Resistance Movement

Status of the Resistance Movement: Growing, Deepening, Succeeding

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

So much has been accomplished by Occupy and other social justice movements in the past two years that it is incredible the corporate media and their pundits do not report on what is happening around them. Despite the lack of corporate media coverage, the movement is deepening, creating democratic institutions, stopping some of the worst policies from being pushed by the corporate duopoly and building a broad-based diverse movement.

This is not to say things are getting better for the 99%; in fact, quite the opposite is happening. Big business government continues to funnel money to the top while robbing most Americans of the little wealth they had. More Americans are being impacted by the unfair economy and realize that their struggle is not their fault but is the reality of living in a system with deep corruption and dysfunction. Economic injustice is the compost creating fertile ground for the movement to grow.

Too many commentators focus on the lack of encampments and think Occupy is dead. Camping out in public parks was a tactic - it was not the movement or the only tactic of the movement. Too many fail to look at what members of the Occupy community are doing along with other social justice, environmental and peace activists. We report on the movement every day at Popular Resistance so we see lots of activity all over the country on a wide range of issues and using a variety of tactics. And we see a growing movement having a bigger impact.

On the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), these writers captured the essence of Occupy. David Callahan, in Seven Ways Occupy Changed America And Is Still Changing It, correctly noted how we changed the debate, revived progressive populism, spurred worker revolts and challenged capitalism. Rebecca Solnit, who has been active in Occupy and other movements, also made important points. She writes, “Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear is a sign of their recognition that real power doesn’t only lie with them.”

Occupy taught us that we have power, that we can have an impact and that by building an ever-bigger movement, the power structure will shake. We are optimistic that the movements for peace and social, economic and environmental justice will continue to grow and find ways to work in solidarity. As the movements mature, we expect to see more successes in the struggle to weaken corporate domination and create a more just and sustainable society.

Deeper and Broader Resistance Movement

We recently spoke with three people who have been involved with OWS since its beginning two years ago. Each is still active, and their work demonstrates how the resistance movement is deepening.

Laura Gottesdiener is the author of A Dream Foreclosed. She traveled across the country to record the stories of one of the most vibrant aspects of the Occupy - the anti-foreclosure movement. This includes Occupy Our Homes and groups like Take Back the Land, Home Defenders League and City Life/Vida Urbana, which work to stop home foreclosures and evictions. Through a range of tactics, including blockades, these groups have kept hundreds of families in their homes.

Gottesdiener writes that 10 million have been evicted since the crash began in 2007; that is more than the number of people living in Michigan. According to the Department of Treasury, the housing crisis has destroyed $19.2 trillion of US household wealth.

In addition to blockading homes to prevent evictions, housing activists take back vacant properties and fix them up so families can move into them. They have successfully pressured banks to accept this as a better alternative than leaving the properties vacant.

Preventing evictions is ongoing work. The Center for Responsible Lending reported in 2011 that we were not even halfway through the foreclosure crisis. Every month thousands are still evicted and facing foreclosure.

When Gottesdiener drove across country to see the nationwide reality of the movement to stop foreclosures and evictions, she found that it had especially deep roots in the African-American community, where people see this as part of a historic pattern of disenfranchisement. The old prejudicial practice of red-lining to keep blacks out of neighborhoods has been transformed into predatory lending to drive them into debt then take away their homes. The resistance movement is fighting back where the government has failed to act to stop this theft of wealth by the looting class.

Our next guest, Justin Wedes, is working with a new project that went public on the anniversary of Occupy - the Occupy Money Cooperative. This group sees itself as the “start of the financial services revolution.” It is a financial services project that will be owned and controlled by its members in a democratic way. It seeks to provide financial services to the millions of people shut out of the banks in a way that is transparent, with no hidden fees.

The Occupy Money Cooperative will show by example that financial services do not have to rip people off to succeed. And by doing so, it will push other financial institutions in that direction. It will begin with the Occupy Money Card, a debit card, savings facility and virtual checkbook that people can use without the cost, or the balances required for a regular bank account. They see it as a “bank on a card.”

