement
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 May 2012 04.00 EDT
Comments (411)
Occupy London celebrate May Day by handing out flowers in Liverpool St
Anonymous protester gives flowers to commuters in London saying Love, breathe, hope, create, occupy. Photograph: Heard Inlondon/ Heard InLondon/Demotix/Corbis
We are living in a world controlled by forces incapable of giving freedom and dignity to the world's population. A world where we are told "there is no alternative" to the loss of rights gained through the long, hard struggles of our ancestors, and where success is defined in opposition to the most fundamental values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional.
But we have not remained silent! From Tunisia to Tahrir Square, Madrid to Reykjavik, New York to Brussels, people are rising up to denounce the status quo. Our effort states "enough!", and has begun to push changes forward, worldwide.
This is why we are uniting once again to make our voices heard all over the world this 12 May.
We condemn the current distribution of economic resources whereby only a tiny minority escape poverty and insecurity, and future generations are condemned to a poisoned legacy thanks to the environmental crimes of the rich and powerful. "Democratic" political systems, where they exist, have been emptied of meaning, put to the service of those few interested in increasing the power of corporations and financial institutions.
The current crisis is not a natural accident; it was caused by the greed of those who would bring the world down, with the help of an economics that is no longer about management of the common good, but has become an ideology at the service of financial power.
We have awakened, and not just to complain! We aim to pinpoint the true causes of the crisis, and to propose alternatives.
The statement below does not speak on behalf of everyone in the global spring/Occupy/Take the Square movements. It is an attempt by some inside the movements to reconcile statements written and endorsed in the different assemblies around the world. The process of writing the statement was consensus-based, open to all, and regularly announced on our international communications platforms. It was a hard and long process, full of compromises; this statement is offered to people's assemblies around the world for discussions, revisions and endorsements. It is a work in progress.
We do not make demands from governments, corporations or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt. We speak to the people of the world, both inside and outside our movements.
We want another world, and such a world is possible:
1. The economy must be put to the service of people's welfare, and to support and serve the environment, not private profit. We want a system where labour is appreciated by its social utility, not its financial or commercial profit. Therefore, we demand:
• Free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings. We reject outright the privatisation of public services management, and the use of these essential services for private profit.
• Full respect for children's rights, including free childcare for everyone.
• Retirement/pension so we may have dignity at all ages. Mandatory universal sick leave and holiday pay.
• Every human being should have access to an adequate income for their livelihood, so we ask for work or, alternatively, universal basic income guarantee.
• Corporations should be held accountable to their actions. For example, corporate subsidies and tax cuts should be done away with if said company outsources jobs to decrease salaries, violates the environment or the rights of workers.
• Apart from bread, we want roses. Everyone has the right to enjoy culture, participate in a creative and enriching leisure at the service of the progress of humankind. Therefore, we demand the progressive reduction of working hours, without reducing income.
• Food sovereignty through sustainable farming should be promoted as an instrument of food security for the benefit of all. This should include an indefinite moratorium on the production and marketing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and immediate reduction of agrochemicals use.
• We demand policies that function under the understanding that our changing patterns of life should be organic/ecologic or should never be. These policies should be based on a simple rule: one should not spoil the balance of ecosystems for simple profit. Violations of this policy should be prosecuted around the world as an environmental crime, with severe sanctions for those convicted.
• Policies to promote the change from fossil fuels to renewable energy, through massive investment which should help to change the production model.
• We demand the creation of international environmental standards, mandatory for countries, companies, corporations, and individuals. Ecocide (wilful damage to the environment, ecosystems, biodiversity) should be internationally recognised as a crime of the greatest magnitude.
2. To achieve these objectives, we believe that the economy should be run democratically at all levels, from local to global. People must get democratic control over financial institutions, transnational corporations and their lobbies. To this end, we demand:
• Control and regulation of financial speculation by abolishing tax havens, and establishing a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT). As long as they exist, the IMF, World Bank and the Basel Committee on Banking Regulation must be radically democratised. Their duty from now on should be fostering economic development based on democratic decision making. Rich governments cannot have more votes because they are rich. International institutions must be controlled by the principle that each human is equal to all other humans – African, Argentinian or American; Greek or German.
• As long as they exist, radical reform and democratisation of the global trading system and the World Trade Organization must take place. Commercialisation of life and resources, as well as wage and trade dumping between countries must stop.
• We want democratic control of the global commons, defined as the natural resources and economic institutions essential for a proper economic management. These commons are: water, energy, air, telecommunications and a fair and stable economic system. In all these cases, decisions must be accountable to citizens and ensure their interests, not the interests of a small minority of financial elite.
• As long as social inequalities exist, taxation at all levels should maintain the principle of solidarity. Those who have more should contribute to maintain services for the collective welfare. Maximum income should be limited, and minimum income set to reduce the outrageous social divisions in our societies and its social political and economic effects.
• No more money to rescue banks. As long as debt exists, following the examples of Ecuador and Iceland, we demand a social audit of the debts owed by countries. Illegitimate debt owed to financial institutions should not be paid.
• An absolute end to fiscal austerity policies that only benefit a minority, and cause great suffering to the majority.
• As long as banks exist, separation of commercial and financial banks, avoiding banks that are "too big to fail".
• An end to the legal personhood of corporations. Companies cannot be elevated to the same level of rights as people. The public's right to protect workers, citizens and the environment should prevail over the protections of private property or investment.
3. We believe that political systems must be fully democratic. We therefore demand full democratisation of international institutions, and the elimination of the veto power of a few governments. We want a political system which really represent the variety and diversity of our societies:
• All decisions affecting all mankind should be taken in democratic forums like a participatory and direct UN parliamentary assembly or a UN people's assembly, not rich clubs such as G20 or G8.
• At all levels we ask for the development of a democracy that is as participatory as possible, including non representative direct democracy .
• As long as they are practised, electoral systems should be as fair and representative as possible, avoiding biases that distort the principle of proportionality.
• We call for the democratisation of access and management of media. These should serve to educate the public, as opposed to the creation of an artificial consensus about unjust policies.
• We ask for democracy in companies and corporations. Workers, despite wage level or gender, should have real decision-making power in the companies and corporations they work in. We want to promote co-operative companies and corporations, as real democratic economic institutions.
• Zero tolerance of corruption in economic policy. We must stop the excessive influence of big business in politics, which is today a major threat to true democracy.
• We demand complete freedom of expression, assembly and demonstration, as well as the cessation of attempts to censor the internet.
• We demand respect for privacy rights on and off the internet. Companies and the government should not engage in data mining.
• We believe that military spending is politically counterproductive to a society's advance, so we demand its reduction to a minimum.
• Ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities should have their civil, cultural, political and economic rights fully recognised.
• Some of us believe a new Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fit for the 21st century, written in a participatory, direct and democratic way, needs to be written. As long as the current Declaration of Human Rights defines our rights, it must be enforced in relation to all – in both rich and poor countries. Implementing institutions that force compliance and penalise violators need to be established, such as a global court to prosecute social, economic and environmental crimes perpetrated by governments, corporations and individuals. At all levels, local, national, regional and global, new constitutions for political institutions need to be considered, as in Iceland or in some Latin American countries. Justice and law must work for all, otherwise justice is not justice, and law is not law.
This is a worldwide global spring. We will be there and we will fight until we win. We will not stop being people. We are not numbers. We are free women and men.
For a global spring!
For global democracy and social justice!
Take to the streets in May 2012!
