List of things to do.

1. Grow your own food, either on your own land or in community.

2. Use the spare money to buy from local producers (farmers).

3. Reduce expenditure by barter or sharing costs

4. Reduce expenditure by turning off the TV

5. Learn a skill which can be used as a source of income/barter

6. Get to know your neighbours, which can facilitate all of the above

7. Volunteer your time in the community to help others.

This will not solve the world's problems but it will be a start.

"Wall Street, the government, and corporate America need to answer one basic question: Why did you sell us down the river?"

often we hear the comparative expression describing developed and developing nations. we americans may experience some misplaced sense of pride that we comprise a sophisticated, well-developed nation. kind of like a rose which reached its peak beauty, then the pedals droop and fall.
the beauty fades.
entropy!

those whose only purpose means to "continuously maximize profits" look for new garden plots to "grow their economy." scew 'em! 'aberfan' gave some great advice. communal living, smaller gardens because "too big to fail" is a myth. sell that nonsense down the river!

Once again, this is only half of the equation.

You must also get a vasectomy.

The question is how to occupy the food system. I believe in jumping in one toe at a time.

As a consumer:

1. Go down to your local farmer's market. If it matters, many of them now have ways to accept SNAP (food stamps). Just as important, learn about healthy food.

2. Join a Community Supported Agriculture program.

3. You can actively support a farmer by farming, by transporting food to market, by pre-processing food. For example, some school cafeterias won't buy whole squashes but they will buy chunks of squash all ready to cook. It's better when we occupy the entire chain of food production and processing.

4. Too many benevolent dictatorship businesses (think "Ben and Jerry's") sell out to some megacorp when the founders get older. The final step is to get in writing that the farm isn't going to sell out but instead is held in community trust. Remember, in writing.

5. The final step is to be sustainable from generation to generation. Know where your leaders come from. Be able to go into a new market. Plan for steady expansion until the entire 1% apparatus is crowded out of the world market, has no consumers, has no workers to use, has no dictators or friends in Congress to buy.

Why is it that a coworker promoted to be your manager suddenly has the power of life and death over you? A few months ago, in many cases, he or she was joking with you as you sat in back-to-back (literally) cubicles. Now, after the promotion, when the old-style top-to-bottom hierarchy of a corporation blunders and has to lay off people, your coworker of a few months ago signs off on your layoff. If he now has the power to send you into an intractable Recession without adequate severance pay or health insurance—and then “bad-mouth” you to his peers and superiors at corporate parties and clubs, shouldn’t you have the right to bad-mouth—or tell the truth—about his weaknesses? But, in the quintessential multinational firm with a head office drawing up plans and issuing commands to international satellite facilities that build a local version of “Product 1,” you have no rights, either before or after your layoff. If you bad-mouth your ex-boss/ex-coworker, you are labeled as “erratic” or a “misfit” or “don’t hire him, his memory isn’t 100%” or “he hates company parties” or “I saw him steal a package of Xerox paper one day.” And your hole grows deeper. The damage inflicted without thought, casually, by your ex-friend gains momentum until people believe everything is your fault: “He hasn’t been hired in two years! There must be something wrong with him!” Your network of loyalists dwindles, until, one day, using a free movie ticket received for donating blood at your church, you see this ex-coworker in the theater’s lobby: A sideways glance. “Hello, Mr. Smith,” he says to you. You stare into his eyes and say nothing. You call your child near to you and slip into your movie—one you hope he is not also going to see. I've been thinking lately that capitalism is nothing more than proof of evolution, in which the fittest or most adaptable survive. Since we are creatures of evolution, we accept this kill-or-be-killed mentality without question--except the preposterous one: "Can't we all just get along?" Perversely, the free-trade agreements pioneered by Bill Clinton and largely responsible for there being 40 applicants for each open position in my life’s work—editing, writing and proofing—likely heed the beginning of the end of the “quintessential multinational firm,” according to a valuable little book called, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio/Penguin, New York, 2010).According to the authors, that old-fashioned multinational “was modeled on a hub-and-spoke architecture. A head of office drew up plans and issued commands to an international network of satellite production facilities that built products for local markets.” “This market-by-market approach to organizing production no longer makes sense in a global age,” the authors write. “National silos gave rise to bloated and expensive bureaucracies that deployed inefficient, incompatible, and often redundant processes for making and marketing products locally. Insufficient knowledge transfer across organizational boundaries and departmental silos meant that most multinationals failed to seize opportunities for innovation and cost reduction. Now that global business standards and info technologies envelop the planet, the cost of coordinating a distributed global business is infinitely cheaper than just a few decades ago.” This is what caused the Crash of 2008 and the rise of the elite 1%, leaving the 99 percenters to struggle for survival just as the inhabitants of the great Mayan civilizations struggled to survive when the Spaniards attacked with guns, steel and germs 500 to 600 years ago; just as the makers of horse carriages struggled when the car was invented about 100 years ago; just as trains and ocean liners petered out after the airline industry skyrocketed in the 1940s and 1950s; just as farmers struggled and had to migrate to cities to squander out a “living” wage during the first Industrial Revolution from 1700 to 1900. This is what Occupy Wall Street—and all of the Occupy protests--are fighting. Do you think they will win? Doubtful. A friend of mine told me that he went to his union’s meeting about a week ago and there was no “fire in the belly” of his fellow union members. It seems that after the police brutally, in the dead of night, scrambled Occupy Wall Streeters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and trashed laptops, tents, sleeping bags, and backpacks, there may be too few people, whether young and with nothing to lose or not, willing to face life-ruining jail time or injury. My friend said there, so far, appear to be very, very few Tim DeChristophers willing to brave two-years hard time in a federal prison to try to change the 1% elite, which has this universe’s two prime weapons—money and power. It seems that more and more multinationals are moving to a new model, a truly global firm that breaks down national “silos.” “This is not a multinational with a new twist. Smart firms are abandoning the multinational model completely,” the authors write. Today “supply chains” are becoming “value networks.” “In the past, companies like Boeing wrote detailed specifications for each part and asked suppliers to build to plan. Boeing gathered the parts on the plant floor and spent weeks assembling a single plane. Today, suppliers co-design airplanes from scratch and deliver complete subassemblies to Boeing’s factory, where a single plane can be snapped together like Lego blocks in as little as three days.” “Handing significant responsibility for innovation over to suppliers signals an important change in how companies compete.” Bringing new products to market now means working with a vast “ecosystem” (a word the authors use, rather oddly, considering the global warming consequences and economic consequences being ignored in the never-ending quest for greater profits for shareholders) of partners that possess complementary skills. Innovation is less about inventing and more about orchestrating or coordinating good ideas,” the authors claim. But they never touch upon any negative consequences of this new business model or the “collateral damage” it already is bringing by destroying the middle and lower classes while depleting their retirement funds or health insurance or educations. The authors instead say, “Boeing and BMW are not giving up on innovation. Both companies are taking advantage of the resources they have ‘freed up’ to focus on improving a few dimensions of value that ‘matter most’ to their customers.”

