Occupy the World Movement

October 19, 2011

Southampton, NY: Occupy Wall Street captures the imagination of the people of New York City, possibly the most progressive and diverse city in the world.  This is as it should be. The liberal northeast, in our country’s history, often leads movements for social change; Abolition, anti-lynching, a woman’s right to vote, and labor rights are but a few examples.
 
Next the OWS movement moved to the hinterland, from Wall Street to Main Street, and now, like the Arab Spring, it is going global. WE ARE THE WORLD: OCCUPY IT! 

For example, this just in: OCCUPY HARLEM MOBILIZATION. We stand in solidarity with Occupiers of Wall Street.  Friday, October 28, 2011, 6:30 – 9:30 PM at St. Philip’s Church, 204 West 134th Street (Adam Clayton Powell Blvd).  

The freedom struggle of Black people and their allies around the world provides a vital engine moving things forward, always forward. This newest class war, in the finest sense, can avoid the usual trajectory taken in world economic crises.  Ruling classes traditionally bail themselves out on the backs of the poor, the working class and relatively powerless, what used to be called, Third World Countries.  A favorite saying in the junkyard dog-mean south is, “Don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon!

The 99% in Greece today launched a general strike against EU and Wall Street austerity measures. All we are saying in the Occupy movement is that the world certainly needs austerity, but it must be of a new kind. No longer can rich 1% nations and individuals appropriate most of the world’s goods and riches.  

We talk, organize, and take action to bring about a world class struggle where people, not power elites and power institutions, decide what’s to be cut and how to nurture and protect humans and animals. 

World Class Struggle depends on building a world-class movement using all the energy, creativity and technology at our disposal. Revolutionaries of North America bear a heavy responsibility, being as we are in the very entrails of Kock-crazed Globezilla wreaking havoc astride the world since the beginning of modern times.

Our determination is strong because the whole world is watching the ridiculous position taken by our ruling class here in good old USA. They say the ship of state will remain afloat simply by cutting welfare, Medicare, public education, emergency assistance, foreign aid, and any other program right-wingers and Republicans oppose.  

These same oligarchs gleefully spent all our public money on expeditionary and preemptive wars, and then they incurred massive debt bailing out billionaires. Because the public was quiescent, our rightwing-tinted ruling class saw they could do anything they wanted to abuse “the people.” 

But they went too far!  They know no shame.  Amazing how men with millions and billions of personal wealth, still want more. After years of redistributing world and American wealth upward, through tax breaks and loop holes for the rich and the super rich, their party, the Republicans, in the face of national and world depression, refused to increase revenue even by closing unconscionable tax loop holes.  No!  Only cuts directed at the middle class and the poorest can be used to correct this rotten economy.

Maintaining their voracious amassing of unprecedented personal and private wealth, our rulers helped themselves to what was left of the public treasury in the name of saving “the financial system.”

Well the ruling classes of the world can no longer do as they please.  State power can now change hands quickly and relatively nonviolently, thanks to the lessons of our freedom movement.

Reform of the system, even if it once seemed desirable, even doable, is no longer possible.  As Stokely/Kuame Ture, Musaka and others famously urged, we now seem Ready for Revolution.

Reform or Revolution, a constant theme in people’s struggle from the beginning, whenever and wherever that was, is now on the table for real. 

Reform seems impossible; its time revolutionaries think about ideas for the near and far future – strategy and tactics. 

The bedrock of protection for Americans, habeas corpus, was given up without a whimper in the name of being more secure.  This strangely unpatriotic action, urged upon our stupid right-wingers by the corporate fascist Kock brothers, sole funders of the Tea Party, was to protect us from terrorist.  At the same time, party geniuses like Michelle and Sarah urged common folk to cling to their guns as protection against the government?  Why would anyone gladly give up habeas corpus while viewing with alarm the power of the central government?  I guess we should be happy that our opposition does not think straight, if at all. 

The occupy movement should give President Obama, a center-right politician, an opportunity to turn more leftward.  It might not be enough to save capitalism, as FDR did, but possibly a left turn will be enough to give him and us some breathing room.  

I’m sure President Obama and his up to now uncomprehending staff wish they had, by executive order, put millions to work on infrastructure, as soon as the bottom fell out.  These millions of workers, continuing to pay rent and mortgages, would have allowed housing and jobs, the center piece of the bust, to bounce back quicker. I never understood why this could not be done at the same time measures were being taken to save the banks.  Isn’t the bureaucracy big enough to do several big tasks at the same time?

We are in deep cocoa, however, if President Obama fails to get another term.  His relative progressivism keeps harsher measures of the Patriot Act off the necks of change agents. A Perry or even Romney, White House might land many of us in prison or underground.  We can be “disappeared” due to lack of habeas corpus, PRODUCE THE BODY!

Ready for revolution?  Let’s hope that we are.  It might be delayed a while but it can no longer be stopped.

Bob Zellner
Southampton, NY.