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#OccupyWallStreet video report by Phil Aroneanu of 350.org

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by Phil Aroneanu, US Campaign Director for 350.org

I have been extremely busy with work, but I've been really inspired by the recent discussions of Occupy Wall Street.  Having just come off a marathon couple months of climate action, including two weeks of arrests in Washington DC as part of the Tar Sands Action, and a global day of climate action called Moving Planet, I was tired and reticent to get engaged in more public protest.

But I decided to head to Occupy Wall Street anyway, where I linked up with Max Berger, and talked to the inspiring individuals who were camped out in Liberty Park. What I found was a crew of mostly young people, dedicated to linking up the issues that most Americans care about: immigration, income inequality, corruption, climate change...etc.  I was surprised how eloquently they wove all those issues together, and how much inspiration they took from the many global movements that people I know have helped to organize.

Here's a quick video that nicely captures the linkage between the #occupywallstreet and the global climate movement:

In addition, Bill McKibben, 350.org founder, decided to record his own message of thanks to the people in Liberty Park:


 

I'm really proud to have been able to be a small part of the #occupywallstreet protest, and to know that the organization that I helped found has become one of the first environmental groups to publicly support the courageous folks in New York and around the world highlighting corporate corruption and envisioning a safe, just world.

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Photos by Paul Weiskel.

For a passionately worded political commentary on #Occupywallstreet, please see this op-ed by Chris Hedges of Truthdig, partially quoted below:

The Best Among Us

By Chris Hedges

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.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher

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.  [READ MORE]

 

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