This Changes Everything Part 5

We could invest in universal health coverage, which offers people the security to risk launching new businesses and helps make shorter workweeks more feasible. We could fully fund education and job training.

We could save money by cutting the bloated military budget, oversized prison populations, and the drug war. And we'd have enough money if everyone-including the wealthiest Americans and large corporations-paid taxes at the rates they paid during the Clinton administration.

To get these sorts of changes, we need the American government to work for all of us, not just for corporations.

Powerful moneyed interests won't willingly give back the power that has allowed them to acquire most of America's wealth. We need strong people's movements to get government to work for ordinary Americans. That's the way American workers won the eight-hour day, women secured the right to vote, and African Americans ended segregation.

Enlightened politicians may cooperate with these movements, but they cannot lead them. We the people will have to set our own agenda and insist that government respond.

Sarah van Gelder and Doug Pibel wrote this article for "New Livelihoods," the Fall 2011 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is executive editor and Doug is managing editor of YES! Magazine.

Photo by Scott Eisen.

BOSTON, October 5, 2011.

PART III.

WE HAVE THE POWER.

Through the Occupy Wall Street movement we're redefining power, learning new ways to make change, and winning back our political self-respect. Instead of pet.i.tioning the powerful for change, we're making it happen ourselves. Instead of taking direction from leaders, each of us can claim the right as a sovereign individual to be part of powerful collective action.

But do marches and occupations really make a difference? And how do we take the next steps to build power for the 99%?

Thomas Linzey and Jeff Reifman in chapter 13 tell stories of communities around the United States-especially those resisting hydrofracking-that are using local lawmaking to end corporate "personhood" and determine their own futures.

Ralph Nader in chapter 14 reminds us of past victories accomplished via organized, persistent street action, and through the willingness of people in all walks of life to "speak out and stand tall."

Rebecca Solnit ties the Occupy Wall Street movement to the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the uprisings in Europe in chapter 15, showing that ordinary people are often strengthened and transformed by such upheavals.

Sarah van Gelder wraps up this section with chapter 16, a list of 10 Ways to Support the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Whether or not you choose to sleep outside with your local occupiers, there are many, many ways to get involved.

CHAPTER 13.

HOW TO PUT THE RIGHTS OF PEOPLE AND NATURE OVER CORPORATE RIGHTS.

THOMAS LINZEY AND JEFF REIFMAN.

The history of populist uprisings like Occupy Wall Street is far from rea.s.suring. The last one to have any staying power was the populist farmers revolt of the 1800s, and it was aggressively dismantled by everyone from the two major political parties to the banks and railroad corporations of its day.

Most revolts are snuffed out well before their efforts affect the political scene-not because their ideas and issues aren't relevant, but because the major inst.i.tutional players within the system-that-is attempt to snag the power and energy for their own. In the eyes of the Democratic Party or the national environmental groups, this revolt is merely an opportunity to a.s.similate newly emerging troops back into those groups' own ineffective organizing. Yet, if those inst.i.tutional groups had actually been effective all of these years, why the need for a revolt at all?

It's when these revolts become mainstreamed by their "friends" within existing inst.i.tutions that they lose their steam and become mere footnotes in an endless list of revolts that burned out early. The pundits and "experts" are already trying to put this revolt in its place. A recent New York Times editorial declared that it "isn't the job of these protesters to write legislation." That, the editorial argued, was what the national politicians need to do. The Times couldn't be more wrong.

If the Occupy movement is to succeed over time, it must follow the lead of community rights building efforts that have begun to dismantle the body of law that perpetually subordinates people, community, and nature to wealthy corporate minorities. For example: * In November 2010, Pittsburgh's city council stripped corporations seeking to drill for natural gas of their corporate person-hood rights, protections of the commerce and contracts clauses of the U.S. and Pennsylvania Const.i.tutions, and the right to pre-empt community ordinances with federal or state law.

* In March 2011, for the first time since Ecuador added rights for nature to its Const.i.tution, a judge stopped destructive corporate development in a suit brought by ordinary residents on behalf of the Vilcabamba River.

* This November, Spokane, Washington residents will vote on Proposition One which 1) grants neighborhoods complete control over local development, 2) affords rights and protections to the Spokane River and aquifer, 3) grants const.i.tutional protections to employees in the workplace and 4) makes people's rights superior to corporate rights.

