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Published on Monday, January 16, 2012 by Common Dreams
'Occupy the Dream' Says Occupy the Federal Reserve
Coalition calls for new campaign for economic justice inspired by MLK
The 'Occupy the Dream' coalition has called for a national day of action today, with more than 16 groups planning on occupying their closest Federal Reserve Bank.
From the Occupy the Dream website:
Members of the African-American faith community have joined forces with Occupy Wall Street to launch a new campaign for economic justice inspired by the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Faithful to its philosophical origin, the "Occupy the Dream" coalition has called for a National Day of Action on Martin Luther King Day – Monday, January 16, 2012 – to focus attention on the gross injustice visited upon the 99% by the financial elite.
The Associated Press reports:
...The Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King founded, is one of the support groups. Damien Conners is with the SCLC.
"Dr. King's last campaign was the poor peoples' campaign," said Conners. "The Occupy movement is primarily about people who have been left out of the political processes as well as economic gains the country has made."
As The Sacramento Bee notes, King's message is echoed in the message of the "99%":
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to action – spoken four days before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968 – resonates powerfully in the hearts and minds of many in the 99 percent. [...]
"King would say, 'Please finish what I started.' That's what we're doing," said Sean Laney, head of Occupy Sacramento's education committee.
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25 Comments so far
Show AllKing correctly believed that racial equality cannot be achieved without economic equality first being achieved.
Great idea but aren't the banks closed today?
Occupy should have started with the federal reserve. It is the source of power for the banks. It is the banks' private money machine.
Will the occupy movement get behind that presidential candidate that wants to audit the Fed. and then abolish it. Oh and he also wants to stop the wars, not attack Iran, and pull the plug on aid to Israhell. His initials are RP.
No they won't as RP values Property over People and that flies directly in the face of OWS.
And Ron Paul also wants to abolish all controls on corporate behavior, abolish all protection for the worker, abolish environmental protection, do away with any kind of social safety net, institute a "your are on your own" healthcare system. And, unlike his foreign policy views, he will have a enthusiastic congress behind him in instituting all these savage domestic measures.
Cascadian: While Ron Paul seems to be a man of impeccable integrity and his motives may be sincere and commendable; of stopping the wars, abolishing the IRS and the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul has to know it will never happen. In the first place, he will never be allowed the Republican nomination and in the second place, even if nominated by the Republi con party, the 1% would never allow him to do what he says he wants to do, because it would cost them trillions of $. The last President that tried to buck the 1% was JFK.
Abolishing the IRS would be good how? We need a more vigorous IRS that taxes the hell out of the rich.
And what would you replace the Fed with? every sovereign nation with their own currency has some kind of central bank.
How about replacing the Fed with a central bank that is actually owned and operated by the government, rather than by private interests. This is what the founding fathers wanted, and is a big part of the reason why your country was founded in the first place.
It'd be good because the IRS spends all its energy crushing the middle class. The rich people that are ruining the world don't have to worry about the IRS because they hide their money and they have connections on the inside so the IRS will look the other way. And most of the money collected by the IRS goes to paying interest on debt that fictional debt. The IRS is the slave master. That's why it'd be good.
As for the debt, it should be nationalized and made part of the treasurey initially. But you don't replace it. The treasurey department and congress would manage the money supply and control it with a national income, large infrastructure projects, and taxes in the event inflation starts going crazy. Now, there are people smarter than us (particularly at YES magazine) who are searching outside of the box for new ways to manage a currency.
I suggest you research this more. You seem to think taxing the rich will solve everything. Ever ask where that tax money goes? Ever ask, who is this debt owed to? Ever ask, maybe these agencies that were put into place under the guise of protecting us actually protect those they supposedly regulate?
If the IRS is not dealing administering the tax code fairly, it seem to me that the solution is to reform the IRS. Any failings with the IRS are either in the tax code itself, or insufficient resources and workers to pursue the big tax cheats and their armies of lawyers. I'm "middle class" and all my experiences with the IRS have been fair. Tell a poor person who relies on the EIC to make ends meet that the IRS is such a bogeyman.
I really could not care less about this "middle class" crap. If "middle class" is doing so poorly, then why are they still middle class? The phrase "middle class is laden with racist and classist code-language. The operative word is "The Poor".
The US "occupy movement" is becoming indistinguishable form the Ayn Randite US right. And I am coming very close to concluding that the occupy movement contains the seeds of populist-fascism. Populism is a tow-edges sword, and all it will take is a charismatic leader to lead the whole movement, pied piper like, down the path to fascism. It has happened before. If it was a left-labor quasi fascist leader like Peron or Huey long it would be one thing, but i see no such trends in that direction. This explains why the corporations are giving the occupy movement such a kid-glove treatment - just like they did to the brownshirts of those days. They are even letting occupy protesters into Davos - where formerly all roads into Davos were blockaded and any protest even miles down the highway was met with brutal oppression.
From Glen Ford and Black Agenda Report:
http://blackagendareport.com/
At this time in the history of the U.S., I am skeptical of any rhetoric that includes the word "dream," and I admit this with great sorrow. Before cheering this merging of movements on, Glen Ford offers some insight about Russell Simmons that is important to understand.
Thanks for the link, Kay. I'm in complete accord with Ford. It is unfortunate that OWS has chosen to ally itself with OTD. I suppose the best that can come of it is members of OTD might lose faith in their own leadership being in lockstep with Obomber and the DLC. But it seems more likely that OWS is well on the way to being co-opted into supporting the Democratic Party. I wonder, is there ANYTHING Obomber can do that would lose him the support of most blacks in the Dem party?
The FED is the engine of doom that feeds the empire. If you want to kill a snake you cut off it's head. Like RP says, "END THE FED,"
Are you aware that if you 'End the Fed' you wipe out any possible financial solvency the US may have had, obliterate the dominant world trading currency, collapse the banking infrastructure around the world as trillions of dollars in loans disintegrate, and render every single US dollar in circulation as worthless as a Weimar Republic Duetchmark?
What do you have in place to INSTANTLY replace the present US dollar? That would be just as instantly accepted without argument by the very international, national and Corporate banks and Governments that you just ruined? A currency that would be accepted just as instantly by tens of thousands of businesses and Corporations who just had their bank accounts emptied by your action of 'Ending the Fed'?
Are you willing to be held accountable for the ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE hundreds of thousands of deaths that would be directly and legally attributed to your actions, as people starve and freeze to death and commit suicide?
Because if you haven't considered all the possible ramifications of your simplistic action, then you haven't thought about it at all.
Nationalize the Fed!
The fed as currently setup is obviously a tool of the extremely wealthy parasites ruling our country -
We ought to also apply the sherman anti-trust act to citi, jp Morgan, goldman and BAC as a starting point.
Our keeper's life blood is their control over our global monetary systems -- it is the key to their control, which they simply buy, over everything else (media, government agencies, etc).
End the Fed is the right idea, and if it comes to pass it will signal the beginning of the end for the behind-the-scenes transnational bankster criminals who now run things. They will fight tenaciously to keep the Fed though, and they don't mind killing ANYBODY in waging this fight -- if the puppets inside the Beltway learned nothing else from JFK's assassination, they certainly learned this.
I'm almost embarassed to say this, considering how much people talk about money here, but...."Occypy Prisons" "Occypy Law Enforcement" would be two things worth adding to the list. In fact, they may be the most important. In fact, I wouldn't waste any time.
These spooky "big bankers" (who they will soon be calling "Jew bankers" - like that great grassroots populist movement that arose in Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic did) - are the symptom, not the cause.
The cause is a system - the capitalist system.