FAIR USE NOTICE

FAIR USE NOTICE

A BEAR MARKET ECONOMICS BLOG

OCCUPY THE REVOLUTION

OCCUPY THE REVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Battle for the Soul of Occupy


Adbusters Blog

Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!

Alright you jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,

First they silenced our uprising with a media blackout… then they smashed our encampments with midnight paramilitary raids… and now they’re threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation. This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?

It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed.

Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?

We are now in a battle for the soul of Occupy… a fight to the finish between the impotent old left and the new vibrant, horizontal left who launched Occupy Wall Street from the bottom-up and who dreams of real democracy and another world.

Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past. Let’s Occupy the clicktivists and crash the MoveOn party. Let’s #DEFENDOCCUPY and stop the derailment of our movement that looms ahead.

for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ
OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25, #26, #27 and #28 / Check out Oakland occupier Mike King’s take on MoveOn’s 99% Spring


Adbusters Blog

Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Round #2.
Last weekend, tens of thousands of activists participated in training workshops put together by the 99% Spring, a project of MoveOn.org and several other organizations that purports to move away from clicktivism toward fomenting “non-violent direct action”–aiming to transform America in the process.
“Change happens,” say actors Olivia Wilde and Penn Badgley, in a video created for the organization, “because people put their beliefs and bodies on the line.” They go on to reference civil rights activism, and the video cuts to crowds of peaceful protestors. Some journalists and news outlets have praised this supposed shift, claiming its goal is to recruit a broad base of regular Joes and Janes, and ally them with the Occupy movement.
Others warned, as early as March, that the 99% Spring’s links to MoveOn.org meant that it would be a veiled Obama re-election campaign (making the movement’s nod to the Arab Spring bitterly ironic, as the US is a major supplier of arms used to quash democratic uprisings).
Is the 99% Spring movement a veiled attempt to co-opt and sanitize Occupy? Is it a marketing ploy for Obama 2012? According to occupier Charles Young, it would appear so:
“The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.”
Read the rest of Young’s report on his experience at the 99% Spring training at counterpunch.org and weigh in below how on we can ensure that the soul of Occupy is never co-opted.



Adbusters Blog

Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Round #3.

In this Al Jazeera video a profound discussion emerges over the question of how Occupy should deal with the 99% Spring movement. Can we co-opt the co-opters? Should we simply ignore the 99% Spring? Or do we need a more visceral response?
Watch the video and let’s discuss how Occupy can win the battle for the soul of our movement.


Adbusters Blog

Battle for the Soul of Occupy

The Nation Magazine wins Round #4.
“Boots. Check. Gas mask. Yup. Black pants. Got it. Water bottle and Bandana. Tent. okay. People’s Library. Sounds good. Solidarity.”
“Will that be all?”
“Oh yes, and one revolution please.”
“And how will you be paying for that? Cash or credit?”
“Credit.”
As occupiers across the world prepare for a May uprising, The Nation magazine has some advice for what the movement should do next. “Show your support today for Occupy Wall Street’s Move Your Money Relay by applying for The Nation Magazine Platinum Visa® Rewards Card!” writes Associate Publisher Peggy Randall. We hear some 99% Spring occupiers are even rushing out now to get their Nation credit card in time for the May Day General Strike.
With this kind of boost, we’re sure to succeed.

Support + Share

Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.


Adbusters Blog

Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Round #5 - Will MoveOn knock us out?

sinkers.org

As we prepare for the May uprising, two power centers of our movement have announced plans for a spectacular bi-coastal May 1st bridge blockade. On the West Coast, Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco are planning rush hour disruptions on the Golden Gate Bridge while in New York City, occupiers say they will block one or more Manhattan-bound bridges. These acts of nonviolent direct action will set the tactical tone for the next phase of Occupy: they signal the turn towards Strike actions aimed at disrupting the flow of money. And, on a deeper level, these blockades come at a pivotal moment for Occupy as the movement grapples with a battle for its soul.

The question many occupiers are debating is whether the spirit and voice of Occupy will stay with the new left horizontals who launched the uprising or whether it will move towards MoveOn’s 99% Spring, and their old left buddies at The Nation magazine, Ben & Jerry’s, et al.

