Salutations Brian Lister :: Looking out upon the withered Ame many of us feel a deep sense of bet Unemployment, financial insecurity, enslavement to debt are just the tip iceberg. We dont want to merely fi machine and bring profit and produ corner of the earth. We want to fun change the course of civilization. Fo American Dream betrayed even tho achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers their McMansions, narcotized to the ruination of nature and culture but because of it, endlessly consuming accumulating to quell the insistent wasnt put here on earth to sell pro wasnt put here on earth to increas share. I wasnt put here on earth numbers grow. We protest not only at our exclusio American Dream; we protest at its it cannot include everyone on earth ecosystem and bioregion, every peo culture in its richness; if the wealth be the debt of another; if it entails and underclasses and fracking and a the ugliness our system has created, want none of it. No one deserves to live in a world b the degradation of human beings, f waters, and the rest of our living pl Speaking to our brethren on Wall St deserves to spend their lives playin numbers while the world burns. Ulti are protesting not only on behalf of behind, but on behalf of the 1% as have no enemies. We want everyon to the beauty of what we can create. Occupy Wall Street has been criticiz lack of clear demands, but how do demands, when what we really wan less than the more beautiful world tell us is possible? No demand is bi could make lists of demands for ne policies: tax the wealthy, raise the wage, protect the environment, end regulate the banks. While we know t positive steps, they arent quite wh people to occupy Wall Street. What attention is something deeper: the structures, ideologies, and instituti prevented these steps from being t ago; indeed, that made these steps necessary. Our leaders are beholde impersonal forces, such as that of compel them to do what no sane h would choose. Disconnected from t effects of their policies, they live in insincerity and pretense. It is time t countervailing force to bear, and no but a call. Our message is, Stop pr You know what to do. Start doing it. Wall Street is about exposing the tr trust its power. When a policeman sprays helpless women, we dont be and scare him into not doing it agai the world. Much worse than pepper being perpetrated on our planet in money. Let us allow nothing happe to be hidden. If politicians are disconnected from the world of human suffering and ecosy collapse, all the more disconnected financial wizards of Wall Street. Beh computer screens, they occupy a w symbol, manipulating numbers and bits. Occupy Wall Street punctures t of pretense as well, reconnects the human consequences of the god th perhaps with their own consciences humanity too. Only in a hallucinatio someone imagine that the unsustai last forever; in puncturing their bu remind them that the money game end. It can be perpetuated for a wh perhaps, but only at great and grow We, the 99%, are paying that cost ri as the environment and the social f the 1% will soon feel it too. We wan operate and serve the financial syst up and see before it is too late. We can also point out to them that or later they will have no choice. Th serve, the financial system, is a dyin Reading various insider financial we perceive that the authorities are flai panicking, desperately implementin they themselves know are temporar the problem down the road a few y months. The strategy of lending eve money to a debtor who cannot pay doomed, its eventual failure a math certainty. Like all our institutions of growth, it is unsustainable. Once yo stripped the debtor of all assets - h savings, pension - and turned every last of his or her disposable income tow service, once you have forced the d austerity and laid claim even to his income (or in the case of nations, t then there is nothing left to take. W that point, the point of peak debt. T machine, ever hungry, seeks to liqui whatever scraps remain of the natu and social equity to reignite econo GDP rises, so does our ability to se But is growth really what we want? really cheer an increase in housing there are 19 million vacant housing market already? Can we really appla field, when the atmosphere is past t how much waste it can absorb? Is really what the world needs right n we envision a world instead with m less work, more sharing and less bu public space and less indoors, more less product? So far, government policy has been somehow to keep the debts on the every debt bubble in history ultimat collapses; ours is no different. The how much misery will we endure, a much will we inflict, before we succ inevitable? And secondly, how can gentle, non-violent transition to a s or degrowth world? Too many revol before us have succeeded only to in different but more horrible version thing they overthrew. We look to a of revolution. At risk of revealing th eyes, let me call it a revolution of l What else but love would motivate to abandon the quest to maximize r interest? Love, the felt experience of to other beings, contradicts the law economics as we know them. Ultim want to create a money system, an economy, that is the ally not the en We dont want to forever