News and Notes
November 18, 2011 - New York City showed its billionaire mayor and the rest of the 1 percent that the fight is far from over, just two days after the violent crackdown on Liberty Plaza in the middle of the night Tuesday. From a 7am march on Wall Street and subway speak-outs around the city to student walk-outs at CUNY and Columbia and a giant, permitted rally in Foley Square with a reported 30,000-plus attendees, the 99 percent showed up around the city to stand in solidarity with the evicted occupiers and express their support for a growing, expanding, living movement. There was also a march across the Brooklyn Bridge and projections on the Verizon building declaring, "We are Winning" and "Occupy Earth."
October 27, 2011 - The champions of Alabama’s far-reaching immigration law have said that it is intended to drive illegal immigrants from the state by making every aspect of their life difficult. But they have taken a very different tone when it comes to the part of the law concerning schools.
October 26, 2011 - One debate is tied to the single-issue, single-tactic mode of politics that has defined politics in America for two generations. Are we going to liberate society, issue by issue, one at a time? First win the decades long battle to control the police that is far from over, then move on to the next issue? Or are we going to liberate society as a whole and fix all the issues right away?
October 24, 2011 - In Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It's where we're all eventually headed—the 99 percent, or at least the 70 percent, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school teacher, and impoverished senior—unless this revolution succeeds.
October 20, 2011 - Will President Obama be the main holdout when world leaders, under growing pressure from the occupy Wall Street protests across the world and demand building for a tax on international financial transactions, meet early next month at the G-20 summit in France?
October 20, 2011 - The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties.
October 14, 2011 - The Occupy Wall Street protests grew out of anger at the outsized power of banks. But as they've expanded nationwide, the uprisings have evolved into a kind of running challenge to the way power is concentrated in all aspects of our economy—concentrated into the hands of people with an interest in maintaining the status quo.
"We, the poor, jobless, downsized, uninsured victims of welfare reform and others abused by the institutions of domination are no longer silent. We are moving forward with the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many freedom fighters to improve the lives of Americans."
-Portia Anderson, WEAP
Upcoming Events
| 03/03/12 | Support for Families of Children with Disabilities Conference (San Francisco) |
| 04/05/12 | World Courts of Women on Poverty in the US |
| 06/30/12 | National March on Washington |