If you are following the Occupy movement (where there is now an Occupy Boston!!!), you may want to check out this statement is issued by the General Assemblies of the Occupy movement:
National General Assemblies Draft Declaration Version: 1.0 Time: 9/30/2011
Over two centuries ago America’s founders gathered to air their grievances with the British monarchy and to declare an end to the divine right of kings in this country.
Their English is archaic and strange to us now, but every single one of us knows and understands this part: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Today we, the free men and women of America, have gathered in Liberty Square to renew this foundation of our country, to ensure the natural, inalienable rights of all human beings are respected, and to restore the rule of the law, the very foundation of our civil society. Our grievances today are clear and simple.
With regard to our property: We have been deprived of our homes in illegal foreclosure processes, often by corporate entities that can not prove that they have any claim on our property. Our national treasury has been drained to cover the gambling losses of Wall Street casinos, who conceal their true nature by calling themselves banks. With regards to our livelihood: Our First Amendment freedom of association, namely the formation of a union for the purpose of collective bargaining, is constantly under assault. Our factories and service centers are dismantled and shipped to other countries with no heed paid to the needs of those they employed, nor to the stability and well being of our nation as a whole. With regard to our lives:
We are subjected to numerous schemes which deprive us of the fruit of education, the means by which we make citizens. From kindergarten to graduate school we are beset with fees contrived by bankers as well as requirements and restrictions conceived by fanatics who would have us revisit the religious wars this country’s founders fled.
We have been deprived of healthy, safe, natural food grown by our neighbors and in its place we can only find that which fattens without nourishing, that which may be unclean, and that which is created from animals who live in torment and plants unnaturally turned into pesticide factories. We spend more than any other western nation on health care, our doctors and nurses are among the best in the world, but the only things ensured by our parasitic health insurance industry are their profits and banana republic grade care for our citizens.
With regard to our Liberty: We have been subjected to policies that segregate us by race, by age, by country of origin, whom we choose to love, whether we be natural born citizens, legal immigrants, or desperate refugees, when no natural division exists. We have been subjected to endless eavesdropping, poorly conceived security procedures when boarding planes, a politicized “Do Not Fly” list, and a dozen other insults foisted on us under the guise of protecting us. We are arrested, often for victimless crimes that the nations of Europe have long since chosen to ignore or tax and regulate. We are imprisoned at rates SIX TIMES that of our neighbors in Canada, SEVEN TIMES that of our neighbors in the United Kingdom, and TEN TIMES that of our neighbors in Mexico. It is our 21st century slave plantations masquerading as prisons that need reform, not us.
We are imprisoned differently; the darker our skin, the longer our sentences. Need we say more here?
Our founders displayed great wisdom, cautioning us to take care that we are acting on problems, rather than reacting to them. “Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;” Our suffering today is not light, nor is it transient; a generation of carefully calculated policies were needed to dismantle America’s once broad middle class. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
We are today come to that which the authors of our Declaration of Independence so feared: total usurpation of our right to self government, brought on by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, an act clearly bought, paid for, and implemented by a few corrupt men. The removal from authority and prosecution of those found to be involved is our first and foremost DEMAND.
America is a nation of the rule of the law, and without its steady, even application to ALL none can consider their rights and property to be safe. We will certainly find more causes for which we will DEMAND vigorous application of the rule of the law, but when the United States Supreme Court, one of the three pillars of our government, becomes a rotten husk where one can purchase the utter dissolution of our election system, and for naught but the price of a single Washington D.C. town home, we MUST act. When our rights were enumerated we were also reminded of increasingly dire solutions that a free people might apply to a government that no longer has their consent. Having discussed this among ourselves, we feel such talk is premature, paranoid and more than a bit hysterical. Our founders provided all the tools required for the housecleaning we MUST undertake. We need only muster the will to wield them.