The 'GlobalMay manifesto' of the Occupy movement
The global Occupy movement wants a better world. Such a world is possible, and here's how …
Share 1740
Occupy movement
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 May 2012 04.00 EDT
Comments (411)
Occupy London celebrate May Day by handing out flowers in Liverpool St
Anonymous protester gives flowers to commuters in London saying Love, breathe, hope, create, occupy. Photograph: Heard Inlondon/ Heard InLondon/Demotix/Corbis
We are living in a world controlled by forces incapable of giving freedom and dignity to the world's population. A world where we are told "there is no alternative" to the loss of rights gained through the long, hard struggles of our ancestors, and where success is defined in opposition to the most fundamental values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional.
But we have not remained silent! From Tunisia to Tahrir Square, Madrid to Reykjavik, New York to Brussels, people are rising up to denounce the status quo. Our effort states "enough!", and has begun to push changes forward, worldwide.
This is why we are uniting once again to make our voices heard all over the world this 12 May.
We condemn the current distribution of economic resources whereby only a tiny minority escape poverty and insecurity, and future generations are condemned to a poisoned legacy thanks to the environmental crimes of the rich and powerful. "Democratic" political systems, where they exist, have been emptied of meaning, put to the service of those few interested in increasing the power of corporations and financial institutions.
The current crisis is not a natural accident; it was caused by the greed of those who would bring the world down, with the help of an economics that is no longer about management of the common good, but has become an ideology at the service of financial power.
We have awakened, and not just to complain! We aim to pinpoint the true causes of the crisis, and to propose alternatives.
The statement below does not speak on behalf of everyone in the global spring/Occupy/Take the Square movements. It is an attempt by some inside the movements to reconcile statements written and endorsed in the different assemblies around the world. The process of writing the statement was consensus-based, open to all, and regularly announced on our international communications platforms. It was a hard and long process, full of compromises; this statement is offered to people's assemblies around the world for discussions, revisions and endorsements. It is a work in progress.
We do not make demands from governments, corporations or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt. We speak to the people of the world, both inside and outside our movements.
We want another world, and such a world is possible:
1. The economy must be put to the service of people's welfare, and to support and serve the environment, not private profit. We want a system where labour is appreciated by its social utility, not its financial or commercial profit. Therefore, we demand:
• Free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings. We reject outright the privatisation of public services management, and the use of these essential services for private profit.
• Full respect for children's rights, including free childcare for everyone.
• Retirement/pension so we may have dignity at all ages. Mandatory universal sick leave and holiday pay.
• Every human being should have access to an adequate income for their livelihood, so we ask for work or, alternatively, universal basic income guarantee.
• Corporations should be held accountable to their actions. For example, corporate subsidies and tax cuts should be done away with if said company outsources jobs to decrease salaries, violates the environment or the rights of workers.
• Apart from bread, we want roses. Everyone has the right to enjoy culture, participate in a creative and enriching leisure at the service of the progress of humankind. Therefore, we demand the progressive reduction of working hours, without reducing income.
• Food sovereignty through sustainable farming should be promoted as an instrument of food security for the benefit of all. This should include an indefinite moratorium on the production and marketing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and immediate reduction of agrochemicals use.
• We demand policies that function under the understanding that our changing patterns of life should be organic/ecologic or should never be. These policies should be based on a simple rule: one should not spoil the balance of ecosystems for simple profit. Violations of this policy should be prosecuted around the world as an environmental crime, with severe sanctions for those convicted.
• Policies to promote the change from fossil fuels to renewable energy, through massive investment which should help to change the production model.
• We demand the creation of international environmental standards, mandatory for countries, companies, corporations, and individuals. Ecocide (wilful damage to the environment, ecosystems, biodiversity) should be internationally recognised as a crime of the greatest magnitude.
2. To achieve these objectives, we believe that the economy should be run democratically at all levels, from local to global. People must get democratic control over financial institutions, transnational corporations and their lobbies. To this end, we demand:
• Control and regulation of financial speculation by abolishing tax havens, and establishing a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT). As long as they exist, the IMF, World Bank and the Basel Committee on Banking Regulation must be radically democratised. Their duty from now on should be fostering economic development based on democratic decision making. Rich governments cannot have more votes because they are rich. International institutions must be controlled by the principle that each human is equal to all other humans – African, Argentinian or American; Greek or German.
• As long as they exist, radical reform and democratisation of the global trading system and the World Trade Organization must take place. Commercialisation of life and resources, as well as wage and trade dumping between countries must stop.
• We want democratic control of the global commons, defined as the natural resources and economic institutions essential for a proper economic management. These commons are: water, energy, air, telecommunications and a fair and stable economic system. In all these cases, decisions must be accountable to citizens and ensure their interests, not the interests of a small minority of financial elite.
• As long as social inequalities exist, taxation at all levels should maintain the principle of solidarity. Those who have more should contribute to maintain services for the collective welfare. Maximum income should be limited, and minimum income set to reduce the outrageous social divisions in our societies and its social political and economic effects.
• No more money to rescue banks. As long as debt exists, following the examples of Ecuador and Iceland, we demand a social audit of the debts owed by countries. Illegitimate debt owed to financial institutions should not be paid.
• An absolute end to fiscal austerity policies that only benefit a minority, and cause great suffering to the majority.
• As long as banks exist, separation of commercial and financial banks, avoiding banks that are "too big to fail".
• An end to the legal personhood of corporations. Companies cannot be elevated to the same level of rights as people. The public's right to protect workers, citizens and the environment should prevail over the protections of private property or investment.
3. We believe that political systems must be fully democratic. We therefore demand full democratisation of international institutions, and the elimination of the veto power of a few governments. We want a political system which really represent the variety and diversity of our societies:
• All decisions affecting all mankind should be taken in democratic forums like a participatory and direct UN parliamentary assembly or a UN people's assembly, not rich clubs such as G20 or G8.
• At all levels we ask for the development of a democracy that is as participatory as possible, including non representative direct democracy .
• As long as they are practised, electoral systems should be as fair and representative as possible, avoiding biases that distort the principle of proportionality.
• We call for the democratisation of access and management of media. These should serve to educate the public, as opposed to the creation of an artificial consensus about unjust policies.
• We ask for democracy in companies and corporations. Workers, despite wage level or gender, should have real decision-making power in the companies and corporations they work in. We want to promote co-operative companies and corporations, as real democratic economic institutions.
• Zero tolerance of corruption in economic policy. We must stop the excessive influence of big business in politics, which is today a major threat to true democracy.
• We demand complete freedom of expression, assembly and demonstration, as well as the cessation of attempts to censor the internet.
• We demand respect for privacy rights on and off the internet. Companies and the government should not engage in data mining.
• We believe that military spending is politically counterproductive to a society's advance, so we demand its reduction to a minimum.
• Ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities should have their civil, cultural, political and economic rights fully recognised.
• Some of us believe a new Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fit for the 21st century, written in a participatory, direct and democratic way, needs to be written. As long as the current Declaration of Human Rights defines our rights, it must be enforced in relation to all – in both rich and poor countries. Implementing institutions that force compliance and penalise violators need to be established, such as a global court to prosecute social, economic and environmental crimes perpetrated by governments, corporations and individuals. At all levels, local, national, regional and global, new constitutions for political institutions need to be considered, as in Iceland or in some Latin American countries. Justice and law must work for all, otherwise justice is not justice, and law is not law.
This is a worldwide global spring. We will be there and we will fight until we win. We will not stop being people. We are not numbers. We are free women and men.
For a global spring!
