Occupy Movement Is Spreading And Growing
Our captured government won’t do its job. It doesn’t keep Wall Street and banks and giant corporations from ripping us off and doesn’t prosecute them after they do. It doesn’t stop polluters -- even as the effects of climate change increase. It doesn’t enforce employment and labor laws, so all of us who work fall further and further behind. It doesn’t take care of those in need even as more and more of us are in greater and greater need. It just helps the connected rich get richer. So people finally got fed up, and started “occupying.” Now the occupy movement is spreading to more and more cities, growing with more and more people, and expanding people’s understanding of the power that comes from speaking out.
It started with Occupy Wall Street, people rising up over the greed and inequality, the1% vs 99%. Labor joined, adding their voice and grievances. Veterans, teachers and others are showing up in greater and greater numbers now. Others are joining. Now it’s everywhere: Hundreds of towns like Occupy Orlando and Chicago and Portland and Nashville and Asheville and Oakland and even little towns like Redwood City.
People are getting arrested as the powers-that-be react to the spreading and growing crowds. According to Chris Bowers at Daily Kos,
Arrests in Chicago, New York City, Fresno, Eureka, Denver, Portland, Boston, Seattle, Oakland, Ashville, Riverside and more cities over the weekend has brought the total number of arrests of Occupy protesters over 3,350.
Globalization Of Protest
The world feels the effect of their common wealth draining to shock-doctrine attacks from the 1%. Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes at Al Jazeera that in reaction to this we are seeing The globalisation of protest,
The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now become global -- with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalisation and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can.
And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: A sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right -- at least not without strong pressure from the street.
Stiglitz writes that arond the world these protesters are sounding an alarm:
They are right that something is wrong about our “system”. Around the world, we have underutilised resources -- people who want to work, machines that lie idle, buildings that are empty -- and huge unmet needs: Fighting poverty, promoting development, and retrofitting the economy for global warming, to name just a few. In America, after more than seven million home foreclosures in recent years, we have empty homes and homeless people.
The protesters have been criticised for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.
… On one level, today’s protesters are asking for little: A chance to use their skills, the right to decent work at decent pay, a fairer economy and society. Their hope is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, on another level, they are asking for a great deal: A democracy where people, not dollars, matter, and a market economy that delivers on what it is supposed to do.
Seniors Occupying Over Social Security & Medicare Cuts
More groups are expressing their own dissatisfaction with the captured government cutting back in order to preserve the tax cuts and other benefits of the top 1%. At The Huffington Post, Lizzie Schiffman reports in, Seniors Join Occupy Chicago, Protest Cuts To Medicare, Social Security
More than 1,000 senior citizens and their supporters marched from Chicago’s Federal Plaza to the intersection of Jackson and Clark Street Monday morning to protest proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
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