“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the cor- porate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race re- quires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon cor- ruption of that system, it is up to the individu- als to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the pro-

cess is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assem- bled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an ille- gal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Execu- tives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and dis- crimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming sys- tem through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, con- finement, and cruel treatment of countless ani- mals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip em- ployees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut work- ers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the

culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have de- liberately declined to recall faulty products en- dangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have pro- duced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or pro- vide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to mur- der prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the tor- ture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass

destruction in order to receive government contracts.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to ad- dress the problems we face, and generate solu- tions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard! Occupy Wall Street”

— October 4 

GUERRILLA COMICS: A Light Went Off In My Head

We of a certain age and generational experience know the expression “A light went on in my head.” We even remember a little cartoon bubble drawn over a head, with a little light bulb in it and jagged rays around it, depicting in cartoon a light, literally, going on, in a head. We may actually have “changed” actual “bulbs,” as some of us have “changed” actual “tires.” A light going off may have been depicted differently.

Now, lights bulbs may be going off in our heads all the time. All sorts of things may have been going off in our heads. We suspect that this is what is happening when things get a bit dimmer, our speech gets a little fuzzier, and the thought we were just shaping evaporates, and we just know we’re not getting it back. We also think we have some idea what we experience when flash-bulbs go off in our heads. Maybe the woman meant a flash-bulb. That’s scary, though. I’m not sure I would be talking about that on NPR. Flash-bulbs did used to “go off,” you know. Not like digitally, or whatever. Like when gunshots ”go off. ” In our heads. You know?

“The Obama Administration Is At The Charity Of The Powers That Be:” Jonathan Schell

“The Obama administration exhibited its overall signature flaw in caricature: It is embedded with (let’s say this straight: in bed with) the powers that be. Well meaning, it begins by taking those powers –the commanding heights of society- as given, immovable. Then it starts to bargain. (On healthcare, it begins with Big Pharma, o finance with Wall Street, on war with the top generals –above all David Petrraeus.) Then when the administration is duly handed its half- or quarter-loaf – the stripped-down healthcare plan, the eviscerated financial regulations, the soft date for withdrawal from Afghanistan bought with the surge in troop levels- it’s at the charity of these powers.”

Jonathan Schell. The Revolutionary Moment. In The Nation, 21 February 2011

“Choose From A Selection Of Lavishly Advertised And Colorfully Marketed Candidates:” John Michael Greer.

“[M]ost people in North America made the consumer economy their model for political participation. A consumer’s role in the economic process is limited to choosing from a selection of lavishly advertised and colorfully marketed products provided by industry. In the same way, most people in the industrial world embraced political systems in which all they had to do was choose from a selection of lavishly advertised and colorfully marketed candidates provided by the major parties.”

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society, 2008).

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“Between the members of a family, transmission of an inheritance fulfilled a function entirely different from the commonplace business of preserving wealth. It underpinned that distinction that rituals, conventions and codes build up between their adepts as shared wealth and access to individuality. A repertoire of courtesies, precedences, formulae… It enabled the individual to choose his or her own interpretation of a given role, in a pre-existing narrative, and the faculty to construct himself using ready-made forms, by mobilizing a range of feelings, of relations, already established. As individual and family security, inheritance was an aesthetic and a morality. The assets, even on the notary’s parchment, had a savor, a scent… Who said anything about money? The family bond used to be maintained less by blood kinship and obligatory, explicit affection than by those shared sensations from beyond the narrative and even beyond memory: kitchen recipes carefully passed on, sauces and bouquet garni as rituals of belonging, housekeeping and culinary codes surviving stubbornly through the generations, gestures, postures and courtesies equivalent to passwords, a laisser-passer restoring the underlying complicity to structures behind all the words, differences and disagreements; and over it all, the mythical narrative of great moments, major ordeals of life victoriously confronted and surmounted by the ancients, statements like passports that, from cradle to grave, would ensure a place in the lineage.”

…

“And money aspires to pay for what cannot be bought, on behalf of people who people whose wealth it ensures while impoverishing them of themselves, in an arabesque of involuntary, copious and dramatic irony.”