The Occupy Money Cooperative is a great example of the evolution of Occupy. The movement started because of the excesses of Wall Street, the financial collapse, mass debt and an unfair economy. While the movement knows that it is going to take a mass resistance movement mobilized for change to put in place polices that end the rule of money, it also knows that right now we need to build our own institutions that can provide the services people need. This requires operating outside of government. They are capitalizing the bank in a grass-roots way, seeking donations from people across the country.

Finance, the wealth divide and unfair economy are central issues among Occupy and other justice activists, and many of the strongest off-shoots of Occupy are in this area. Occupy the SEC does brilliant work by pushing the SEC to properly regulate the banks. Strike Debt, a nationwide movement of debt resistors that sees “debt as the tie that binds the 99%” published the Debt Resistors Manual. And, their Rolling Jubilee project has raised $615,000 and has forgiven $12,300,000 of debt.

Across the country, creative alternatives to the dominant finance and employment system are developing. These include local currencies, time banks, community supported agriculture, farmers markets, worker or consumer cooperatives, land trusts to control housing prices and discussion of complementary monetary systems. There is a growing movement for public banks and remaking the Federal Reserve while people take steps to opt out of Wall Street by moving their money from the big banks. A new democratic economy is being created outside of the Wall Street-dominated economy.

One of the main purposes of the Occupy encampments was to show people they were not alone, that a lot of people shared their values and concerns about the unfair economy and dysfunctional government.

Occupiers showed people they could stand up. And the police repression showed their courage against an abusive government that was doing the work of the banks rather than protecting the constitutional rights of Americans. This courage has been contagious as we can see in the growing movements around the country.

Environmental activists have escalated their protests against the extreme energy economy that relies on risky and expensive extraction methods like tar sands, hydrofracking, mountaintop removal and off-shore drilling. At the same time, increased resistance turned the nuclear renaissance into a nuclear retreat with companies pulling out and reactors being closed. These protests have been joined by, and often led by, Native Indian groups like Idle No More.

And, for the first time, the American people helped stop a war after a president said he wanted to bomb a nation. The bombing of Syria may be halted only temporarily, but this is an amazing feat. This may be the beginning of an antiwar movement that crosses the political spectrum and can take on the challenge of ending US imperialism and militarism.

This brief review does not do justice to the depth and activity of what is occurring every day in the United States and around the world. Rather than disappearing, Occupy has evolved and is bigger and deeper, more connected to communities and other organizations, than it was when there were encampments all over the country.

The movement continues to grow and broaden because of the very fertile environment created by a government that cannot respond to our demands for a fair economy, that tramples on our Free Speech and other rights and that puts profits ahead of protecting the planet. The hubris and greed of those with unfair wealth has not diminished. They continue to take more, want more and create a rigged economy that serves only them, not all of the people.

We have no doubt that the movement is growing, that support for our views are rising and that we are reaching a tipping point that will ensure our ultimate success. People who want to see transformative change in this country should go forward with confidence and build on the strengths we have shown. We will look back on this era in amazement at all we have accomplished.

truth-out.org

Citizens Assembly

  From Occupy Movement to a Permanent Political Force

“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try

and change the problematic model.

You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller

We well know that our systems of governance are problematic to put it mildly and if we follow Fuller’s advice then we ought to create another model to make our existing system obsolete.

I am not sure how much more Fuller had to say about the matter or what he was referring to specifically when he said or wrote that statement. But in this article I will apply it in relation our plight with a thoroughly corrupt political system.

The Occupy Movement is still a minority movement, despite its growing popularity. Though it seems to be composed of people who are thinking and dreaming big. Occupy participants are brimming with hope in action and they have placed that hope not in some man or woman, but in themselves as a collective with a just and common cause.

They seem determined to change not only their own broken institutions, but they are also looking to band with Occupy Movements from other countries in the hope of creating a better world for all concerned.

But how do we go about changing our monolithic and seemingly all powerful institutions? They have mountains of money, they make the laws to suit their aims and they command military-police forces.  We are learning that we, the 99 percent, are still much bigger and even more powerful than the Establishment.