For global democracy and social justice!
Take to the streets in May 2012!
-
Ogopogo - Posts: 19694
- Joined: 12/ 11/ 04 4:08 am
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Ogopogo » 05/ 18/ 12 8:40 pm
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/18/chic ... nd-mayhem/
Chicago Braces for Leftist Violence and Mayhem
Posted by Matthew Vadum Bio ↓ on May 18th, 2012 Comments ↓
31
Print This Post Print This Post
A A A
The Left’s violent attacks on the yet-to-begin NATO summit in Chicago are already underway as anti-American activists hope to recreate the mayhem that accompanied the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Radicals clamoring for “change” have said for months that the actions in Chicago are only the beginning.
During a heart-warming “F*** the Police” protest action Tuesday night in Chicagoland, mask-wearing demonstrators clad in black clothing carried communist and anarchist flags in hopes of winning the hearts and minds of Middle America. One area resident described the raucous march as “scary.”
Leftists and union goons terrorized entire neighborhoods, creating makeshift barricades, dragging dumpsters into the streets, and upending garbage cans. One anarchist apparently beat up an 80-year-old man.
Management at a downtown housing complex in Chicago is warning residents to flee to safety before Occupy demonstrators switch into full rage-against-the-machine mode. The Library Tower Condominium Association sent out a letter indicating that management “is STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21.”
When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting this weekend, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its allies plan to press their demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters, Kalle Lasn’s left-wing magazine that helped to lay the groundwork for the Occupy movement. Chicago demonstrators won’t be able to protest the G8 summit unless they’re willing to do a lengthy weekend commute. That conference was supposed to take place alongside the NATO conference in Chicago but was relocated to Camp David in Maryland.
The steadily increasing levels of violence from Occupiers may be related to anarchists’ apparently growing influence in the movement. “Anarchist occupiers are energized and their visceral tactics are attracting members,” according to Adbusters, which praised the brutal techniques anarchists used during May Day actions. “Now, the power of the Black Bloc is growing within Occupy and pushing the movement in unexpected directions.”
Useful idiot Aaron Hughes, an organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War, will also play a role in the protests this weekend. He said he intends to lead a cohort of veterans to the NATO summit. Hughes and other misguided souls plan to return –John Kerry-style— the service medals they earned in Iraq.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s favorite labor organization, the Service Employees International Union, is subsidizing demonstrators by providing Washington, D.C. office space worth $4,000 a month to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Interviewed in that space one Occupy activist ill-suited for abstract thought, Johnny Mandracchia, shared his unusual definition of the word violence with Katie Pavlich of Townhall magazine. It is not violence to smash the windows of a Starbucks coffee shop, said the self-described anarcho-syndicalist, “because Starbucks isn’t a private business – it’s a corporation.” Such acts, including the burning of police cars, are merely examples of vandalism, he said.
While Professor Mandracchia was imparting his novel ideas about law, Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were busy helping the anti-American activists who hope to violently disrupt the approaching NATO summit in Chicago.
Ayers and Dohrn are the close personal friends of Obama who launched his political career with a fundraiser in their Chicago living room when he ran for the Illinois state senate. The small-c communist confab for cash took place several years after the conclusion of a lengthy firebombing campaign conducted by the now-married couple’s terrorist group, the Weather Underground. Ayers and Dohrn escaped justice on a legal technicality after law enforcement personnel failed to cross every “t” and dot every “i” in their quest for evidence against the couple.
Some Obama critics say Ayers may have even written Obama’s well received first autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
Freshly returned from a sojourn in Marxist fantasy land, Dohrn seemed to echo the late radical lawyer William Kunstler’s infamous observation that the police constitute “an army of occupation” in American cities.
Although the security dragnet enveloping Chicagoland is prompted by a well-founded belief that Occupy-associated groups and fanatics like Dohrn pose a threat to public safety, the wrinkly terrorist bomber blames NATO for the creation of “restricted zones” and “the shutdown of universities and colleges, the shutdown of businesses, the closings of the major museums here, it is being treated as really a practice military zone.”
What Dohrn really means is that the so-called right of unhinged nihilistic protesters to run wild in the streets is more important than the right of Chicago’s citizens to defend their persons and property from attack.
Predictably, for propaganda purposes Dohrn deliberately misdescribed the NATO conference as “war games,” evoking images of destroyers on Lake Michigan shelling the Sears Tower.
Dohrn told fellow travelers such as host Amy Goodman at “Democracy Now!” that instead of getting together in Chicago representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should be meeting “in an underground bunker or on a remote island.” For her part, Goodman euphemistically described Dorhn and Ayers merely as “two veteran activists.”
Zoe Sigman of Occupy Chicago amplified Dohrn’s points at a press conference.
Sigman called NATO leaders “warmongers” invading Chicago and “the military arm of the 1 percent.” The “warnings of violence downtown echo the reality of police repression” that some Chicagoans face in their everyday lives. “NATO,” Sigman said, “is a symptom of the global system of violence and oppression at the hands of the 1 percent.”
Of course Sigman did not discuss Occupy Wall Street and the spectacularly violent satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of crimes, including assault, rape, arson, rioting, robbery, and a host of others. But deluded true believers don’t quite see it that way. They see the police and institutions as the problem.
Ayers told Goodman that the authorities in Chicago are the real troublemakers.
“What they’re doing and what they’ve been doing for months is to kind of deflect attention from NATO onto the idea that somehow the protests create a threat,” he said.
“They’re shutting Lakeshore Drive. They’re shutting the trains. They’re closing exits off the freeways. And they’re creating a kind of culture of fear,” said Ayers, an expert in creating a culture of fear.
“We insist that this is a family-friendly, nonviolent, permitted march. And all the kind of hysteria about what’s about to happen is really brought on by the police. I don’t think anything is going to happen, except that they are creating the conditions for a police riot, once again. They’re creating the conditions for more repression. And this is a very bad thing.”
Far-left activists from the Catholic Worker movement kicked off “A Week Without Capitalism” in Chicago by invading an office building housing the Obama reelection campaign headquarters. They claimed to be advancing “nonviolent resistance to the corporate G8/NATO agenda.”
On the other side in Chicago is Mayor Rahm Emanuel, himself a radical Saul Alinsky-inspired thug, who previously served as Obama’s White House chief of staff. Emanuel has beefed up security in the Windy City and taken other steps such as boosting fines for resisting a police officer in anticipation of the demonstrations.
Thousands of out-of-state police officers are streaming into Chicago to help deal with Ayers’s family-friendly nonviolent demonstrators. Law enforcement personnel would be wise to bring their batons and gas masks.
Chicago Braces for Leftist Violence and Mayhem
Posted by Matthew Vadum Bio ↓ on May 18th, 2012 Comments ↓
31
Print This Post Print This Post
A A A
The Left’s violent attacks on the yet-to-begin NATO summit in Chicago are already underway as anti-American activists hope to recreate the mayhem that accompanied the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Radicals clamoring for “change” have said for months that the actions in Chicago are only the beginning.
During a heart-warming “F*** the Police” protest action Tuesday night in Chicagoland, mask-wearing demonstrators clad in black clothing carried communist and anarchist flags in hopes of winning the hearts and minds of Middle America. One area resident described the raucous march as “scary.”
Leftists and union goons terrorized entire neighborhoods, creating makeshift barricades, dragging dumpsters into the streets, and upending garbage cans. One anarchist apparently beat up an 80-year-old man.