These communities, and many like them, have begun adopting community bills of rights, which elevate the rights of people and nature above the rights of corporations. It's not another exercise in putting out good-sounding statements. Instead, it's a seizure of governmental lawmaking authority designed to make the government work on behalf of the majority, rather than continuing to serve as a colonized lackey for corporations.

Instead of diluting themselves to meet the needs of already-inst.i.tutionalized groups who aren't going anywhere, the Occupy folks must move in the opposite direction: deepen and strengthen their effort by demanding structural change. That means moving away from the mainstream progressive organizations and the inst.i.tutional advocacy they promote (which has proven ineffective against the type of consolidated wealth that influences decisions about every aspect of our lives today) and towards a new form of advocacy and activism. Rather than negotiating the terms of our de-occupation, we can and must rewrite the very rules under which our system operates.

Mainstream progressive groups have failed by working within legal and regulatory systems purposefully structured to subordinate communities to corporate power. Transformative movements don't operate that way. Abolitionists never sought to regulate the slave trade; they sought freedom and rights for slaves. Suffragists didn't seek concessions but demanded the right for all women to vote.

The Occupy movement must begin to use lawmaking activities in cities and towns to build a new legal structure of rights that empowers community majorities over corporate minorities, rather than the other way around.

It's taken a century's worth of manufactured and concocted legal doctrines to create an environment so skewed in the favor of corporations and their decision makers that not only our legislatures but also our courts can be wielded against us. Our country's wealth inequality did not arise overnight, but emerged slowly as the corporate minority eviscerated almost every memory of a true democratic system.

They've built a system that not only allows those with the most wealth to have the most decision-making power, but one in which our most essential const.i.tutional rights have now been bestowed onto corporate "persons," thus insulating them from governing authority.

What's been happening in communities such as Pittsburgh and Spokane since the early 2000s is a revolution that takes those const.i.tutional rights back and makes them work for communities again. Residents of over a hundred rural American communities have now seized their local governments by using munic.i.p.al law-making power to recognize rights for nature, to strip corporations of certain claimed rights, and to elevate community decision-making rights above the claimed "rights" of corporations. In the process, they've stopped everything from proposed corporate factory farms to natural gas fracking and corporate water withdrawals.

These communities have begun to understand that the specific issues that affect them cannot be solved without dismantling a structure of law, government, and culture that guarantees that corporate minorities will continue to make decisions on energy, agriculture, and resource extraction.

Occupy Wall Street must become Occupy New York City-with groups of New Yorkers seizing the city and its boroughs and using the munic.i.p.al ent.i.ties to align their governing structures with their demands. That may mean eliminating corporate rights within the city, recognizing the rights of neighborhoods, and restoring labor rights within the workplace.

Occupy Seattle and Portland must actually occupy their munic.i.p.alities via citizen initiatives and other processes to begin to change the law with which their cities operate by eliminating corporate rights and privileges.

This means understanding that our current system, in which a corporate minority wields a stranglehold over 99% of us, won't change just because one bill is introduced into congress, or promises are made by financial inst.i.tutions. Structural change-focused on toppling the corporate domination of policy on everything from energy to transportation to finance-must be forced. We must begin in our cities and towns, then drive upwards against state and federal frameworks of law that protect decision-making authority by the 1%. In each of the cities where we live, we need to start working together to define the rights we need and then use our munic.i.p.al structures to obtain them.

As winter nears, the Occupy movement should take note of community organizer Saul Alinsky's observation in Rules for Radicals, "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag." There may only be a brief window to convert street-level momentum into organized rights-legislating movements in each of our local communities.

Thomas Linzey is the executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Jeff Reifman is co-founder of Envision Seattle, a freelance writer, and an organizer. This chapter first appeared on YesMagazine.org on October 14, 2011.

CHAPTER 14.

GOING TO THE STREETS TO GET THINGS DONE.

RALPH NADER.

What took them so long-these jobless, poor, voiceless, excluded, defrauded, disrespected, fed up thousands, who are learning that half of what democracy means is showing up and staying-in this case-in the parks and the streets? Isn't that the lesson of American history?

The plutocrats of Wall Street and the oligarchs who serve them in Washington, DC, always sweat a little when people are in the streets. That is what happened during the drive to get women the right to vote, and the great challenges from organized demonstrators of farmers and workers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Later it was the marches and rallies that sent the message of restraint and retreat to the bosses and launched the modern civil rights, women's rights, environmental, and peace movements.