But to achieve our goals we need more than greater numbers and raw power—-we need organization. Every complex agency has an organizational system that enables it to accomplish its goals. The Occupy Movement will need to evolve from rag tag protest movement to a permanent political force in order to achieve its goals. The Occupy Movement could very well be the seedling of the exo-establishment structure (Citizens Assembly) we need to replace our pathetic government. Let us please come together to make it so. Any bright future for all concerned will depend on it. Make no mistake about it our generation will decide either the legacy or the tragedy of humankind.

Indeed our future lies with the principles embodied by the emerging good will organizations.

They hold the vision of a just and equitable society striving to maintain an ecological balance between its own members and between those it shares the planet with–the plants and animals.

These organizations represent the hope of humanity and it is also where the rubber meets the road—principles in motion.

Collective action is the key which will unlock the creative life-affirming and progressive potential inherent in the human spirit.

The lock is a system of inherited political-commercial powers structures that are unwilling to change despite the undeniable evidence that the dominant economic-political model is a dead end street.It is up to us to oblige The System to reform. The System is bound by design to perpetuate itself. Its democratic gestures big-fish-scary are illusions. Its strategy is to pacify its subjects while it goes about business as usual.

The collective action I speak of must be greater than the forces that keep emerging cultural movements at bay, locked down and largely ineffectual.

Deforestation, resources depletion, pollution, social decay, human rights abuse and militarism are still running rampant despite the fact that the social and environmental justice movements are now over 40 years old.

It could be a case of too little and too late.

Please bear in mind that the political power structures we are dealing with have honed their conquer and domination skills over the last 5000 years.

The ideas of egalitarianism and ecology as socio-cultural ordering principles are by comparison embryonic and therefore easily contained and suppressed by the 5000 year old prevailing culture of brute force.

They have well fortified positions and all the power one can dream of. We, however, outnumber them by at least 100,000 to one and we are armed with the principles of justice and 21st century communication technologies.

Big-fish-scary-no-more.. The Pen and now the keyboard are mightier than the sword. The various political uprisings around the world are testament to a new wave of effective political dissent and reform tactics.

We have the rightful cause, we have the willingness and we finally have the tools with which to course correct from the perilous path the world is currently being led down.

What we lack is the organizational superstructure to sufficiently amplify the will of the people through the multitude of existing organizations.

In other words, in order to achieve the kinds of reforms now demanded by the socio-ecological condition of the planet we need to pool our resources together.

The many good will movements of the world are by themselves insufficient to oblige governments to make the necessary reforms.

But a collective of movements would carry the necessary clout to get the attention of governments.  It is not difficult to imagine a collaborative effort between the many good will organizations of the world.

emergent-culture

What Did You Do?

Doing Good

Our movement is young, and it can only gain traction when others join in. Despite what truth we may be confident of being in possession of, it is of no consequence if others aren’t standing with us, so we must be fully conscious of our image to the public and how our actions come across to others. Sure, many will hold onto their negative preconceptions of occupiers no matter what we do, and the corporate media and police state are aligned against us, but we aren’t trying to reach any of those factions. We are trying to reach those who still retain even the slightest ability to form opinions for themselves who, while still unknowingly receiving the bulk of their worldview from corporations, are able to reconsider things if shown evidence of an alternate narrative. This is why one of the main focuses of Occupies all across the country should be to simply DO GOOD. Of course the corporate media will neglect coverage or seek to discredit a movement which posits that the very idea of a “corporate media” is an oxymoron. But if occupiers, say, feed the homeless once a week, it empowers those who see it in the flesh to form their own opinions.

Just like a food bank or free clinic, every Occupy should be a boon to its surrounding community, not only for the purpose of building the “better world” we know is possible, but also to combat negative media stereotypes. Over time, these types of utterly non-controversial actions will go a long way in telling people the real story about not only Occupy, but of the inherently conflicted and self-serving motives of the corporate elite.          
 Global Coherence Initiative

Survival 2100

 The Way Forward: Survival 2100

The  Survival 2100 plan calls for the continued pursuit of local resilience and the diversification of local economies.

