Forum Post: Coffee Party's Letter to the Occupiers & the 99%

Many of you might already be familiar with the Coffee Party ( http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/ ), a nonpartisan movement that, like OWS, has developed in response to the cycle of political and economic corruption that is threatening our country and the world. The Coffee Party has supported OWS. The following letter by Annabel Park, one of the CP founders, is addressed to OWS supporters and the 99%. She presents some excellent suggestions for the OWS movement. I encourage all to read the excerpts from letter below and check out the Coffee Party's website, which has useful videos and information on what got us into our current cycles of political and economic corruption and how to free our country from them.

(Note: I wasn't able to paste the full letter or the links included in the letter on this thread. You can read the letter in full, as posted on the CP website, here: http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/annabel-letter-occupy)

Enjoy.

Letter to the Occupiers & the 99% by Annabel Park

Dear Occupiers and the 99%,

First of all, I am inspired by your courage and conviction and I thank you for the leadership that you are showing the nation.

I just read the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City passed by the NYC General Assembly. I agree with many of the critical statements made about our current financial and political system and I admire the comprehensive nature of the approach.

As we further develop our collective vision and political strategy, I submit for consideration, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights proposed in his State of a Union speech in 1944, a year before his death.

Although never adopted as an official amendment to the US Constitution, the Economic Bill of Rights became the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, authored in part by his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and adopted by the UN General Assembly December 10, 1948. The United States voted in favor of the adoption.

Martin Luther King, Jr. attempted to advance a version of this in 1968 through the Poor People's Campaign before he was assassinated.

While we may need to revise it, it seems to me that the Economic Bill of Rights offers an orientation -- an intellectual, social and moral one -- that addresses many concerns that we all have as citizens and frames our rights as rights; not as "entitlements" for the elderly, the undeserving, or the underperforming.

The values and ideas expressed in the Economic Bill of Rights were embodied in the New Deal programs — Roosevelt administration's response to the Great Depression — one of which is our current Social Security program.

Insofar as the Economic Bill of Rights may appear to be unrealizable, this so-called conventional wisdom attests to just how far our current consciousness has departed from the lessons in humanity painfully learned during the Great Depression and World War II.

This departure is no accident; it is by design. In the last 30 years, we've moved away from Roosevelt's vision, and have been lured or bullied into accepting an entirely different social contract. Roosevelt wanted the Economic Bill of Rights to be the law of the land because he knew the "economic royalists" were nipping at the heels of social justice. He wanted to give us constitutional protection from their abuse of power. He spelled it out in 1936 in his speech "Rendezvous with History."

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age — other people's money — these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in. Without our consent, we have become enablers or cogs of a financial system that requires us to pay off the gambling debts of the "money guys" at the casino we call Wall St and maintain the system that benefits the 1%, the "economic royalists." Our political system is now fully co-dependent on this financial system, just too addicted to the enormous amounts of cash that flow into campaign coffers, and into bank accounts once our elected leaders leave office to join the private sector.

Because of these problems, and, our incomprehensible and unfair tax code, our country has an upward income redistribution system. In a sense, we have socialism, but only for the 1%. It bestows privileges to the wealthy for being wealthy and punishes the poor for being poor.

The current social contract tramples on our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We need to thoroughly revisit and renegotiate this social contract...

To continue reading the letter, follow this link: http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/annabel-letter-occupy