Management at a downtown housing complex in Chicago is warning residents to flee to safety before Occupy demonstrators switch into full rage-against-the-machine mode. The Library Tower Condominium Association sent out a letter indicating that management “is STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21.”
When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting this weekend, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its allies plan to press their demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters, Kalle Lasn’s left-wing magazine that helped to lay the groundwork for the Occupy movement. Chicago demonstrators won’t be able to protest the G8 summit unless they’re willing to do a lengthy weekend commute. That conference was supposed to take place alongside the NATO conference in Chicago but was relocated to Camp David in Maryland.
The steadily increasing levels of violence from Occupiers may be related to anarchists’ apparently growing influence in the movement. “Anarchist occupiers are energized and their visceral tactics are attracting members,” according to Adbusters, which praised the brutal techniques anarchists used during May Day actions. “Now, the power of the Black Bloc is growing within Occupy and pushing the movement in unexpected directions.”
Useful idiot Aaron Hughes, an organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War, will also play a role in the protests this weekend. He said he intends to lead a cohort of veterans to the NATO summit. Hughes and other misguided souls plan to return –John Kerry-style— the service medals they earned in Iraq.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s favorite labor organization, the Service Employees International Union, is subsidizing demonstrators by providing Washington, D.C. office space worth $4,000 a month to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Interviewed in that space one Occupy activist ill-suited for abstract thought, Johnny Mandracchia, shared his unusual definition of the word violence with Katie Pavlich of Townhall magazine. It is not violence to smash the windows of a Starbucks coffee shop, said the self-described anarcho-syndicalist, “because Starbucks isn’t a private business – it’s a corporation.” Such acts, including the burning of police cars, are merely examples of vandalism, he said.
While Professor Mandracchia was imparting his novel ideas about law, Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were busy helping the anti-American activists who hope to violently disrupt the approaching NATO summit in Chicago.
Ayers and Dohrn are the close personal friends of Obama who launched his political career with a fundraiser in their Chicago living room when he ran for the Illinois state senate. The small-c communist confab for cash took place several years after the conclusion of a lengthy firebombing campaign conducted by the now-married couple’s terrorist group, the Weather Underground. Ayers and Dohrn escaped justice on a legal technicality after law enforcement personnel failed to cross every “t” and dot every “i” in their quest for evidence against the couple.
Some Obama critics say Ayers may have even written Obama’s well received first autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
Freshly returned from a sojourn in Marxist fantasy land, Dohrn seemed to echo the late radical lawyer William Kunstler’s infamous observation that the police constitute “an army of occupation” in American cities.
Although the security dragnet enveloping Chicagoland is prompted by a well-founded belief that Occupy-associated groups and fanatics like Dohrn pose a threat to public safety, the wrinkly terrorist bomber blames NATO for the creation of “restricted zones” and “the shutdown of universities and colleges, the shutdown of businesses, the closings of the major museums here, it is being treated as really a practice military zone.”
What Dohrn really means is that the so-called right of unhinged nihilistic protesters to run wild in the streets is more important than the right of Chicago’s citizens to defend their persons and property from attack.
Predictably, for propaganda purposes Dohrn deliberately misdescribed the NATO conference as “war games,” evoking images of destroyers on Lake Michigan shelling the Sears Tower.
Dohrn told fellow travelers such as host Amy Goodman at “Democracy Now!” that instead of getting together in Chicago representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should be meeting “in an underground bunker or on a remote island.” For her part, Goodman euphemistically described Dorhn and Ayers merely as “two veteran activists.”
Zoe Sigman of Occupy Chicago amplified Dohrn’s points at a press conference.
Sigman called NATO leaders “warmongers” invading Chicago and “the military arm of the 1 percent.” The “warnings of violence downtown echo the reality of police repression” that some Chicagoans face in their everyday lives. “NATO,” Sigman said, “is a symptom of the global system of violence and oppression at the hands of the 1 percent.”
Of course Sigman did not discuss Occupy Wall Street and the spectacularly violent satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of crimes, including assault, rape, arson, rioting, robbery, and a host of others. But deluded true believers don’t quite see it that way. They see the police and institutions as the problem.
Ayers told Goodman that the authorities in Chicago are the real troublemakers.
“What they’re doing and what they’ve been doing for months is to kind of deflect attention from NATO onto the idea that somehow the protests create a threat,” he said.
“They’re shutting Lakeshore Drive. They’re shutting the trains. They’re closing exits off the freeways. And they’re creating a kind of culture of fear,” said Ayers, an expert in creating a culture of fear.
“We insist that this is a family-friendly, nonviolent, permitted march. And all the kind of hysteria about what’s about to happen is really brought on by the police. I don’t think anything is going to happen, except that they are creating the conditions for a police riot, once again. They’re creating the conditions for more repression. And this is a very bad thing.”
Far-left activists from the Catholic Worker movement kicked off “A Week Without Capitalism” in Chicago by invading an office building housing the Obama reelection campaign headquarters. They claimed to be advancing “nonviolent resistance to the corporate G8/NATO agenda.”
On the other side in Chicago is Mayor Rahm Emanuel, himself a radical Saul Alinsky-inspired thug, who previously served as Obama’s White House chief of staff. Emanuel has beefed up security in the Windy City and taken other steps such as boosting fines for resisting a police officer in anticipation of the demonstrations.
Thousands of out-of-state police officers are streaming into Chicago to help deal with Ayers’s family-friendly nonviolent demonstrators. Law enforcement personnel would be wise to bring their batons and gas masks.
-
Ogopogo - Posts: 19694
- Joined: 12/ 11/ 04 4:08 am
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Ogopogo » 08/ 02/ 12 8:17 pm
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/01/467989 ... aying.html
Officer at center of pepper-spraying incident no longer works at UC Davis
By Sam Stanton
sstanton@sacbee.com
Published: Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
Last Modified: Thursday, Aug. 2, 2012 - 3:10 pm
Lt. John Pike, the UC Davis police officer who became a focal point of last November's pepper-spraying incident during a campus protest, is no longer employed by the university, a spokesman confirmed late Tuesday.
UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said he could not discuss the details of Pike's departure, but in response to queries from The Bee, he said Pike was no longer employed there as of Tuesday.
"Consistent with privacy guidelines established in state law and university policy, I can confirm that John Pike's employment with the university ended on July 31, 2012," Shiller said. "I'm unable to comment further."
Pike, 39, declined to comment when reached by The Bee as he was sitting in a meeting on campus where he said he was being terminated.
Pike's 2010 salary was listed as $110,243.12. He has been on paid leave since the debacle unfolded last year, sparking worldwide outrage, numerous investigations and calls for the resignation of UC Davis leaders.
Pike's leave coincided with an internal affairs investigation into his and other officers' actions on the campus quad Nov. 18, when Pike and at least one other officer used pepper spray on students and protesters who were seated and had locked arms, refusing police orders to disperse.
UC Davis officials have said that because the internal affairs probes are confidential, they cannot not disclose their findings.
As a result of cellphone video showing Pike spraying the students and protesters, he became the primary symbol of the public outrage over the incident as the images spread worldwide on the Internet.
Pike, a former Sacramento police officer, was suspended with pay after the incident along with another officer and then-UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza. Spicuzza retired in April after an independent panel issued an investigative report that severely criticized her leadership of the Police Department and found fault with much of the university leadership during the crisis.
Pike's future had remained in limbo until now, and at one point he faced harassment that included a barrage of 10,000 text messages, 17,000 emails and numerous items being ordered delivered to his home.