Persistent street action breaks through the ma.s.s media's adhesion to status-quo definitions of news. It is unpredictable, visual, and flares when police overreact. It is hard to ignore, especially when the Internet is already actively reporting and commenting. Messages of resistance are coming from the indignation of engaged real people with real stories of injustice, deprivation, and moral outrage. These personal declarations, day after day, are harder to ignore than similar portrayals in the many muckraking books, magazines, and doc.u.mentaries.

Being here, there, and everywhere in communities around the country exudes spontaneity and new energy. Ma.s.s media like spontaneity and new energy-people new to the causes that old-line groups have espoused more decorously for many years. (Our large presidential campaign rally in October 2008 in front of the New York Stock Exchange, during the crash, was largely ignored-except for an article in The New York Times.) There are times, places, and styles that produce sparks glowing with the potential to put more heat on an establishment unready for such gra.s.sroots perturbations.

Already, the Occupy encampments in small, mid-sized, and large towns-with a core still near Wall Street-have shown that the people have a pulse; that they have breaking points beyond which they will not remain pa.s.sive.

The campers and the marchers are discovering that they have power-the crucial first stage of liberation from growing up powerless and under corporate domination-the two go together-into a process of self-realization. They are together finding talents and skills, temperaments and visions, resilience and determination that they may not have thought they had.

The Wall Street fat cats, in their private conversations, must have been wondering how a collapsed economy, the direct loss of eight million jobs, trillions of dollars in pensions and savings, and a taxpayer-funded bailout of the crooks and speculators who continue bad practices without remorse could persist without sustained protests by the victims. They now have the first stage of their answer.

We can be certain that the power structure is now a.n.a.lyzing the most effective ways of cooling down and drying up this decentralized, leaderless, growing occupation of the peoples' commons in scores of communities, with the "whole world watching" (to borrow a phrase from the 1960s). The corporate supremacists and their political allies will, of course, rely first on police power to clear the s.p.a.ces and the tents. That will only serve to provoke even greater numbers of people to join the pioneers. What comes next is unknown, but it is most likely that a series of contingency plans are already on the drawing board to thwart a civic movement that shows signs of becoming very serious indeed.

Occupy Wall Street and its many supporters are already emboldening those in business, government, university, and union circles, who have been self-censoring, to take the next step to speak out and stand tall. This is what happened in the 1960s-first with civil rights and then with the anti-Vietnam war movements. They sparked other challenges that liberated minds and long-repressed initiatives for change leading to legislation protecting consumers, the environment, and worker safety. In evaluating the Occupy challengers today, consider such penumbras that are exciting other efforts for justice that unite around the need to shift power from the few to the many along with the many resources that come with that dynamic.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, author, and former presidential candidate. His Web site is Nader.org.

CHAPTER 15.

THE OCCUPATION OF HOPE:.

LETTER TO A DEAD MAN.

REBECCA SOLNIT.

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi, I want to write you about an astonishing year-with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society.

I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.

We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began. Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%.

And so Tunisia erupted and overthrew its government, and Egypt caught fire, as did Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where the nonviolent protests elsewhere inspired a civil war the rebels have won after several b.l.o.o.d.y months. Who could have imagined a Middle East without Ben Ali of Tunisia, without Mubarak, without Gaddafi? And yet here we are, in the unimaginable world. Again. And almost everywhere.

Distinctively, in so many of these uprisings the partic.i.p.ants were not advocating for one party or a simple position, but for a better world, for dignity, for respect, for real democracy, for belonging, for hope and possibility-and their economic underpinnings. The Spanish young whose future had been sold out to benefit corporations and who were nicknamed the Indignados, lived in the plazas of Spain this summer. Occupied Madrid, like occupied Tahrir Square, preceded Occupy Wall Street. The United States had one great eruption in Wisconsin this winter, when the citizenry occupied their state capitol building in Madison for weeks. Now the Occupy movement has spilled over from Wall Street. Hundreds of occupations are happening all over North America: in Oklahoma City and Tijuana, in Victoria and Fort Lauderdale.

The 99%.

"We are the 99%" is the cry of the Occupy movement. This summer, one of the flyers that helped launch the Occupy Wall Street protest read: "We, the 99%, call for an open general a.s.sembly August 9, 7:30 p.m. at the Potato Famine Memorial, NYC." It was an a.s.sembly to discuss the September 17 occupation to come.

