The Occupy movement is an international protest movement against social and economic inequality, its primary goal being to make the economic and political relations in all societies less vertically hierarchical and more flatly distributed. More: en.wikipedia.org.
Probably about the last chance the citizenry of this country have to rail against the corporate takeover (that's happening faster than you can say "Bob's your uncle").
It's nice to think we still have the constitutional right to assemble... but that right, like so many others, is merely a fading dream as money and the extremely wealthy continue to pillage and use up our country.
I don't support movements that don't have a core mission.
Disorganized, directionless, and yet they were the only ones who even tried to stand up to the enormously powerful financial cabal that controls our government. I think, for awhile anyhow, they were expressing what so many of us felt. If only they'd had a little better organization, they might have been able to take it to the next level.
At least they got a national discussion going.
Personally, I'd like to see people "occupy" their own local governments. Americans love to sit around and complain, but rarely do they actually engage with the avenues that are available to all of us for interacting with government.
By law, local governments are required to allow public comment, but those sessions are almost always empty.....normally two or three people show up. That's a pretty low number for a city of 500,000.
I am frequently called to interpret at public hearings on law and policy matters; and it always shocks me how few people care to make their voices heard in the one place where it really will make a difference.
YES, it has brought talk, and knowledge to the people all over the world. I would say that it is slowly bringing people to understand our fear is not over the oceans, cause they can't swim that far, but it is a checkpoint on our,[not the governments], highways. It is brutal beatings,shootings, kidnapping, and verbal threats of unarmed,elderly,handicapped , law abiding people, here and all over the world. You know the rest, or part of it. So I support Occupy. Chances are it stopped a lot of bloodshed. I am 64 years old and partially disabled. I would like to volunteer to explain the law to the cop in the white shirt, spraying the students on campus with pepper spray, [and he can bring the spray], why that was a bad idea. Ya'll get the rest. I'm extremely easy to find.
What knowledge? They protested what?
They hod no real defined goals, it was only after people started asking what are you protesting and what do you stand for did anyone come forward with any goals. The robin hood tax, where we tax financial transactions, now such a tax would not only hit the "rich" but anyone with a 401k. Now look at a lot of those protesting, they aren't hurting for cash, ipad, ipods, macs. Then look at the way they treated the business near the park, how they treated the homeless who came for food.
Now you talk about beating, shooting, etc, what about the crime in the occupy movement camps? The Zuccotti Park has was so overrun by sexual predators attacking women that organizers felt compelled to set up a female-only sleeping tent. The anarchists urged violence against the police. Drugs, assaults, murders, arson, or taking over a person's home and destroying it.
So the occupy movement didn't really accomplish anything in the end, who didn't know about inequality. Yes a few people complained and got some air time, but in the end, they caused millions of dollars in damage, they tried to suppress the reports of crime in the camps (don't report rapes to the police), they stole, destroyed property, murdered, raped, sold and used drugs and you support that?
So you support George Soros and the communist which is what that was and a majority of those out there protesting were paid organizers you know like Obama.
Yes. They have a right to protest as guaranteed by law. True, they have to follow the law to do it (the federal law, their Constitutional right - not the garbage rulings some local judge makes at the behest of the wealthy people the protest may inconvenience - which was most likely the point of the protest to begin with), but as long as they are within the law, there should be NO repercussions against them for exercise of their Constitutional rights.
No, I don't. We resort to protest too often and too quickly in this country, so much so that we sometimes protest for the sake of protesting. Those people who camped out in parks should have organized politically instead, by starting their own political party, or exerting influence on an existing political party. They could have pressured government to hold the large investment banks accountable for their part in tanking the economy. They could have pushed for legislation to make sure that there would be no more bank bailouts, or if there were, that those who ran those banks so poorly would lose all their personal profit as part of the bailout plan.
If they absolutely had to protest, they could have done it more effectively by transferring any money and/or credit card debt they themselves had with the big banks to small local banks and credit unions, and they could have encouraged other people to do the same. If you want to get a banker's attention, you do it by taking money away from him, not by camping out in a park.
Yes.
I personally as an anarchist want to see efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate the power of capitalism, corporations, and markets. I want to replace them with alternative structures.
However, I would not support any movement whose logic was brutal or who ignored the rights of people today for a better society tomorrow.
But the Occupy movement should be one that even people who are far further to the center than me should support. Even a die-hard believer in capitalism should not accept our current highly corrupt, crony capitalism. We should have reforms that break up inequality caused by financial speculation, investor's rights treaties, and specific policies that create inequality.
The Occupy Movement is almost like a Communistic movement because they want the money to be spread around the individuals, I do not support them because Communism has been proved to be a failing political type over the 20th century.