The site already features more than 600 personal stories, some of them written by and featuring the sad faces of children. Page after page is tagged with the protests, whether it be pictures of protesters' signs, quotes from speeches or personal observations of the young and old.
At the above site you will find real people, sharing hopes, goals, injustice, feelings, and loss. Summed up best by the paragraph "We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 per cent is getting everything. We are the 99 per cent."
THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT is a people powered protest for democracy, that began on September 17, 2011 with an encampment in the financial district of New York City. While it does not constitute anything close to an awakening of the American public, it has potential and does appear to be gaining some traction, but has a long way to go before I would consider it "a movement".
Now that the media which had been totally ignoring it, has finally started reporting on this, it means that there is fear in Corporate land and some media see potential mainstream "news worthiness" about these events.
Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation sent out sparks across America, the World within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called Occupy Chicago, Occupy Florida, Occupy Denver, or Occupy LA. and many other places, including other Countries?
The Protests Of Occupy Wall Street are growing every day as they are now listed by State and Country. Click here for the location of Protests in your State or Country.
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the possible beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new and old generation of Americans, generations who are looking forward to finishing, or finished their education with no jobs, no future, but many still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt, or family financial obligations. Most are of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, people who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, or skipped College and got jobs immediately, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated, faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral rejects of society.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates and criminals who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure here in America. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone.
Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down. The danger is their being co-opted by some political movement with a hidden agenda, or to miss the sometimes common goals these protesters can share with the minority segment of sane Tea Party members, and Independent voters.
What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.
Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid, in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it.
It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for.
It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all, that the current forms of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was faked by cheap credit at home and massive plunder here and abroad.
As a result, the debt crisis has come home to America and Europe, with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity, too big to fail".
While at the same time those in power, those who created this economic meltdown escaped unscathed, they created a myth to blame these problems on Government spending, and the solution to be fixed on the already broken backs of the regular citizens in each country. In America there would be over 12 trillion dollars spent on Corporate welfare bailouts using taxpayers money, but at the same time, no money would be available to also help regular folks, victims of this economic catastrophe as the Government claimed they didn't have the funds.
While at the same time reinforcing these lies by creating deliberate fear on the part of everyone else to scare them into protecting themselves against losing what "crumbs" they still had.
Even the programs that would help make our lives better became politicized into a single lying, brainwashed message, that these were somehow the economic reasons that caused the financial mess in our Country. Selective amnesia, creating hate, division, and fear so that the real perpetrator's, the puppet politicians and their masters would escape responsibility, accountability for their corrupt, insatiable greed.
The form of resistance that has emerged in these Occupy Wall Street protests looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below.
Thirty years of relentless political, class warfare, bullying propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, make these protesters chances of success look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of people to the wolves in order to do so.
Never underestimate the power and lengths of the corrupt tentacles that the rich, corporations, and their political puppets possess. They are ruthless, have unlimited funds, no ethics, will do anything necessary to protect their elite status, using their finely honed shrewd, powerful, evil, self serving, slimy tactics by successfully keeping us deliberately divided, apathetic,and fighting each other based on manipulating truths into lies.They only care about their own cruel, selfish, self serving needs and do not care about destroying us, our Country, and our Home Towns,
MY HOME TOWN-Bruce Springsteen
Perhaps the most ironic element of the Occupy Wall Street protests, organized almost entirely via the Internet, is the very basic way that immediate information is disseminated on the ground. Rather than using an agreed upon Twitter process, bullhorn, or sound system (the latter two require permits from the city) the group is using a "human microphone" technique: simply shouting back the words of the speaker so the rest of the group can hear.
Here are some links below for you to click on and follow the events of these protests as it goes forward and see for yourself the riveting truth.
The movement's official Twitter name, @OccupyWallSt, had nearly 39,000 followers.
Click Here to go on a different active FB Site that acts also as a place to announce events, share views.
The thieves in Brooks Brothers suits use your money that they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves, while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.
Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a ruling class and an obedient cadre of politicians from all political parties, judges and journalists who live in their gated fiefdoms, while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills, and at least 45,000 human beings die from lack of proper health care.
Where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.
The only word these corporations, the rich know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education, Social Security, to Medicare, because they want that money for themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs.
Let the middle class what is left of it, teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.
Who the hell cares? If the stocks of Exxon Mobil, the Coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good for them. Profit. Profit. Profit, that is their credo.
They have their hooks deep into our necks. If you do not shake them off , they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children's children. They are too out of touch with reality, too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us.
So either we dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we march as sheep toward self-annihilation.
Keep your head up your ass of denial or take it out and help add to the voice of these protestors in whatever way you are comfortable with, but don't blame someone else if we the 99 per cent lose, blame yourself.