Statement Issued from Zuccotti Park
by the General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street
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 corporate 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 requires the cooperation of its members.
That our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system,
it is up to the individuals 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 process 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 assembled here as is our right to let these facts be
known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite
not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give
executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in workplaces 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 system through monopolization.
They have profited off the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of
countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees 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 worker's health care 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, but 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 deliberately declined to recall faulty products, endangering lives
in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy despite the catastrophic failures their
policies have produced 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 provide 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 kept people misinformed and fearful through their control
of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners, even when
presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture 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 address the problems we face, and generate solutions 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.
[No genuine change can ever be achieved in this country until the power
of the Israeli lobby has been dealt with and dismantled. If the protesters
refuse to face this fact their efforts are doomed to failure.--Richard
Edmondson, "For the Heart and Soul of the Movement,"
leftwing-christian.net, October 12, 2011]
[Activists need to vary their tactics. I suggest citizens surround the local
offices of their Senators and Representatives. The number of Americans fed
up with a gridlocked Congress, beset by craven or cowardly, both marinated
in corporate campaign cash, can motivate an endless pool of activists who
want their voices to be heard.--Ralph Nader, "Quo Vadis,
OWS?," counterpunch.org, October 28, 2011]
["It's probably bigger than the anti-war movement, because there are so many
simultaneous demonstrations. I've never seen anything like it," said Carol
Sobel, co-chair of the Mass Defense Committee of the National Lawyers Guild.
--Tom Pugh, "Volunteer attorneys steer Occupy protesters through the
legal system," mcclatchydc.com, October 30, 2011]
[Senator Sanders: "As a result of these GAO
reports, we learned that the Federal Reserve provided a jaw-dropping $16
trillion in total financial assistance to every major financial institution
in the country as well as a number of corporations, wealthy individuals and
central banks throughout the world."--"The Veil of Secrecy at the Fed Has Been Lifted, Now It's
Time for Change," Huffington Post, November 4, 2011]
How to successfully Resist Police Intimidation and Defend Your Rights, November 23, 2011
[The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message".
Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you
want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers.
These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was
legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets
boundless sums enter the campaign process.
No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the
most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act - the
Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates
investment banks from commercial banks. . . .
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole
that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting
Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors. . . .
In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its
chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers,
with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to
order their police forces - pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware
and training from the DHS - to make war on peaceful citizens.--Naomi Wolf,
"The shocking truth
about the crackdown on Occupy," Guardian, November 25, 2011]
[Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben
Alis of the US and the UK--Robert Fisk, "Bankers are the
dictators of the West," Indepedent, December 10, 2011]
[The rule proposal . . . would nix the ability of Wall Street banks that
hold insured deposits to place billions of dollars in speculative trades for
their own firm's account . . . also impacted will be the ability of Wall
Street banks to own hedge funds and private equity funds.--Pam Martens, "Battle Lines are Drawn on the Volcker
Rule: Occupy the SEC Pitches An Extreme Makeover of Wall Street,"
counterpunch.org, February 20, 2012]
[The Tax Policy Center estimates that eliminating all individual income tax
expenditures would raise levies on the bottom 20 percent by $931. For the
top 1 percent, the tax increase would be almost $280,000.--Ezra Klein, "The invisible welfare state of the top one percent,"
washingtonpost.com, March 2, 2012]
["Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the
price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety
net."--"Iceland Did it Right...and Everyone Else is
Doing it Wrong," NationofChange, November 30, 2012]
[The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group
disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in
handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were
forced to wet or soil themselves -- was coordinated with the big banks
themselves.--Naomi Wolf, "Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on
Occupy ," guardian.co.uk, December 29, 2012]
[Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimson . . . explains why his nation is
growing strongly, why unemployment is negligible, and how they moved from
the world's poster-child for banking crisis 5 years ago to a thriving nation
once again. Simply put, he says, "we didn't follow the prevailing
orthodoxies of the last 30 years in the Western world." --"How Iceland Overthrew The Banks: The Only 3 Minutes Of
Any Worth From Davos," zerohedge.com, January 27, 2013]
[VIDEO: A new book that's the talk of academia and the media, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century . . . shows that two-thirds of America's increase in income inequality
over the past four decades is the result of steep raises given to the country's highest earners.--"What the 1%
Don't Want You to Know," Moyers & Company, April 18, 2014]
[On average, that would be 312 times, according to a new report from the Economic Policy
Institute, which analyzed the 2017 compensation of chief executives from America's 350
top companies.--Ilana Novick, "It's True: Your Boss Is Making More Than You Do. Maybe 3,101 Times
More," truthdig.com, August 16, 2018]
Wolff Responds: DC Rage: More Coming Unless Basic Economic Changes Made, January 7, 2021
The European, The American Dream is Over, January 27, 2021
Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality, NY Times, November 9, 2021