For the first most spectacular days of Occupy – such as on September 24 when eighty Zuccottis were arrested and shocking footage of women getting maced was replayed on national television – MoveOn ignored our movement. They decided to jump on board much later when 700 nonviolent occupiers were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. They saw this mass arrest as an opportunity to fold Occupy into their electoral Rebuild the Dream campaign to bolster Obama. At a time when Occupy was inspiring hundreds of thousands of people across the nation to take the squares, set up leaderless encampments and reinvent democracy in people’s assemblies, MoveOn held an October 5 online “Virtual March on Wall Street” with their friends at Rebuild the Dream.

At the peak of Occupy, when the people’s movement had catalyzed a global day of action on October 15 that saw millions of us in 82 countries rally in financial districts and capital cities for real democracy, MoveOn tried to cash in on Occupy’s momentum with a donation pitch. “We have to capitalize on this momentum now,” wrote MoveOn in an email to its members. “Can you chip in $5?”

And now, MoveOn wants to hijack our movement with their 99% Spring.

MoveOn is an existential threat to our movement because they don’t have a revolutionary bone in their body … if we give these clicktivists any more room then they will pull off a managed cooling of our revolutionary fervor … they will neuter the kind of bold, militant nonviolent direct actions that are the key to the next phase of our movement. Don’t let them do it!

Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!

Support + Share

Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.


Adbusters Blog

Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Round #6 - A left hook!

Occupy will come out swinging May 1 with a General Strike in 115 cities … A month of visceral nonviolent actions will follow. We will flex our tactical muscles, dream of a new world order and #playjazz like never before.
From Slavoj Žižek in today’s Guardian:
“The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.”
The clicktivists at MoveOn are channeling Occupy’s intensity into legal, symbolic rallies that bolster Democratic Party campaign promises. Check out the 80 organizations backing MoveOn’s 99% Spring: most of them are the same old lefty cabal that’s ruled over and stifled the political left for the last 20 years.

But there are also some flowers among the vegetables … and we should try to get them back. Folks like the Ruckus Society or the Rainforest Action Network … groups whose bold civil disobedience inspired us all in the past. We still remember how the tactical brilliance of John Sellers, a former Ruckus Society leader, was so feared that he was preemptively arrested, charged with 14 misdemeanors, including “possession of an instrument of crime” – his cell phone – ha ha! – and held on $1 million bail during the Republican National Convention protests in 2000.

Hey jammers, let’s get some of these wild flowers back … Head over to the 99% Spring and look through the list of affiliated organizations. Decide for yourself which groups you respect then call them for a chat or send them an email or a tweet. Ruckus Society is at 510-931-6339, ruckus@ruckus.org, @Ruckusociety; Rainforest Action Network at 415-398-4404, answers@ran.org, @RAN… Let’s nudge our friends back into the Occupy camp in time for the May Day General Strike.

Support + Share

Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.

GLOBAL #LAUGHRIOT


Adbusters Blog

MAY 18 GLOBAL #LAUGHRIOT

Tactical Briefing #27.

Alright you wild cats, nimble dreamers and jammer tacticians,

In a sudden about-face, the United States has conceded a victory to Occupy and moved May’s G8 summit to Camp David, an impenetrable military base in rural Maryland. Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move… but now we’ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.

The big question is do we follow Mao’s advice (“when the enemy retreats, we pursue”) or Sun Tzu’s (“Do not pursue an enemy who simulates flight”)? We’ve heard persuasive arguments on all sides. Some occupiers say the movement should lay chase and go for #OCCUPYCAMPDAVID against all odds … a month of tree-sits, lockdowns and nomadic encampments in the woods and nearby Thurmont. Others believe it’s best to up the ante with #OCCUPYCHICAGO: an even bigger mobilization beginning with the May Day General Strike. Still others advocate an unpredictable everywhere-at-once global insurgency of anarchic swarms throughout the month of May.