With their stock in decline, Monsanto just bought a controlling interest in Xe, which is the new name for Blackwater.

Things could get very strange.

This article is a shining example of the maturing, ripening of the occupy movement, creativity and wisdom emerging from the hearts of the best of us. Rock on!

I somewhat agree with the article; however, I also agree with PaulK and Aberfan on what needs to be done. In fact, I would recommend PaulK's and Aberfan's advice on strengthening OWS in terms of fighting Big Agri.

"The world's people can feed themselves if we let them"

Notice how such a statement resonates when it's a key headline that you've read this morning, when it occupies prominent space in your mind. But when elites push mountains of their propaganda on you, it's much harder for you to keep such important truths in your mind. So you might want to turn elite media off. But the message comes a bit tainted in that the author produces beef/dairy. It's very easy to do plant foods sustainably, but it's very difficult to do animal foods sustainably. If one produced animal food for individual consumption three meals per day, seven days per week, that is a grossly unethical practice. The impact of animal food production is ten times the impact of plant food production. One of the best things we can do is promote the consumption of less animal food. Also, substitute wild venison for beef. There's an overpopulation of deer in Merka. You can weigh the pros/cons of each scenario. In fact, one of the great changes we are creating in this society is a clearing of the market and policy tables to make space for paid initiative/activities to analyze resource allocations that serve the PEOPLE's interests. Despite the author producing animal food, it's great to read that he is embracing the truth about the people's need to own/control production, always, everywhere.

"Wall Street, the government, and corporate America need to answer one basic question: Why did you sell us down the river?"

It's nothing personal. Just business.

Remember the great lessons we used to get from Grandparents? How about this one. You are what you eat.

Monsanto has the US/World consumers by the 'huevos' as they seem to be spreading their poison all over the planet and the packaging doesn't have to identify the food as a Monsanto GM seed product. In Mexico the Monarch butterflies began to disappear after Monsanto 'snuck' in some of their corn Frankenstein seeds along with the regular seeds into the country contaminating the seed supply. The farmers had to remove these artificial food plants by hand and now they don't trust the US at all with food seed purchases. In Iraq, part of the peace agreement signed by al-Miliki is that Iraq is to use 100% US Frankenstein Genectally Modified food seeds.

"The message from the Occupy movement needn't and shouldn't be a specific set of demands. It should be about asking the right questions." What an excellent way of putting it!

I am happy to hear the issue of agriculture and its profit at the cost of social health and sustainability being addressed. Our current system allows multibillion-dollar corporations the comfy subsidies intended to help small farmers, and makes it more and more impossible for small farms to compete on the marketplace.

Smaller farmers are more likely to use sustainable methods of farming, such as organic, as well as permaculture, which should be our primary agricultural model as its practices restore the vital ecosystem of the soil which is destroyed by modern agriculture. Their methods produce food that is much more nutritious and flavorful, while preserving genetic diversity, soil health, and the overall environment. Healthy plants come from a healthy soil, and they naturally resist disease and pests, helping to mitigate the need for pesticides/herbicides--of which there are many effective environmentally-friendly alternatives.

With our planet's near future climate uncertain, sustainable and diverse agriculture accessible to many more farmers would be a tremendous advantage.

Support your local seed companies! Here's a list by state.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2007-11-01/Best-Garden-Seed-Companies.aspx