Beginning on September 17th with Occupy Wall Street, a new and dynamic social movement has arrived and is capturing the imagination of millions of people in towns and cities around the world. This is real.
Source: Yes Magazine
Young people locking arms, facing arrest on a cold, wet Seattle street—it could have been the WTO protests that rocked the city more than ten years ago. Only this time, Seattle is just one of dozens of places where the movement for the 99 percent is taking hold.
And, unlike the WTO protests—whose motivation was unclear to many Americans—the demonstrations now spreading virally from Wall Street immediately strike a chord: we all know that neither our economy nor our government is working for the benefit of the 99 percent.
In Vermont last Sunday, more than 100 people gathered in Burlington as part of the Occupy Wall Street political uprising, expressing their outrage about economic inequality and the excesses of banks and other economic interests.
Source: Tom Dispatch
The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.
United States ambassador to Syria Robert Ford is quite a feisty diplomat. He shows up unannounced and uninvited at various hot spots in the country, greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and, oftentimes, anger.
More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019