That backlash led, in part, to a judge's order that the names of other officers involved in the incident not be revealed, an order that is currently the subject of a legal battle between the Federated University Police Officers Association and lawyers for The Bee and the Los Angeles Times.
The university, Pike and other officers have since been sued by students who say they were victims of the pepper-spraying. The Yolo County District Attorney's Office is still reviewing the matter to determine whether criminal charges should be filed.
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/01/467989 ... rylink=cpy
Officer at center of pepper-spraying incident no longer works at UC Davis
By Sam Stanton
sstanton@sacbee.com
Published: Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 1B
Last Modified: Thursday, Aug. 2, 2012 - 3:10 pm
Lt. John Pike, the UC Davis police officer who became a focal point of last November's pepper-spraying incident during a campus protest, is no longer employed by the university, a spokesman confirmed late Tuesday.
UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said he could not discuss the details of Pike's departure, but in response to queries from The Bee, he said Pike was no longer employed there as of Tuesday.
"Consistent with privacy guidelines established in state law and university policy, I can confirm that John Pike's employment with the university ended on July 31, 2012," Shiller said. "I'm unable to comment further."
Pike, 39, declined to comment when reached by The Bee as he was sitting in a meeting on campus where he said he was being terminated.
Pike's 2010 salary was listed as $110,243.12. He has been on paid leave since the debacle unfolded last year, sparking worldwide outrage, numerous investigations and calls for the resignation of UC Davis leaders.
Pike's leave coincided with an internal affairs investigation into his and other officers' actions on the campus quad Nov. 18, when Pike and at least one other officer used pepper spray on students and protesters who were seated and had locked arms, refusing police orders to disperse.
UC Davis officials have said that because the internal affairs probes are confidential, they cannot not disclose their findings.
As a result of cellphone video showing Pike spraying the students and protesters, he became the primary symbol of the public outrage over the incident as the images spread worldwide on the Internet.
Pike, a former Sacramento police officer, was suspended with pay after the incident along with another officer and then-UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza. Spicuzza retired in April after an independent panel issued an investigative report that severely criticized her leadership of the Police Department and found fault with much of the university leadership during the crisis.
Pike's future had remained in limbo until now, and at one point he faced harassment that included a barrage of 10,000 text messages, 17,000 emails and numerous items being ordered delivered to his home.
That backlash led, in part, to a judge's order that the names of other officers involved in the incident not be revealed, an order that is currently the subject of a legal battle between the Federated University Police Officers Association and lawyers for The Bee and the Los Angeles Times.
The university, Pike and other officers have since been sued by students who say they were victims of the pepper-spraying. The Yolo County District Attorney's Office is still reviewing the matter to determine whether criminal charges should be filed.
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/01/467989 ... rylink=cpy
-
Ogopogo - Posts: 19694
- Joined: 12/ 11/ 04 4:08 am
Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Ogopogo » 09/ 01/ 12 2:17 pm
Excerpt:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-08-29/ ... -year-two/
Occupy Wall Street, Year Two
Approaching its anniversary, the movement isn't dead. It's growing up.
A A A Comments (18) By Nick Pinto Wednesday, Aug 29 2012
Every Monday for the past six weeks, a crowd of activists has piled into a cramped office space on 23rd Street to plan the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
Kevin Vanden/wordpress.com
All of the jokes about leftists and their meetings probably go double for Occupy, a collection of people defined only by the initial protest tactic they shared, a collection of people with political philosophies ranging from anarchism to Marxism to the most moderate shades of liberal reformism.
The arguments are frequent, and even when they're absent, tensions and disagreements seethe just under the surface.
Some of the fights are about tactics: Can the logistically ambitious plans for a swirling "hurricane" of protesters pinwheeling from intersection to intersection through Lower Manhattan really be pulled off? Is a protest framework built around loosely coordinated but independent "affinity groups" a recipe for open-source creative dissent or a tepid vision that depends on a self-organized army of protesters that will never arrive for its success?
Other disagreements are ideological and as old as Occupy itself. Who does this movement belong to? Is it the anarchists who played a critical role in getting it off the ground, and whose philosophical and structural underpinnings were central to what it became? Or is there room for a broader spectrum of the rhetorical "99 percent," for less radical perspectives that seek incremental reform?
Amid the conflict and tension, something is emerging from the frequently agonizing four-hour meetings. The factionalism that for so long seemed to threaten to tear the movement apart seems increasingly manageable. After a year of precisely these sorts of arguments, anarchists, liberals, and union stalwarts all know the contours of their disagreements, but they're also better than they've ever been at pushing through them.
They're also increasingly confident that whatever this thing is that binds them together, that keeps them coming back to the next meeting, the next hard-won consensus, whatever they call that shared project, it has a future beyond this first anniversary.
Having weathered a rocky first year during which police repression and its own growing pains led a fickle news media to write it off again and again, Occupy persists—in these meetings on 23rd Street, in a far-flung but well-coordinated network across the nation and the Internet, and, when the anniversary rolls around on September 17, right back in the streets of Lower Manhattan, where it all started.
As Occupy plans its own anniversary and the movement prepares to enter its second year, organizers find themselves in something like the role of particle physicists studying the readouts of a cyclotron: Something bright and hot happened in Zuccotti Park for a few months last fall. What was it? What was the magical formula, the combination of circumstances so powerful it could transform so many people who visited the park and capture the imagination of an entire nation, while reframing the popular conversation and inspiring hundreds of sympathetic uprisings across the country, from Los Angeles to Kalamazoo? Can they replicate it?
Some of the critical ingredients of that first flash are gone, maybe forever. Police and institutional powers seem determined to deny the movement the physical space that was so central to its early days.
Still, even more fundamental conditions of last autumn's rebellion remain and are only becoming more pronounced. The foreclosure crisis is, if anything, accelerating. The bankers whose crimes provoked the ongoing crisis are still free men, and the prosecutions and regulatory reforms that might prevent this all from happening again are nowhere to be seen.
"The economic conditions are just as bad as they were a year ago," says Bill Dobbs, an Occupy spokesman. "The 1 percent hasn't given anything up."
But is that enough? Can Occupy recapture the remarkable momentum that seemed to spring from nowhere last year?
At their most disheartened, some activists say that the most they can do is wait for the moment when the economic and political situation becomes so bad that public anger finally overcomes the barriers that keep people from taking action.
The obituary of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been written and rewritten hundreds of times in the year since the movement first burst into the national consciousness.
Early drafts were penned when the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park, and more followed in the winter months after coordinated police actions expelled encampments from public parks in virtually every major city in the country.
Through the winter and spring, the energy of many of New York's Occupy protesters was spent in two ways.
The first was an ongoing fight against the police repression—shutting down public spaces and conducting violent and unlawful arrests virtually every time protesters tried to assemble—that dogged the movement's every action.
When protesters emerged from their winter hibernation to mark Occupy's six-month anniversary in March, the gathering provoked a massive police response that led to scores of arrests and injuries.
In the following weeks and months, protesters kept up their fight for their right to assemble, first in Union Square—where police took the unprecedented step of closing the park every night with more than 100 officers and truckloads of barricades—then in the financial district across from the New York Stock Exchange, where the arrests and harassment continued in apparent violation of a federal ruling protecting the right of protesters to occupy sidewalk space.
So determined was the NYPD to deny protesters a space to gather that when a march passed nearby Tompkins Square in May, officers chained the entire park shut, closing it to the public.