The Irish Hunger Memorial, so close to Wall Street, commemorates the million Irish peasants who starved in the 1840s, while Ireland remained a food-exporting country and the landed gentry continued to profit. It's a monument to the exploitation of the many by the few, to the forces that turned some of our ancestors-including my mother's four Irish grandparents-into immigrants, forces that are still pushing people out of farms, homes, nations, and regions. The Irish famine was one of the great examples of those disasters of the modern era that are not crises of scarcity, but of distribution. The United States is now the wealthiest country the world has ever known, and has an abundance of natural resources, as well as of nurses, doctors, universities, teachers, housing, and food-so ours, too, is a crisis of distribution. Everyone could have everything they need and the rich would still be rich enough, but you know that enough isn't a concept for them. They're greedy, and their thirty-year grab for more has carved away at what's minimally necessary for the survival and dignity of the rest of us. So the Famine Memorial couldn't have been a more appropriate place for Occupy Wall Street to begin.

Later in August came the Web site started by a twenty-eight-year-old New York City activist, "We Are the 99%," to which hundreds daily now submit photographs of themselves. Each of them also testifies to the bleak conditions they find themselves in. It's a Web site of unremitting waking nightmares, economic bad dreams that a little wealth redistribution would eliminate (even without eliminating the wealthy). The people contributing aren't asking for luxuries. They would simply prefer not to be worked to death like so many nineteenth century millworkers, nor to have their whole world come crashing down if they get sick. They want to survive with dignity, and their testimonies will break your heart.

"We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers," was the slogan of the first student protest called in Spain this year. Your beautiful generation, Mohammed Bouazizi, has arisen and is bringing the rest of us along, even here in the United States.

What is Your Occupation?

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy together. Occupy New Orleans, Portland, Stockton, Boston, Las Cruces, Minneapolis. Occupy. The very word is a manifesto, a position statement, and a position as well. For so many people, their occupation is their ident.i.ty, and when a job is lost, they become not just unemployed, but no one. The Occupy movement offers them a new occupation, work that won't pay the bills, but a job worth doing. "Lost my job, found an occupation," said one sign in the crowd of witty signs.

There is, of course, a bleaker meaning for the word occupation, as in, "the United States is occupying Iraq." Even National Public Radio gives the Dow Jones report several times a day, as though the rise and fall of the stock market had not long ago been decoupled from the rise and fall of genuine measures of well-being for the 99%. A small part of Wall Street, which has long occupied us as if it were a foreign power, is now occupied as though it were a foreign country.

Wall Street is a foreign country-and maybe an enemy country as well. And now it's occupied. The way that Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francis...o...b..y for eighteen months four decades ago and galvanized a national Native American rights movement. You pick someplace to stand, and when you stand there, you find your other occupation, as a member of civil society. At this moment in history, occupation should be everyone's occupation.

Baby Pictures of a Revolt.

Young man whose despair gave birth to hope, no one knows what the future holds. When you set yourself afire almost ten months ago, you certainly didn't know, nor do any of us know now, what the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring will be, let alone this American Fall. Such a movement arrives in the world like a newborn. Who knows its fate, or even whether it will survive to grow up? Zuccotti Park is just two blocks from Wall Street, and also just a block from Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 attacks. On that day, it was badly damaged. September 21, my dear friend Marina Sitrin wrote me from Occupy Wall Street: "There are people from more diverse backgrounds racially, more diverse age groups, including not just a few children here with their parents, and a number of working people from the area. In particular, some of the security guards from the 9/11 memorial a block away have been coming by for lunch and chatting with people, as has a local group of construction workers."

If the Arab Spring was the decade-later ant.i.thesis of 9/11, a largely nonviolent, publicly inclusive revolt that forced the Western world to get over its fearful fantasy that all young Muslims are terrorists, jihadis, and suicide bombers, then Occupy Wall Street, which began six days after the tenth anniversary of that nightmarish day in September, is the other half of 9/11 in New York. What was remarkable about that day ten years ago is how calmly and beautifully everyone behaved. New Yorkers helped each other down those dozens of flights of stairs in the Twin Towers and away from the catastrophe, while others lined up to give blood, desperate to do something, anything, to partic.i.p.ate, to be part of a new-found sense of community that arose in the city that day.

When I began to study the history of urban disaster years ago, I found such unexpected exhibitions of that kind of joy again and again, uniting the generative moments of protests, demonstrations, revolts, and revolutions with the aftermath of some disasters. Even when the losses were terrible, the ways that people came together to meet the occasion were almost always inspiring.