    "Industrialised world reductions in material throughput, energy use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet’s ecological means." — Business Council for Sustainable Development

It’s not as if we’re unaware of the problem. Symptoms were already so persistent two decades ago that a proclamation by many of the world’s top scientists warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”2 This assertion was echoed a dozen years later by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s no less urgent warning that “human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of the earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”

One might think that humanity’s best science would be enough to stimulate a decisive policy response, but the feeble effort so far has done little to stem the cumulative cascade of dismal data. No national government, no prominent international agency, no corporate leader anywhere has begun to advocate in public, let alone implement, the kind of evidence-based, visionary, morally coherent policy responses that are called forth by the best science available today.

On the climate front, the first six months of 2010 were the warmest ever recorded, and 2010 tied with 2005 and 2008 for hottest year in the instrumental record. (This while we should have been experiencing modest cooling—the world is just emerging from the longest solar minimum in decades.) Earth and paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glikson posits that the world may be experiencing the fastest climate change in 34 million years.

Some climate scientists are now stepping into the policy arena. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows argue that the world will be hard-pressed to stabilize greenhouse gases at 650 ppmv CO2e, which implies a 50 percent chance of a catastrophic 4°C increase in mean global temperature, the desertification of much of the world’s habitable land mass, dramatically rising sea levels, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees by the end of the century. Indeed, unless we can reconcile economic growth with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6 percent per year), avoiding this increase will require a “planned economic recession.”

Of course, climate change is just one symptom of generalized human ecological dysfunction. A virtual tsunami of evidence suggests that the global community is living beyond its ecological means. By one measure, the human “ecological footprint” is about 2.7 global average hectares per person (gha/capita), yet there are only 1.8 gha/capita on earth. The human enterprise has already overshot global carrying capacity by about 50 percent and is living, in part, by depleting natural capital and overfilling waste sinks.

In theory, Homo sapiens is uniquely equipped to confront this self-made crisis. Four critical intellectual and emotional qualities distinguish people from other advanced vertebrates. Humans have

•     an unequaled capacity for evidence-based reasoning and logical analysis;
•     the unique ability to engage in long-term forward planning;
•     the capacity to exercise moral judgment; and
•     an ability to feel compassion for other individuals and other species.

As noted above, despite decades of hardening evidence, mainstream global society nevertheless remains in policy paralysis, stymied by cognitive and behavioral barriers to change that have deep roots in both human nature and global society’s culturally constructed economic growth fetish.

But what if mounting public pressure (think Occupy Wall Street) or a series of miniclimate catastrophes finally overwhelms these barriers? Assume the world community becomes fully motivated to deal effectively with biophysical reality. Now the question becomes, What would truly intelligent, forward-thinking, morally compassionate individuals do in response to available data, the historical record, and ongoing trends?

postcarbon.org

Alternatives

The Chinese believe that if the weather is very bad it is because of bad government. We have all noticed the wild fluctuations in our weather recently, heatwaves in March and snow in May. This changing of the climate we are told by scientists is because of global warming and I have no reason to doubt that this is so. Yet time and again the summits convened to try to deal with this crisis fail to come up with any concrete proposals. Why? Because of the vested interests of the elite in the global oil economy. We all know that oil is a resource that is all but exhausted. Yet we continue to rely on oil to maintain the illusion of progress. Oil fuels our vast transport systems and powers our electricity generators.

 Meanwhile, the government assures us that the best viable alternative is nuclear power. Yet this technology would leave us with a far worse pollution problem than oil and one that will last much much longer. If in years to come my great great grand children where to dig up my skeleton and scan it with their Geiger counters they would still find my bones were radio-active from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Every human on the planet has some of the fallout from that calamity in their body and now Fukashima is doing the same. You will notice how Fukashima has dropped out of the news even though that disaster is set to be even more deadly than Chernobyl. It has directly impacted the lives of over one million people already and now the scientists are saying there is worse to come!

Where Next for Occupy?

Where Next for Occupy?

Charles Eisenstein

Occupy has awakened a potent energy that had been lying dormant. It has made activists of people of a new generation, and brought renewed hope to veterans of past movements. Unlike earlier protest movements, it has not objected to any specific policy, such as segregation or the Vietnam War. It is a protest against a condition of society, highlighted by the maldistribution of wealth and debt whose symbol is Wall Street, that goes deeper than anything the Occupiers can easily name. As we say, no demand is big enough.