The battle over ongoing police repression continues today, though mostly in the legal arena. A host of lawsuits accusing the city and police of violating protesters' Constitutional rights is just beginning to work its way through federal court; a damning and encyclopedic report by legal scholars released last month catalogs hundreds of specific police violations; and international human rights observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe are conducting their own investigation of the repression.
Kevin Vanden/wordpress.com
But even as the legal battles continue, Occupy protesters agree more and more that while ongoing police repression might be unavoidable, Occupy's fixation on its foundational tactic—the physical occupation of public space—is, for the moment at least, a dead end.
"They're never going to let us have a public space like that again," one protester told me. "We can bang our heads against that forever, but it's not going to happen. All it does is draw us more into fights with the police and away from the issues that brought us all together in the first place."
The second focus of Occupy's attention over the winter and spring was planning for a major re-emergence on May Day. By many standards, the May Day events were a success. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers packed Union Square and coursed down Broadway.
Less obvious but perhaps more important was the behind-the-scenes coalition-building that May Day organizers conducted, brokering a more or less unprecedented alliance between organized labor and immigrants' rights groups and drawing unions to embrace May Day, an international day of workers that has been shunned by generations of American organized labor for its radical associations.
But despite these accomplishments, the dominant media narrative had already closed the book on Occupy, and organizers found they were unable to recapture the lightning that had struck in the park. Press attention to the day's events was cursory at best, leaving many inside the movement dispirited and reinforcing a popular perception that Occupy was moribund.
Nothing to see here, the sober voices of conventional wisdom declared. That moment you might have found exciting is over. What remains of Occupy is a shrinking band of addled and disorganized malcontents, retreading the same rhetorical ground with ever-diminishing effect.
Many Occupy participants now concede that they walked into that trap, and that staking their movement's credibility and vitality on a one-day spectacular show of force was a strategic mistake.
Occupation, after all, was a tactic, an action that took place for a moment, first near Wall Street and then in many other places around the world. Conflating the tactic with the social energy it represented is one of the easiest ways to misunderstand what happened last year and what is yet to come. If Occupy Wall Street is no longer occupying Wall Street, it's easy to say the movement is dead.
What the obituary writers fail to recognize is that the spectacle of the occupation was only the most obvious of Occupy's weapons. Its real strength, its true innovation, was the way that people who found their way to Zuccotti Park—literally and figuratively—related to one another.
There's one thing people say again and again when they talk about what Occupy has meant to them: "We found each other in Zuccotti Park."
Most simply, they mean that they learned they were not alone in believing that something is seriously wrong in this country and that knowledge strengthened their resolve to do something.
"People at the beginning were like, "It's the revolution!" says Tammy Shapiro, a veteran organizer who helps coordinate the archipelago of Occupy groups across the country through interoccupy.net. "When that didn't happen, a lot of people got disappointed."
That conviction has burned off, but it doesn't mean that Occupiers now think of what happened as unremarkable, just the latest in a long line of upwellings of activist energy. There really is something fundamentally new about Occupy, about what happened when people "found each other."
"I don't identify as an anarchist," says a longtime Occupier who calls himself "Winter." "But some of the anarchist principles that manifest in Occupy are empowering: the fact that we use democracy to make our decisions; that we don't want to make compromises just to have political impact. We feel like we're creating another world just in the way that we're interacting with each other."
The energy unleashed when these people found one another has given birth to a panoply of projects, some of them local and focused on local issues, others national in scope and organization. The technological infrastructure of sites including interoccupy.net and occupytogether.org are helping these groups grow and coordinate.
Among the most notable of these projects is the national Occupy Homes movement, which operated locally in neighborhoods such as East New York but was most fully realized by activists in Minneapolis, Detroit, and Atlanta. By blocking the eviction of families from foreclosed homes—foreclosures often going forward in the face of banks' poor documentation and even outright fraud—activists continue to call attention to one of the most direct ways that the crimes committed in the financial stratosphere impact regular Americans.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-08-29/ ... -year-two/
Occupy Wall Street, Year Two
Approaching its anniversary, the movement isn't dead. It's growing up.
A A A Comments (18) By Nick Pinto Wednesday, Aug 29 2012
Every Monday for the past six weeks, a crowd of activists has piled into a cramped office space on 23rd Street to plan the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
Kevin Vanden/wordpress.com
All of the jokes about leftists and their meetings probably go double for Occupy, a collection of people defined only by the initial protest tactic they shared, a collection of people with political philosophies ranging from anarchism to Marxism to the most moderate shades of liberal reformism.
The arguments are frequent, and even when they're absent, tensions and disagreements seethe just under the surface.
Some of the fights are about tactics: Can the logistically ambitious plans for a swirling "hurricane" of protesters pinwheeling from intersection to intersection through Lower Manhattan really be pulled off? Is a protest framework built around loosely coordinated but independent "affinity groups" a recipe for open-source creative dissent or a tepid vision that depends on a self-organized army of protesters that will never arrive for its success?
Other disagreements are ideological and as old as Occupy itself. Who does this movement belong to? Is it the anarchists who played a critical role in getting it off the ground, and whose philosophical and structural underpinnings were central to what it became? Or is there room for a broader spectrum of the rhetorical "99 percent," for less radical perspectives that seek incremental reform?
Amid the conflict and tension, something is emerging from the frequently agonizing four-hour meetings. The factionalism that for so long seemed to threaten to tear the movement apart seems increasingly manageable. After a year of precisely these sorts of arguments, anarchists, liberals, and union stalwarts all know the contours of their disagreements, but they're also better than they've ever been at pushing through them.
They're also increasingly confident that whatever this thing is that binds them together, that keeps them coming back to the next meeting, the next hard-won consensus, whatever they call that shared project, it has a future beyond this first anniversary.
Having weathered a rocky first year during which police repression and its own growing pains led a fickle news media to write it off again and again, Occupy persists—in these meetings on 23rd Street, in a far-flung but well-coordinated network across the nation and the Internet, and, when the anniversary rolls around on September 17, right back in the streets of Lower Manhattan, where it all started.
As Occupy plans its own anniversary and the movement prepares to enter its second year, organizers find themselves in something like the role of particle physicists studying the readouts of a cyclotron: Something bright and hot happened in Zuccotti Park for a few months last fall. What was it? What was the magical formula, the combination of circumstances so powerful it could transform so many people who visited the park and capture the imagination of an entire nation, while reframing the popular conversation and inspiring hundreds of sympathetic uprisings across the country, from Los Angeles to Kalamazoo? Can they replicate it?
Some of the critical ingredients of that first flash are gone, maybe forever. Police and institutional powers seem determined to deny the movement the physical space that was so central to its early days.
Still, even more fundamental conditions of last autumn's rebellion remain and are only becoming more pronounced. The foreclosure crisis is, if anything, accelerating. The bankers whose crimes provoked the ongoing crisis are still free men, and the prosecutions and regulatory reforms that might prevent this all from happening again are nowhere to be seen.
"The economic conditions are just as bad as they were a year ago," says Bill Dobbs, an Occupy spokesman. "The 1 percent hasn't given anything up."
But is that enough? Can Occupy recapture the remarkable momentum that seemed to spring from nowhere last year?
At their most disheartened, some activists say that the most they can do is wait for the moment when the economic and political situation becomes so bad that public anger finally overcomes the barriers that keep people from taking action.
The obituary of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been written and rewritten hundreds of times in the year since the movement first burst into the national consciousness.
Early drafts were penned when the first tents went up in Zuccotti Park, and more followed in the winter months after coordinated police actions expelled encampments from public parks in virtually every major city in the country.
