#OccupyTogether: The Best Among Us

[chickweed]

If I could be there, I would....I sent food in support.

[FAADAN]

Originally Posted by darwinslair

If they want to protest, I say let them protest. Wall Street is simply a target and a symbol. It doesnt produce anything, most trading is electronic, and if it were to evaporate not a lot would change.

Honestly, I do not think the protesters have any clue what has happened, and what is going to happen going foreward. If I tried to explain fractional reserve lending, money supply, inflation and stagflation, and wealth confiscation through capital gains taxes their eyes would likely glaze over and I would hear something like "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS" which doesnt mean anything either.

If voicing their frustrations helps them deal with this, let them do it.

Tom

Exactly right. They are showing up because it's the pop thing to do. They have no idea why they are there but it's cool. If these are the best among us, we are in deep trouble.

[Longtail]

Heck, many of them dont even know what they are gathering for, its just another weenie gathering.

[ellenr]

Originally Posted by Ohiorganic

Ah 3 posters who have chosen the wrong side-so predictable.

Great post-dramatic and full emotion? You bet because these are dramatic and emotional times and it is great that 100's of 1000's are marching on Wall Street (and 1000's in the financial districts of other US cities as of this weekend).

I love it that for 2+ weeks (or 1 week according to NPR which is just as much bought and sold by the corps as any private news corp) the press has ignored this hoping it would go away but instead under the silence of the MSM it grew and grew and now we have a definite movement and that movement now has definite direction.

LOL, Ohio, you musta been listening to the same broadcast I was - I also heard that "one week" and I went, huh?

They (npr) are so full of bull..

A whole lot of links and tweets here to org's supporting O.W.S.-
http://delicious.com/stacks/view/D7zF8z

[chickweed]

Originally Posted by FAADAN

That's what I thought. Libs love that emotion.

If we don't have emotion, we may as well be machines. Hmmmmm ....robots are machines.....machines can be programmed. If only libs have emotion, does that mean that conservatives are programmed machines?...hmmmmm....

[Ohiorganic]

Originally Posted by chickweed

If we don't have emotion, we may as well be machines. Hmmmmm ....robots are machines.....machines can be programmed. If only libs have emotion, does that mean that conservatives are programmed machines?...hmmmmm....

yes indeed robots are machines and sockpuppets are created by machines. One could draw conclusions...

[older than dirt]

I loved the social life at anti war rallies in the 60's . Lots of hot chicks trying to impress me with how knowledgeable they were. Only thing they understood was horizontal but at the time that was cool to.

[Silverbeard]

Im glad there are people who are willing to demand something better.... there are some major issues though. Others touched on some of them.

How do we get jobs back that are overseas now? Lowerring taxes or environemntal regs as some might suggest as a partial answer isnt enough. Tariffs can be helpful but can cause their own issues and are not full answers either. So what exactly? Protesting to wall street or even or federal government wont esily change decades of action that created this. the global market paradigm is a race to the bottom in many regards.... Compete with india or china? Good luck with that....

What of social programs? Some might not understand it or want to admit it, but we simply wont be able to fund the ones we already have much longer. Much of what the last few generations grew up with to expect are simply not sustainable in any way. Its simple math. Face it. Or ignore it I guess, but in doing so the issue will only be worse in time...

Many might point to the wealthy as having to big of a piece of pie. If this becomes common, guess what? Many of the wealthy will simply move and take their pie with them. History shows this again and again. For those who dont or even if none of them left we STILL would not have enough to come close to funding the lifestyle many have come to expect but was ACTUALLY a generational bubble. ve to further crush individual liberty to do it, and other social ramifications of the types of actions one of that mindset might want....

you can beg all you like for an unsustainable paradigm to return. It wont.

honestly I think building up localized communities is the best answer possible. But for most of these protestors to realize that in its full scope theyd have to realize theres nothing to protest in that case besides any regulations that might hinder it.... Food is the basis or a basis of any economy. We sure as heck need a new paradigm as well there. Heck we can heal the environment somewhat WITHOUT the corporate goons if we continued on the local food movement.... Especially if we set farms up to deal with mostly onsite inputs... which CAN be done.... saves lots of pollution from many angles actually. Keeps lots more cash local etc.... From there over time you can add local food processors and on and on....

Globalization is what gave us many of these issues, and it wouldnt be solved terribly well with new jobs, higher taxes, "equal" distribution of wealth, or any of the answers Ive heard from most similar minded folks. Local economies though cover these bases.... they cover many interrelated bases as well...

so where does this leave us when the protestors appear to want things that are from an unsustainable dieing paradigm??? I dont fully know of course.. but until collectively they understand these issues, and that stand... it wont go much of anywhere meaningful, I can say that much rather surely. Doesnt matter how fair or unfair you might view it. It is simple math really.

So honestly Id suggest they go home and continue to build local economies. Support local business. Not saying there isnt more to the picture of course, but that is by far the most beneficial aspect that individuals can actually build on as far as I can see it....

[FAADAN]

These folks are going to decide their goals thru consensus. They have been there three weeks now and have failed to detail even one common goal.

[uprooted_kentuckian]

Originally Posted by ellenr

by Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil.

To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets.

They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.

Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves.

They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die.

Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters.

Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the **** cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you.

And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.

by Chris Hedges© 2011 TruthDig.com

I read up on some of his articles. What a sad, misguided human being, supported by throngs of other sad and misguided human beings who hold him up as some sort of oracle. The blind leading the blind.