When Ben Ali first attacked then tried to hide from his people, he was toppled. When Mubarak refused to negotiate and tried to beat his people back into line, he was deposed. Now the White House and the G8 are repeating the mistakes of last year’s autocrats … first they try to scare us with tough talk of repressive anti-Occupy ordinances, crowd suppression technologies and paramilitary policing, then they make a hasty retreat to the safety of Camp David.

The world’s leaders flee from us … so what do we do? Maybe we just laugh at them?

On May 18, the day the G8 leaders meet in Camp David, why don’t we, the people of the world have a #LAUGHRIOT. Let roars of laughter rise up from towns and cities everywhere at the spectacle of the world’s leaders trying to crisis manage the economy from behind closed doors and razor wire fences.

Laughter is one of the most powerful tactical weapons of memewar … it signals supremacy and loss of fear. So let’s pull off the greatest comedy of howling flash mobs, riotous street parties and hysterical pranks the world has ever seen. May 18 could be a monumental tipping point… an ahahaha! moment when the people of the world have a collective epiphany, and from that point on start thinking differently about how the world should be governed.

Jammers, whatever we do this Spring, let’s float like butterflies and sting like bees! Let’s bend the G8 and NATO to our will with shock tactics and audacious culture jams that capture the imagination of the world. We may be far closer to a Global Spring than any of us has so far dared to imagine …

for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25 and #26 / OccupyWallst.org / G8Protest.org / OccupyChi.org / CANG8.org / Takethesquare.net / OccupyMay1st.org / MayDayNYC.org / Facebook / Twitter / Reddit

Support + Share

Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.

The May 2012 Insurrection



Adbusters Blog

The May 2012 Insurrection

Tactical Briefing #30.

NICK WHALEN

Hey you dreamers, strikers and new left redeemers out there,

For thirty-one magical days beginning this Tuesday, May 1, we take the plunge and Strike! We block the Golden Gate Bridge; occupy a Manhattan-bound tunnel; seize the ports. In 115 cities, we march into banks, erect tents and refuse to leave. We disrupt financial institutions forcing thousands to preemptively close. Five thousand of us pray, dance, sleep on Wall Street and in front of the Fed and if the Bloombergs of the world bring out paramilitary police to intimidate us, we use our social media fire to call out 50,000 more occupiers and intimidate them right back.

In the week before the G8 and NATO summits, we light the spark globally. We occupy hundreds of squares in cities on every continent – from Paris to Berlin, Toronto to Athens, São Paulo to Bucharest and beyond – we up the ante with direct actions that paralyze capitalism. For a few days, maybe for a full month, we act as if we already live in a world run by people, not corporations.

Our movement goes geopolitical later in May. We swarm Chicago and confront NATO. We tell the military elites there to stop their saber rattling against Iran, halt the global arms race and get behind what the majority of the people on Earth want: a nuclear-free world starting with a nuclear-free Middle East that includes both Iran and Israel.

And then when the G8 leaders meet in Camp David, we create a global spectacle the likes of which the world has never seen before … millions of us … individually, in flash groups and en masse, we burst out laughing at the lunacy of the eight most powerful political leaders on the planet thinking they can dictate the people’s business from behind closed doors and barbed wire fences. For one day, we take over the global mindspace with a whirlwind of #LAUGHRIOT jokes. (Like: Why did the G8 chickens cross to Camp David? / Cuz they’re on the other side. haha!) We laugh our heads off on every news broadcast in the world.

May 1968 was the first wildcat general strike in history … it lasted two weeks and was a grand gesture of refusal still remembered, but then it fizzled … maybe this May we won’t?

for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #26, #27, #28 and #29 / Find out what your local Occupy has planned for May 1, May 12, and the #LAUGHRIOT then join the movement in Chicago

Support + Share

Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Occupy's Perfect Storm



Regime Change

Occupy's Perfect Storm

Why do we have a general feeling of powerlessness?


CELSA DOCKSTADER

The celebrated Anglo-Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman captures the mood of today with the following story:

Imagine you are on an airplane, up there in the sky. You could be reading, drinking, sleeping, playing video games, anticipating a romantic meeting or an arduous work schedule of meetings and talks, or maybe a pleasant vacation... you know how it is on a plane.

