Saturday, October 1: Occupy Wall Street ... and Albuquerque and Santa Fe and ...

JOIN THE MOVEMENT: Hastily organized "occupations" in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street have now been scheduled for tomorrow, October 1, in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (Facebook pages). Click for info sheets for Occupy Burque and Occupy Santa Fe in Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street.

Since September 17, a diverse array of "hacktivists," ordinary citizens and celebrities has been participating in an expanding protest -- called "Occupy Wall Street" -- in downtown Manhattan in New York City. The constant and continuing demonstrations were designed to mimic at least some aspects of the Tahrir (Liberation) Square revolt, which entailed 18 days of protests in Cairo. Tahrir Squate led to the downfall of the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and morphed into a group of revolts now known collectively as the "Arab Spring."

Only time will tell whether Occupy Wall Street will end up in the history books as a victory for the people or just another fizzle in the long, hard battle against corporatist fascism. And only you can impact the outcome -- by joining the movement or sitting at home whining or cursing.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are targeting the irresponsible and often criminal actions of Wall Street traders, giant financial institutions, international banking concerns and pretty much the entire global economic and financial system. Ordinary people all over the world are sick and tired of being at the mercy of a cut-throat bunch of well-dressed, well-educated (well-bred?) extortionists and hooligans who have increasingly been dominating markets, financial dealings, housing, national debt levels, loans, employment, environmental decisions and more on behalf of the greedy and narrow interests of an oligarchy of plutocrats at the top of the economic food chain.

Defining themselves as being representative of "The 99%" of the population who are being used and abused by the outrageously wealthy elites who are calling the shots -- now known as "The 1%" -- the demonstrators are hell bent on creating a fresh, creative, nonviolent model of ongoing protest and revolt. The aim is to create a wide-ranging, semi-spontaneous, day-to-day movement that expands organically and can be adapted and adopted in cities and towns across America and everywhere else where the filthy 1% are gorging on the labor and resources of the other 99% in order to feed their sick addictions to mega-power and mega-wealth.

The specific objects and targets of the protests may vary according to geographical location or local issues in play, but the core goal of the actions will be the same all over -- gaining attention and garnering support for stopping the economic bullies in their tracks in order to salvage the remnants of a fair and just culture and have a chance at shaping a new paradigm that's based on truly sustainable and enlightened principles and practices. It's now or never.

Yes, believe it or not, more and more people are finally awaking to the realities of a monstrous class war being perpetrated against ordinary workers and the poor by a bunch of multi-national economic terrorists who view the world as their own private slot machine. Call it what it is -- a class war -- but contrary to the claims of the crony capitalists, the attacks are being launched by a tiny minority of haves against the masses of the have nots, not the other way around. We cannot let this stand and expect to have a chance at any kind of positive future for ourselves, our families and friends, ordinary humans around the world, the planet's ecosystems or anything else we value and care about.

As reported by , 

The Occupy Wall Street protests, which this week received a boost from pledges of , are expanding not only in the number of participants but in geographical scope as well: Demonstrators in Boston, Denver, Chicago, Santa Fe, Lexington, Kentucky, and now three big California cities, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, have all joined or are preparing to join the movement. A website has been set up calling for Floridians to occupy cities across the state on November 5, “Guy Fawkes Day.” In total, there have been online calls to action in over 77 cities across the United States, most of them slated to occur within the first week of October.

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Occupy Wall Street, which was first proposed by Canadian countercultural magazine , initially received traction online thanks to the support of "Anonymous," the loosely-knit “hacktivist” collective. The event began on  with around 3,000 protesters, but the numbers have varied considerably since then, with a core group of around 200 to 300 people maintaining a camp in nearby Zuccotti Park, despite being , beaten and arrested for  by police.

The #OccupyWallStreet Facebook page describes the new strategy and tactics this way:

The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people — Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

As Chris Hedges writes in a piece published today on Commondreams and elsewhere:

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

... Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money 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 thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles 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 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, 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 know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money 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 prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let 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 rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. 

Helpful Website Links:

• OccupyWallStreet
• OccupyTogether
• Occupy Albuquerque
• Occupy Santa Fe
• Downloadable Posters

JOIN THE MOVEMENT: Hastily organized "occupations" in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street have now been scheduled for tomorrow, October 1, in Albuquerque and Santa Fe (Facebook pages). Click for info sheets (pdf) for Occupy Burque and Occupy Santa Fe in Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street.