fight the to create good in the world; we wan the money power so that we dont it. I will not in this essay describe one of many - of a money system al the good in all of us. I will only say shift can only happen atop an even a transformation of human conscio Happily, just such a transformation today. We see it in anyone who had their lives to serving, healing, and p other beings: people, cultures, whal ecosystems, the waters, the forests, In the ecological age, we are beginn understand that we are connected the welfare of any species or people with our own. Our money system is with this understanding, which is da among all 100 percent of us, each i way. I think the ultimate purpose of Street, or the great archetype it tap revolution of love. If the 99% defeat they will like the Bolsheviks ultimat new 1% in their place. So let us not them; let us open them and invite t us. If Occupy Wall Street has a demand be this: wake up! The game is nearl ship while there is still time. In my many people of wealth who have do exiting the money game and devoti to giving away money as beautifully as And I meet many more people who skills and good fortune to earn weal wanted to, but who likewise refuse t in the money game. So if I sound id in mind that many people have had a heart already. Some might call these ideas imprac I think that nothing other than a ch heart is practical), and seek to issue demands. Unfortunately, though no big enough, yet equally any demand care to make is also too big. Everyt is on the very margin of mainstrea discourse, or outside it altogether. it might be within the range of resp policy options to tighten standards industrial-scale confinement meat o but how about ending the practice Congress wrangles about whether o reduce troop levels by a few thousa there, but what about ending the ga the planet? Any demand that we co that is within the realm of political r small. Any demand we could make t what we truly want is politically unr Shall we fight hard for something w want? It is fine to make demands, b movement cannot get hung up on t less on practicality, because any re achievable demand is far less than planet needs. Practical is not an o must seek the extraordinary. We might come up with a list of de something we can all stand behind, with a secret reservation in his or h says, I wanted more than that. I e those in the movement to recognize demands as stepping stones, or lan perhaps, on the road to an econom us never mortgage a greater to a le means of the movement, more than will be the genesis of what comes af pyramid collapses. Occupy Wall Stre practicing new forms of non-hierarc collaboration, peer-to-peer organiza playful action that someday, maybe, build a world on. We must learn the lessons of Egypt, peoples movement started with th demand to end intolerable conditio discovered its power, soon turned t the ouster of the president. That de have been too big at the outset, too yet at the end it proved to be too s dictator left, the protestors went ho creating any lasting structures of pe and, while some things changed, th political and economic infrastructur did not. Occupy Wall Street should not be c half-measures, even as it encourage applauds the tiny hundredth-measu might come first. It should not let s concessions sap the strength of the or seduce it into neglecting to foste organizational network. Occupy Wall the first manifestation in a long tim power in America. For too long, de has, for most people, meant meani choices in a box. The Wall Street oc stepping out of the box. Our job is to take a stand for a worl truly beautiful, fair, and just, a plan civilization that is healing. For a poli financier, even a small step in this takes courage, for it goes against th of money and all that is attached to that the task of Occupy Wall Street i a context for that courage, and a ca courage. With each step taken, the far larger steps will become appare with the courage to take them. To those holding the reins of power We will be your witnesses and your We will not allow you to live in a bu not go away. We will show you who you hurting and how. We will make it aw business, until your conscience can any longer. We know, in the beginni you will try to escape us; perhaps y Wall Street for suburban corporate private land where there is no stre hit. You might also retreat further i ideologies of globalism and growth the obvious. But nothing will stop u our tactics will constantly shift. In o another, we will speak the truth an speak it loudly. Where speaking the becomes illegal, we will break the la not wait to be invited. We will enter way, every physical and ideological f The truth is dwindling rain forests, deserts, mass tree die-offs on every looted pensions, groaning burdens debt, people working two or three d jobs; children eating dirt in Haiti, el choosing between food and medicin endless, and we will make it no lon to hold it in disconnection from the system. That is why we converge on and anywhere that finance holds sw lulled us into complacency for long illusions and false hopes. We the people are awakening and we will not go back !!!
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 01:18:33 +0000
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