“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 

“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).

Pp 149

“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.”

Pp 105-6

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

“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).

Pp 203

“The Insidious Nature Of Panics…” JoAnn Wypijewski

“The insidious nature of panics is that they exceptionalize the ordinary, and then make ordinary the legal machinery supposedly instituted for extraordinary circumstances.”

JoAnn Wypijewski: What We’ve Become. The Nation, June 7, 2010 (Vol. 290, No. 22)

IMPUNITY, n.  Wealth. Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958)
Pp 31