Then a nice voice, a soft reassuring voice, a well-educated and welcoming voice makes an announcement, but it’s a recorded message, recorded some time ago, telling you that there is no one flying the plane, the cockpit is completely empty. Flight attendants still mill around with drinks, but you have to pay for them. You only have a credit card and they only take cash. You begin to get thirsty and slightly anxious. You start licking your lips in fear.

The announcement reassures you that there’s an automatic pilot, but then you find out that its a rather old model and the batteries that charge it risk running down before you land. But you might still land safely.

Then there’s a second announcement. This time about the airport where you’re meant to be landing. It’s bad news: the airport has not been built yet; it is still in the planning stages, held up by various forms of red tape, corrupt local planning departments, a series of general strikes if it were a Greek airport. Indeed, it then emerges that the application for the airport still hasn’t even been submitted to the right department and meanwhile the lead construction company is being prosecuted for unpaid taxes.

For Bauman, and I think he is right, this story is an image of our age. It expresses our sense of fear, which is the fear of not being in control.
The truth is we are not in control. But that’s not the worst of it. We suspect, indeed we know, that no one is in control: no God, no glorious leader, no benevolent dictator, nothing and no one. It’s even worse than the fantasy behind the Wizard of Oz and the Emperor’s New Clothes. There’s no wizard and no emperor. This is the source, I think, of the massive fear and anxiety that we experience on a daily basis.

Our fear is scattered and diffused. It doesn’t have a specific object. One moment, the object of fear could be a hurricane. The next, it could be a tsunami or it could be the downsizing of your company, or your wife could leave you or your boyfriend suddenly gets sick or your pensions have disappeared. It could be that your house is robbed, car stolen. You could be diagnosed with a fatal disease. We live with a generalized sense of fear, a feeling that I am not in control and that nothing and no one is in control either.

It is as if we are living in quicksand. We try to dig ourselves out and we dig ourselves deeper. The more we try, the deeper we sink into the sand, or, as they say here, into the shit &hellp; quickshit?

Why do we have this feeling of not being in control? Why can’t we pinpoint the source of our fear? Why do we have a general feeling of powerlessness?
One reason, not the only reason but one important reason, is the profound separation of politics and power.

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. The location of the union of power and politics was once understood to be the nation state. This was never the complete truth, particularly for colonized or subjugated peoples, and it was certainly never the full truth of our always interconnected economic life (in a sense there’s always been globalization). But for a period of time in many of the countries of the world, the countries that most of us are from, it was a reasonable expectation that the nation state was the location of the unity of power and politics and this was how we could get things done.

Democracy is the name for a political regime or politeia that believes that power lies with the people. Representative liberal democracy on the Western model (and there are other models, as the last year of Occupy has reminded us) is premised on the idea that we exercise political power through the vote and that these votes would be aggregated by parties, representatives would be elected, governments would be formed, and these governments would have power to get things done. (Personally, as an old Rousseauist, I never really had much faith in representative government, but let’s leave that aside.)

Our belief was that if we worked politically for a certain group, on the right or the left, then we could win an election, form a government, and have the power to change things.

The fact is that today politics and power have fallen apart in liberal democracy. They are separated, maybe even divorced. We know this. We feel this viscerally, I would wager. And every day brings new evidence that confirms this view.

Papandreou – remember him?
  Former Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou’s idea of a referendum to the Greek people to ratify the new EU bailout proposals in October of 2011 is a case in point. Although he handled the referendum idea incompetently, it was a democratic gesture of an old-fashioned kind. Merkel and her sidekick Sarko (who are the punitive super-egoic Batman and Robin of modern Europe – Sarko is Robin and Merkel is the Dark Knight) were, of course, appalled because they know that this referendum idea is a deep misunderstanding of contemporary political reality, where power has shifted elsewhere. The referent of power is not the people and is not located in national governments. It is elsewhere: with financial institutions or the European Central Bank. And these are the institutions that European governments serve, not the people. How could Papandreou be so naïve?