Through the winter and spring, the energy of many of New York's Occupy protesters was spent in two ways.
The first was an ongoing fight against the police repression—shutting down public spaces and conducting violent and unlawful arrests virtually every time protesters tried to assemble—that dogged the movement's every action.
When protesters emerged from their winter hibernation to mark Occupy's six-month anniversary in March, the gathering provoked a massive police response that led to scores of arrests and injuries.
In the following weeks and months, protesters kept up their fight for their right to assemble, first in Union Square—where police took the unprecedented step of closing the park every night with more than 100 officers and truckloads of barricades—then in the financial district across from the New York Stock Exchange, where the arrests and harassment continued in apparent violation of a federal ruling protecting the right of protesters to occupy sidewalk space.
So determined was the NYPD to deny protesters a space to gather that when a march passed nearby Tompkins Square in May, officers chained the entire park shut, closing it to the public.
The battle over ongoing police repression continues today, though mostly in the legal arena. A host of lawsuits accusing the city and police of violating protesters' Constitutional rights is just beginning to work its way through federal court; a damning and encyclopedic report by legal scholars released last month catalogs hundreds of specific police violations; and international human rights observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe are conducting their own investigation of the repression.
Kevin Vanden/wordpress.com
But even as the legal battles continue, Occupy protesters agree more and more that while ongoing police repression might be unavoidable, Occupy's fixation on its foundational tactic—the physical occupation of public space—is, for the moment at least, a dead end.
"They're never going to let us have a public space like that again," one protester told me. "We can bang our heads against that forever, but it's not going to happen. All it does is draw us more into fights with the police and away from the issues that brought us all together in the first place."
The second focus of Occupy's attention over the winter and spring was planning for a major re-emergence on May Day. By many standards, the May Day events were a success. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers packed Union Square and coursed down Broadway.
Less obvious but perhaps more important was the behind-the-scenes coalition-building that May Day organizers conducted, brokering a more or less unprecedented alliance between organized labor and immigrants' rights groups and drawing unions to embrace May Day, an international day of workers that has been shunned by generations of American organized labor for its radical associations.
But despite these accomplishments, the dominant media narrative had already closed the book on Occupy, and organizers found they were unable to recapture the lightning that had struck in the park. Press attention to the day's events was cursory at best, leaving many inside the movement dispirited and reinforcing a popular perception that Occupy was moribund.
Nothing to see here, the sober voices of conventional wisdom declared. That moment you might have found exciting is over. What remains of Occupy is a shrinking band of addled and disorganized malcontents, retreading the same rhetorical ground with ever-diminishing effect.
Many Occupy participants now concede that they walked into that trap, and that staking their movement's credibility and vitality on a one-day spectacular show of force was a strategic mistake.
Occupation, after all, was a tactic, an action that took place for a moment, first near Wall Street and then in many other places around the world. Conflating the tactic with the social energy it represented is one of the easiest ways to misunderstand what happened last year and what is yet to come. If Occupy Wall Street is no longer occupying Wall Street, it's easy to say the movement is dead.
What the obituary writers fail to recognize is that the spectacle of the occupation was only the most obvious of Occupy's weapons. Its real strength, its true innovation, was the way that people who found their way to Zuccotti Park—literally and figuratively—related to one another.
There's one thing people say again and again when they talk about what Occupy has meant to them: "We found each other in Zuccotti Park."
Most simply, they mean that they learned they were not alone in believing that something is seriously wrong in this country and that knowledge strengthened their resolve to do something.
"People at the beginning were like, "It's the revolution!" says Tammy Shapiro, a veteran organizer who helps coordinate the archipelago of Occupy groups across the country through interoccupy.net. "When that didn't happen, a lot of people got disappointed."
That conviction has burned off, but it doesn't mean that Occupiers now think of what happened as unremarkable, just the latest in a long line of upwellings of activist energy. There really is something fundamentally new about Occupy, about what happened when people "found each other."
"I don't identify as an anarchist," says a longtime Occupier who calls himself "Winter." "But some of the anarchist principles that manifest in Occupy are empowering: the fact that we use democracy to make our decisions; that we don't want to make compromises just to have political impact. We feel like we're creating another world just in the way that we're interacting with each other."
The energy unleashed when these people found one another has given birth to a panoply of projects, some of them local and focused on local issues, others national in scope and organization. The technological infrastructure of sites including interoccupy.net and occupytogether.org are helping these groups grow and coordinate.
Among the most notable of these projects is the national Occupy Homes movement, which operated locally in neighborhoods such as East New York but was most fully realized by activists in Minneapolis, Detroit, and Atlanta. By blocking the eviction of families from foreclosed homes—foreclosures often going forward in the face of banks' poor documentation and even outright fraud—activists continue to call attention to one of the most direct ways that the crimes committed in the financial stratosphere impact regular Americans.
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Re: Occupy Wall Street
by styky » 09/ 25/ 12 10:11 am
Report: Ahmadinejad to Meet with Occupy Wall Street
Sep 24, 2012
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/rep ... 52994.html
Sep 24, 2012
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/rep ... 52994.html
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All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope ~ Sir Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money." Margaret Thatcher They say it takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.
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Re: Occupy Wall Street
by J.B. Stone » 09/ 25/ 12 12:28 pm
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Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Kate Shaw » 09/ 26/ 12 2:53 pm
Ogopogo wrote:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/11/occupy-globalmay-manifesto
The 'GlobalMay manifesto' of the Occupy movement
The global Occupy movement wants a better world. Such a world is possible, and here's how …
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Occupy movement
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 May 2012 04.00 EDT
Comments (411)
Occupy London celebrate May Day by handing out flowers in Liverpool St
Anonymous protester gives flowers to commuters in London saying Love, breathe, hope, create, occupy. Photograph: Heard Inlondon/ Heard InLondon/Demotix/Corbis
We are living in a world controlled by forces incapable of giving freedom and dignity to the world's population. A world where we are told "there is no alternative" to the loss of rights gained through the long, hard struggles of our ancestors, and where success is defined in opposition to the most fundamental values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional.
But we have not remained silent! From Tunisia to Tahrir Square, Madrid to Reykjavik, New York to Brussels, people are rising up to denounce the status quo. Our effort states "enough!", and has begun to push changes forward, worldwide.
This is why we are uniting once again to make our voices heard all over the world this 12 May.
We condemn the current distribution of economic resources whereby only a tiny minority escape poverty and insecurity, and future generations are condemned to a poisoned legacy thanks to the environmental crimes of the rich and powerful. "Democratic" political systems, where they exist, have been emptied of meaning, put to the service of those few interested in increasing the power of corporations and financial institutions.
The current crisis is not a natural accident; it was caused by the greed of those who would bring the world down, with the help of an economics that is no longer about management of the common good, but has become an ideology at the service of financial power.
We have awakened, and not just to complain! We aim to pinpoint the true causes of the crisis, and to propose alternatives.
The statement below does not speak on behalf of everyone in the global spring/Occupy/Take the Square movements. It is an attempt by some inside the movements to reconcile statements written and endorsed in the different assemblies around the world. The process of writing the statement was consensus-based, open to all, and regularly announced on our international communications platforms. It was a hard and long process, full of compromises; this statement is offered to people's assemblies around the world for discussions, revisions and endorsements. It is a work in progress.
We do not make demands from governments, corporations or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt. We speak to the people of the world, both inside and outside our movements.
