We are the Invisible Army of Defaulters. We are your neighbors. We are your family, your friends. We are millions. We are everywhere. We are going to bring the system to its knees. We can, because we wield the one power that all the armies of the world can never defeat: The power of refusal. This power has destroyed the mightest empires. The same fate awaits the current system of mafia capitalism in America, an economic system driven by Wall Street CEOs who produce nothing, contribute nothing, who have bought our government and reduced it into a criminal enterprise whose main purpose is to support loan-sharking, gambling, extortion, and the slow reduction of American citizens into debt peons. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from a collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities. To be able to take care of our children, our friends, our families is a value that no accountant can ever measure, that no government, loan administrator, or hedge fund manager can ever have the right to take away from us. We are an army of lovers who cannot be defeated. We are laying the groundwork for another world. Strike debt.
Resist. Insist. Stand together. Build. Never give up. #S17.
On the eve of the feast of the cabal of hypocrites, otherwise referred to as the 2012 NATO Summit, the people of Chicago have undergone a grave injustice at the hands of the violent police state. The Chicago Police's actions today, May 19th, were a brutally violent attack on our bodies and on our rights. An absurdly large police force was deployed in order to intimidate and provoke a peaceable assembly, and resulted in unbridled, militaristic attacks on activists demonstrating against NATO, inflicting several serious injuries - including broken noses, bloodied eyes, and a particularly sickening incident in which a dedicated comrade was belligerently run down by a police van.
We vociferously condemn these unacceptable and cowardly attacks, and know that the people are beginning to awaken from the falsified dream of liberty in a nation thats find itself in a newly authoritarian police state which crushes any dissent and defends the war machines of internatonal violence and global capitalism, instead of the human beings it feigns to represent. Yet we will not be so easily fooled by these tactics. The actions by the Chicago Police Department were carried out tonight with the calculated intent of provoking and generating fear within our collective into a reactionary state. This is a police tactic that is used to distract our focus and to spiral us into downwardness and negativity. We must resist these feelings, for we lose our autonomy in reacting to the script they have written for us, and without steadfast descipline in the face of the arm of state repression. We have to be serious and disciplined in order to not fall into this trap. It is EXACTLY what they want from us. We know that this is a panicked attempt to postemptively justify to the people the astronomical amount of our public resources that have been wasted on the exorbitant number of police on the streets, the unlawful and intrusive surveillance & unjustifiable home raids, and the Orwellian fear being propagated by the puppet corporate media. Our organization will not be provoked into a state of disorganized rage, for we are well aware that is exactly as they wish to manipulate us. It is no better, nay, it is worse to fall into their cheap and predictable trap than it is to subserviently subjugate ourselves to obeying the orders of authority.
This national convergence represents an incredible and unique opportunity to bring together a diverse spectrum of activists in a unified front of resistance unlike any other seen in over a decade. Tomorrow, we enter the stage with a righteous fire in our hearts at the injustice done to us and our comrades on these streets just a day before. Yet we will not be overriden with heightened emotions that cloud our judgement. We recognize this attempt at coercion as yet another manifestation of systemic oppression, and remain autonomous individuals who will not be ordered around, explictly or implicitly. Instead, we channel our anger, our pain, our compassion, our despair, and our passion for a better world without this oppression into our messaging and our actions.
Comrades. Let us take a deep, deep breath together. Let's heal together, and then work together to make tactical decisions that are arrived at out of truly free and autonomous choice, not dictated by authority. Be safe, look out for one another, organize in small, accountable groups of affinity and trust, Stay calm, and remember why we traveled to Chicago - to stand in the face of a war machine that acts recklessly beyond transparency and accountability to the people it affects and claims to represent - and to say we want a world free of war and oppression.
This is the tenth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.
On September 27th, 2011, we marched on the Financial District's Luxury
Night Out, where couples wore outfits that cost more than we will ever
make in a month and looked at cars that cost more than we will ever
make in a year, afterward, they went back to one of their many houses
that cost more than we will make in our lifetime.
Occupied Boston doesn't need a bullhorn to have their voices heard.
They have the people's microphone.
So does Michael Moore, who addressed us tonight.
Occupied San Francisco grows larger every day.
Occupied Chicago was dispersed but not defeated. They will regroup and reoccupy.
This is the ninth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying
Wall Street. The police barricades that have been surrounding the
Stock Exchange help.
Sunday has been decreed, once again, a day of rest. We didn't march.
We have made a new world, a new city within the city. We are working
on a new sky for where the towers are now.
Throughout the day our sisters and brothers arrested yesterday came
back home to Liberty Plaza. They greeted the new faces that have
joined us here. They shared their stories of imprisonment, of medical
care denied and delayed. We welcomed them and listened.
We had visitors.
Immortal Technique
Reverend Billy
Yesterday was a day of action, and today was one of healing,
discussion, and preparation. Working groups met in small circles
around the plaza, planning their work and preparing to report back to
the General Assembly as a whole. The Assembly debated, as always, the
hows and whys of being here. In the morning, we talked about the
occupations rising up in cities around the United States, joining us
in what we're doing, as people begin rediscovering the power in
themselves against the powers looming over them in buildings. We
talked of calling more people to do what we're doing. In the evening
we talked about staying, or leaving, and what this space means for us.
We love it, we're almost addicted to it, but what we are is more than
this.
We strolled around the plaza. We wrote songs with new friends. We
argued about politics with each other, but not a politics of puppets:
a politics for us. We fed the hungry and gave sleeping bags to the
cold. We roughhoused. We talked to the world on our livestream. Most
of all, we kept on organizing ourselves. Our library grew.
Drums blared for hours into the night when the Assembly wasn't in
session, until the time came for quiet. The drummers ended by reciting
from the Principles of Solidarity we approved in Friday's General
Assembly, in the rain. Before the police lined along the Broadway side
of the plaza, they cried together, "We are daring to imagine a new
socio-political and economic alternative that offers greater
possibility of equality." And more.
"Safety in numbers!" a sign by them says. "Join us."