Well, Papandreou is now gone and we have an unelected government of technocrats in Greece and the same thing in Italy. I agree with Habermas on this point. Democracy at this time in history, even representative liberal democracy, risks being no more than a word, a kind of ideological birdsong. Power has evaporated into supranational spaces. These are the spaces of finance, obviously, of trade, obviously, and also information and information platforms, obviously. But these supranational spaces are also those of drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal immigration, the many boats that cross the Mediterranean, and so on.

We know this. And yet power still feels local. We feel English or Greek or Tunisian, but power has migrated beyond local boundaries. Sovereignty lies elsewhere. It is certainly not populist or people-centered. Politics does not have power. Politics serves power. Whereas power is global or supranational, politics is still local and there is a gap between the two.

The casualty of this separation of politics and power is the State. The state has become eviscerated, discredited, and its credit rating has been slashed. This is obviously the case with the Greek state, but I think it is only a slightly more extreme example of the situation in the USA and elsewhere, in Britain say. The state is in a state.

So, what do we do?
  To be honest, I don’t know. Philosophy is the “owl of Minerva” and it always spreads its wings at dusk, when it is too late. But this separation of power and politics, I think, throws light on a number of phenomena. Let me mention three:
One, I had a conversation with my 19-year-old-son in a favorite London pub last Saturday – the Lamb on Lamb’s Conduit Street. He cares about the state we’re in and is really worried and really fears and to some extent hopes that something big might happen. He sees what is happening across the world and doesn’t know what to do. He is part of a huge culture of disillusionment and disappointment among youth. (And if there is one central issue that the last year of global uprisings has raised, then it is that of youth. The question of youth is the question of the future, and that future has disappeared. We who are no longer young have to try and understand this and not simply adopt a patronizing attitude toward youth). My son is disillusioned and doesn’t see what good it would serve if he got involved. He feels powerless. I think this is a general feeling of his generation.

Two, another option is to accept the description of things as they appear to my son but then to do something, to take arms against a sea of trouble to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital and the international status quo. What is so inspiring about the various social movements that we all too glibly call the Arab Spring, is their courageous determination to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination. The demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are actually very classical: they refuse to live in authoritarian dictatorships propped up to serve interests of Western capital, megacorporations and corrupt local elites. The people want to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalization of major state industries. The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East aim at one thing, one ancient Greek concept: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks, and plays. This is the most classical and basic goal of politics. Contemporary conflicts are conflicts about ownership, about occupation, about the nature of property.

Three, the Occupy movement is fascinating from the standpoint of the separation of politics and power and is particularly fascinating to the student of Athenian democracy, with its focus on the ekklesia, the general assembly, and the boule or council. To be with these protesters when the chant goes up: “This is what democracy looks like!” is powerful, really powerful. What was equally powerful was the way in which OWS conducted general assemblies peacefully, horizontally and noncoercively. So, given the separation of politics and power, the Occupy movement is trying to remake democracy, direct democracy, with a mixture of the old – assembly, consensus, autonomia and freedom – and the new, like Twitter feeds and flashmob demonstrations organized through cell phones. The Occupy movement has thrown up some amazing things, such as the Bank of Ideas in Bishopsgate, London that occupies a disused UBS bank building and is a kind of free university, and the St Paul’s cathedral protest, which raises the deep historical questions of the relation of Christianity to property and inequality – and Paul had some pretty radical views on this question.

But in many ways the Occupy movement simply underlines the separation between politics and power that I began with. We are maybe living through 1848 redux, that year of international revolutions. But that ended pretty badly. What we don’t know at this point is how these different movements will develop.
What is hard to imagine, really hard to imagine is some sort of possible articulation between Occupy and the Democratic Party in the USA. I am reminded of a poster I saw at an Occupy: “Obama, please say something.” Sure, he is going to co-opt the movement for the purposes of liberal oligarchy, but that’s all.

The disaffection with normal politics particularly among the young is vast and something else has taken shape, something at once exciting and frightening. We could be in the early stages of a perfect storm.

Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He has authored over a dozen books including the celebrated Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance in which he argues for an ethically committed political anarchism.