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Herve Juvin, 2010: The Coming Of The Body. Translation by John Howe.Verso, London

Guest Essay by Alan M. Simon

Make a zygote and call it a life.  Eat eggs for breakfast.  “Those are my babies. I had to keep them.” Nadia exclaims with moral self-righteousness on the news. Do not destroy the zygote at any cost.  It’s what God wants.  Through the advanced technology of medicine, with the work of forty-six doctors and countless nurses and technicians, eight, one-and-a-half pound beings enter the world as celebrities.

The Right to Life crowd sings praises for God’s tiny miracles (of modern science) but then, as the story unfolds, blogs are ablaze with strafing criticism and promises to forego financial support.  Grandma, at a loss as to what to do, flees her own home to escape the 14 science experiments Nadia cooked up. Nadya will tell you her parents were definitely lacking. She will be a MUCH better parent. She studied child development in college. With 6 already, she had 8 more babies all at once anyway.  Did Nadya use taxpayer money? People are outraged! Nadya must pay for what she has done!  Don’t expect a nickel from us!  Shame on Her! But how do you get from a zygote is a human life with all the rights attached, to complete lack of support after birth?  It’ll be ok.  Movie and book deals are in the works. The market decides.  All she needs now is good lawyers.  Oh. Right.

The hypocrisy involved at all levels of this debate is staggering.  Time to pray, since reason is not involved.  Fourteen children under the age of 7, a single mother who says she wants to breastfeed the newest 8,“I’ll stop my life for them.” As if having eight babies at once WOULDN’T stop your life?  What about the first six?   Dad was a needle and the bed was a petri dish. The biological father “needs time” to adjust to the scale of his brood. Fame and fortune abound for those who seek it, but most will agree it’s wrong to have babies for those reasons. It’s also wrong to prevent women from choosing abortion for the right reasons. The degradation of actual life at the expense of possible life, in the name of fame, or naming a zygote a human being in the name of morality, is immoral in itself.  It allows for embryos destined for the trash to receive support where people needing cures for injury or illness do not. Mental illness, abuse, neglect, poverty, slavery, famine, war, and genocide; life is precious but not always good.  Hopelessness abounds for millions of people.  Don’t worry.  People in government are working very hard to make sure your tax dollars are not spent on these problems. The irony is, they are also working very hard to make sure we create more of these problems, eight at a time if possible.  Every zygote is a human being with all the rights of you and me.

When stressed by the environment, female animals sometimes kill their young to procure their own survival.  They do so without thought but through the instinct for self-preservation.  It’s just part of being female.  Humans differ only in that our cerebral cortexes allow us to debate the act.  Those who seek to legislate to exclude the individual from determining her own ability to give life to another individual, and provide for the survival of that life, tread too close to personal space and obstruct her ability to procure her own survival. Offering a life not of choice, but of consequence.   Mostly these are not immaculate conceptions, like Nadya’s, yet we rush to place shame, blame and punishment squarely on women and “precious” children by refusing support once they are actually born. Suffering mothers and children in dismal lives don’t generally get book and movie deals.  We prefer the bizarre and infamous. God bless America.  Ah well, time for breakfast.  Don’t even get me started on the ethical treatment of hens.

“Since The Problem Could Not Be Solved By Scientific Methods, It Has Not Been Solved At All:” John Michael Greer

“The forces that will take the lead in the opening phases of the deindustrial age will be political, cultural and psychological, not scientific. About these issues the methods of the scientist and the engineer have very little useful to say, and most of what they do have to say was drowned out decades ago by the louder voices of political opportunism and middle-class privilege.

In the same way, the technical issues of the approaching deindustrial transition were either solved along ago or could have been solved readily with modest investments in research and development. What could not be solved by scientific methods was the problem of finding the motivating factors and the political will to get these solutions in place. Since this latter problem could not be solved by scientific methods, in turn, it has not been solved at all. This is the downside of the superlative technological efficiency of our age: those things that we can’t do with our machines, or with the ways of thinking that we evolved to manage our machines, are for all practical purposes beyond our reach.”

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent ( Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society , 2008).

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