We want another world, and such a world is possible:
1. The economy must be put to the service of people's welfare, and to support and serve the environment, not private profit. We want a system where labour is appreciated by its social utility, not its financial or commercial profit. Therefore, we demand:
• Free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings. We reject outright the privatisation of public services management, and the use of these essential services for private profit.
• Full respect for children's rights, including free childcare for everyone.
• Retirement/pension so we may have dignity at all ages. Mandatory universal sick leave and holiday pay.
• Every human being should have access to an adequate income for their livelihood, so we ask for work or, alternatively, universal basic income guarantee.
• Corporations should be held accountable to their actions. For example, corporate subsidies and tax cuts should be done away with if said company outsources jobs to decrease salaries, violates the environment or the rights of workers.
• Apart from bread, we want roses. Everyone has the right to enjoy culture, participate in a creative and enriching leisure at the service of the progress of humankind. Therefore, we demand the progressive reduction of working hours, without reducing income.
• Food sovereignty through sustainable farming should be promoted as an instrument of food security for the benefit of all. This should include an indefinite moratorium on the production and marketing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and immediate reduction of agrochemicals use.
• We demand policies that function under the understanding that our changing patterns of life should be organic/ecologic or should never be. These policies should be based on a simple rule: one should not spoil the balance of ecosystems for simple profit. Violations of this policy should be prosecuted around the world as an environmental crime, with severe sanctions for those convicted.
• Policies to promote the change from fossil fuels to renewable energy, through massive investment which should help to change the production model.
• We demand the creation of international environmental standards, mandatory for countries, companies, corporations, and individuals. Ecocide (wilful damage to the environment, ecosystems, biodiversity) should be internationally recognised as a crime of the greatest magnitude.
2. To achieve these objectives, we believe that the economy should be run democratically at all levels, from local to global. People must get democratic control over financial institutions, transnational corporations and their lobbies. To this end, we demand:
• Control and regulation of financial speculation by abolishing tax havens, and establishing a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT). As long as they exist, the IMF, World Bank and the Basel Committee on Banking Regulation must be radically democratised. Their duty from now on should be fostering economic development based on democratic decision making. Rich governments cannot have more votes because they are rich. International institutions must be controlled by the principle that each human is equal to all other humans – African, Argentinian or American; Greek or German.
• As long as they exist, radical reform and democratisation of the global trading system and the World Trade Organization must take place. Commercialisation of life and resources, as well as wage and trade dumping between countries must stop.
• We want democratic control of the global commons, defined as the natural resources and economic institutions essential for a proper economic management. These commons are: water, energy, air, telecommunications and a fair and stable economic system. In all these cases, decisions must be accountable to citizens and ensure their interests, not the interests of a small minority of financial elite.
• As long as social inequalities exist, taxation at all levels should maintain the principle of solidarity. Those who have more should contribute to maintain services for the collective welfare. Maximum income should be limited, and minimum income set to reduce the outrageous social divisions in our societies and its social political and economic effects.
• No more money to rescue banks. As long as debt exists, following the examples of Ecuador and Iceland, we demand a social audit of the debts owed by countries. Illegitimate debt owed to financial institutions should not be paid.
• An absolute end to fiscal austerity policies that only benefit a minority, and cause great suffering to the majority.
• As long as banks exist, separation of commercial and financial banks, avoiding banks that are "too big to fail".
• An end to the legal personhood of corporations. Companies cannot be elevated to the same level of rights as people. The public's right to protect workers, citizens and the environment should prevail over the protections of private property or investment.
3. We believe that political systems must be fully democratic. We therefore demand full democratisation of international institutions, and the elimination of the veto power of a few governments. We want a political system which really represent the variety and diversity of our societies:
• All decisions affecting all mankind should be taken in democratic forums like a participatory and direct UN parliamentary assembly or a UN people's assembly, not rich clubs such as G20 or G8.
• At all levels we ask for the development of a democracy that is as participatory as possible, including non representative direct democracy .
• As long as they are practised, electoral systems should be as fair and representative as possible, avoiding biases that distort the principle of proportionality.
• We call for the democratisation of access and management of media. These should serve to educate the public, as opposed to the creation of an artificial consensus about unjust policies.
• We ask for democracy in companies and corporations. Workers, despite wage level or gender, should have real decision-making power in the companies and corporations they work in. We want to promote co-operative companies and corporations, as real democratic economic institutions.
• Zero tolerance of corruption in economic policy. We must stop the excessive influence of big business in politics, which is today a major threat to true democracy.
• We demand complete freedom of expression, assembly and demonstration, as well as the cessation of attempts to censor the internet.
• We demand respect for privacy rights on and off the internet. Companies and the government should not engage in data mining.
• We believe that military spending is politically counterproductive to a society's advance, so we demand its reduction to a minimum.
• Ethnic, cultural and sexual minorities should have their civil, cultural, political and economic rights fully recognised.
• Some of us believe a new Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fit for the 21st century, written in a participatory, direct and democratic way, needs to be written. As long as the current Declaration of Human Rights defines our rights, it must be enforced in relation to all – in both rich and poor countries. Implementing institutions that force compliance and penalise violators need to be established, such as a global court to prosecute social, economic and environmental crimes perpetrated by governments, corporations and individuals. At all levels, local, national, regional and global, new constitutions for political institutions need to be considered, as in Iceland or in some Latin American countries. Justice and law must work for all, otherwise justice is not justice, and law is not law.
This is a worldwide global spring. We will be there and we will fight until we win. We will not stop being people. We are not numbers. We are free women and men.
For a global spring!
For global democracy and social justice!
Take to the streets in May 2012!
My sainted Southern Granny would have said, "Yes, and the people in Hell want ice water, and they are not going to get it either."
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, either but right through every human heart." Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Kate Shaw - Posts: 24729
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Re: Occupy Wall Street
by Ogopogo » 09/ 26/ 12 10:56 pm
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbuster ... ng-39.html
Site under maintenance
While you are here, check out our lastest tactical briefing...
ADBUSTERS TACTICAL BRIEFING #39: #HALLOWEENPARTY
Image
Alright occupiers, trick or treat,
Let’s all go to Washington, DC, and have a Halloween night party!
Let’s celebrate the wonderful Coke/Pepsi presidential election now in progress … and the honest, feisty way our elected reps in Congress have conducted our nation’s business … pay tribute to the bold visions they’ve put forward.
At dusk on October 31, let’s gather on Capitol Hill, trick or treat Congress and party like we’ve never partied before.
Bring mask!
CJ HQ
PS And if you cannot make it to DC then party in front of your city hall.
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET
#OCCUPYMAINSTREET
#HALLOWEENPARTY
Tactical Briefing #38, #37 and #36.
Site under maintenance
While you are here, check out our lastest tactical briefing...
ADBUSTERS TACTICAL BRIEFING #39: #HALLOWEENPARTY
Image
Alright occupiers, trick or treat,
Let’s all go to Washington, DC, and have a Halloween night party!
Let’s celebrate the wonderful Coke/Pepsi presidential election now in progress … and the honest, feisty way our elected reps in Congress have conducted our nation’s business … pay tribute to the bold visions they’ve put forward.
At dusk on October 31, let’s gather on Capitol Hill, trick or treat Congress and party like we’ve never partied before.
Bring mask!
CJ HQ
PS And if you cannot make it to DC then party in front of your city hall.
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET
#OCCUPYMAINSTREET
#HALLOWEENPARTY
Tactical Briefing #38, #37 and #36.
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- Joined: 12/ 11/ 04 4:08 am
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