Support + Share

Help us spread the word. Share it online with your friends or subscribe to the print edition.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Why 99% Spring?

AlterNet.org


During the week of April 9-15, 100,000 people will train to engage in non-violent direct action in the name of a new economic vision.

 
 
Photo Credit: The 99% Spring

 There are moments in civic life when our political system completely fails to address extreme moral crises. And within these instants generations of warriors for justice have been called to take action that involved risk and ridicule.

We are in one of those moments right now. And while engaging in the most basic form of democratic practice, voting, is essential, it is clearly not enough to address the steady and strong attack on poor and middle class families in this country.

That is why this spring, during the week of April 9-15, 100,000 people will train to engage in non-violent direct action in the name of a new economic vision.  This will be learning for action: an opportunity to grasp what’s at the heart of our economic crisis, crossed with the lessons learned across centuries of movements that came before us. It will be a training that names names, and calls on the trainees to take action to expose those who created and perpetuate the extreme poverty and injustice that so many Americans are experiencing.

We live in an America where more than 46 million Americans live below the poverty level. This is the highest poverty rate since the Census Bureau began publishing such figures.  Nearly 15 million children in the United States – 21 percent of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level–  an average of $22,050 a year for a  family of four. To make matters worse, six million families have already lost their homes, and 11 million homeowners have mortgages that cost  more than the home is worth.
The numbers are so staggering that they can lose meaning. But behind each number is a child wondering if there will be enough food today; a young person with incredible debt and limited opportunities; a neighbor being evicted from their home; a widowed grandmother struggling to make ends meet. 

This is not an accident. But rather the culmination of a 40-year plan to undermine the role of government, deregulate the financial markets and the corporate sector, rewrite the tax code in favor of the wealthy and corporations, and erode the right for workers to organize.

The good news is there is no shortage of policy solutions that can begin to reverse these trends. Change can start with the following:

·      End the Bush Tax Cuts for households making over $250,000 a year

·      Pass a Wall Street, or Robin Hood, Tax on speculative trading

·      Make the big banks and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reduce principal on millions of underwater mortgages

·      Strengthen collective bargaining laws as strong unions are central to growing the middle class
·      Pass a public jobs bill that puts millions of American back to work rebuilding our infrastructure and developing green technology

·      Pass comprehensive immigration reform and welcome those who have chosen to call America their home and invest in our future

·      Ensure policies are targeted to deliver relief and opportunity to the hardest hit communities
To make these ideas and others come to life, we will have to fully expose who is perpetuating wealth inequality and the status quo. That is why following the 99 % Spring, thousands upon thousands will be engaging in non-violent direct action to shine a light on the exact corporate actors who created this historically unjust economy.  Under the banner of 99 % Power, there will be more demonstrations leading up to and at corporate shareholder meetings this Spring than at any point in American history.

In this moment, we are called, like our predecessors, to act in ways that demonstrate the moral clarity of our purpose.  Whether it’s been women risking arrest in the fight for the right to vote, African-American’s organizing lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides to end segregation, or immigrants marching in record numbers in 2006 to stand down anti-immigrant legislation, there have been moments where we have expanded our participation in political life to end gross injustice.

Conviction without action is impotence. The question that many of us will ask ourselves in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years is this:  When it was clear we were deep down the path toward untenable economic and political inequality, did our action match the power of our convictions? This 99 % Spring, we will prepare ourselves to ensure we have a good answer to that question.  We hope you will join ushttp://www.the99spring.com
George Goehl is the executive director of National People’s Action, a network of metropolitan and statewide membership organizations dedicated to advancing economic and racial justice. George has been an organizer and strategist for 17 years, crafting city, state, and federal campaigns on issues ranging from preventing foreclosures, outlawing predatory lending, and advancing immigration reform. Under George’s leadership National People’s Action has helped lead the fight to hold big banks accountable, advance financial reform, and prevent foreclosures. He is a co-founder of the New Bottom Line, a national alignment designed to restructure our relationship with Wall Street and the financial sector and advance a vision of a more equitable and sustainable economy.