THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
October 5, 2011
Occupy Wall Street

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.

Join us and make your voices heard.

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Zuccotti Park, formerly called Liberty Plaza Park, is a privately-owned publicly-accessible park in Lower Manhattan in New York.

The U.S. Is Run by a Selfish Oligarchy, a Ruling Elite with a Pretend Democracy & Free Market (1993)

Enver Masud, "A Clash Between Justice and Greed," The Wisdom Fund, September 2, 2002

"Keith Olbermann reads the first collective statement of Occupy Wall Street," current.com, October 5, 2011

'Occupy Wall Street' Growing More Organized, Associated Press, October 7, 2010

Naomi Klein, "Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now," commondreams.org, October 7, 2011

Pam Martens, "Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll: Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?," counterpunch.org, October 10, 2011

Paul Krugman, "Panic of the Plutocrats," counterpunch.org, October 10, 2011

[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]

"Occupy movement goes global - in pictures," Guardian, October 15, 2011

THE BEST VIDEO ON "OCCUPY THE WORLD", October 17, 2011

Naomi Wolf, "How I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street: Arresting a middle-aged writer in an evening gown for peaceable conduct is a far cry from when America was a free republic," Guardian, October 19, 2011

Les Leopold, "The Shocking, Graphic Data That Shows Exactly What Motivates the Occupy Movement," alternet.org, October 23, 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]

Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie, "Revealed - The Capitalist Network That Runs the World," newscientist.com, November 3, 2011

Paul Krugman, "Oligarchy, American Style," nytimes.com, November 3, 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]

"Occupy protestors say it is 99% v 1%. Are they right?," Guardian, November 16, 2011

Greg McDonald, "Boehner-Connected Lobbying Firm Targets Occupy Movement," newsmax.com, November 21, 2011

"Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a 'Battlefield' They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window," ACLU, November 23, 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]

VIDEO: "Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein on Next Steps for the Movement Against Corporate Power," democracynow.org, November 25, 2011

Leaked: Republicans Scared of Occupy Wall Street, TheYoungTurks, December 2, 2011

Al Baker, "When the Police Go Military," nytimes.com, December 3, 2011

Matt Taibi, "Indefinite Detention of American Citizens: Coming Soon to Battlefield U.S.A.," rollingstone.com, December 9, 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 biggest recipient of federal tax breaks was General Electric, which claimed a profit of about $10.5 billion and, instead of paying any taxes, received $4.7 billion in net rebates from the federal government.--Michael Zennie, "Revealed: The 30 corporations that spent more on lobbyists than they paid in federal taxes," Daily Mail, December 14, 2011]

Ellen Connolly, "U.S falls to 47th in press freedom rankings after Occupy crackdown," Daily Mail, January 26, 2012

Pam Martens, "Wall Street's Secret Spy Center, Run for the 1% by NYPD: How 60 Minutes Blew the Story," counterpunch.org, February 6, 2012

[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]

Chris Hedges, "AIPAC Works for the 1 Percent," Truthdig, March 5, 2012

Joseph E Stiglitz, "The World's 99% Knows Capitalism Is Failing and Believes That Change Is Possible," truth-out.org, June 21, 2012

[People have written complicated pieces trying to prove it's not over, but if ever I saw a dead movement, it is surely Occupy.--Alexander Cockburn, "Biggest Financial Scandal in Britain's History, Yet Not a Single Occupy Sign; What Happened?," counterpunch.org, July 6, 2012]

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "The Betrayal of the American Dream," PublicAffairs; 1 edition (July 31, 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]

"Four Horsemen," RenegadeEconomist (September 13, 2013)

Thom Hartmann, "The Crash of 2016," Twelve (November 12, 2013)

Dave Lindorff, "What if Americans Demanded the Ouster of This Government," counterpunch.org, February 27, 2014

[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]

Mona Chalabi, "Meet The 80 People Who Are As Rich As Half The World," fivethirtyeight.com, January 18, 2015

Roy Eidelson, "Resisting the Mind Games of Donald Trump and the One Percent," counterpunch.org, December 22, 2016

[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

United for Global Change

Occupy Wall St.

VIDEO: Global Revolution

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