Live from New York: Tahrir Square

It’s a story we’ve been hearing all year with the rise of the Arab Spring: demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Madison Wisconsin, Athens and London. These are the expression of unrest against stagnant regimes, government indifference and corporate corruption and the unrest has seeded itself like a dandelion does with the wind. Now, the same story — written by Uranus square Pluto and the Aries Point — has landed here in the epicenter of the world’s financial system. Tahrir Square, welcome to Wall Street New York.

#Occupy Wall Street began as a leaderless movement by Adbusters, an anti-consumerist magazine based in Toronto. Spurred on by hacktivist group Anonymous and using Facebook and Twitter, #Occupy Wall Street demonstrations started in New York’s Bowling Green Park on Saturday Sept. 17th — Constitution Day in the United States. It is intended for these demonstrations to continue for a few months.

Here is the statement of the protests’ purpose taken from #Occupy Wall Street’s website:

A Modest Call to Action on this September 17th

This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.

We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.

Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.

We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.

We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain in control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.

We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.

• If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
• If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
• If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
• If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
• If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.

And so we call on people to act

1. We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
2. We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.
3. We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
4. We call for the organization of people’s assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
5. We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.

We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.

These demonstrations, mostly peaceful and modestly attended, are now in their 4th day. The majority of the protesters are “over educated, underemployed and angry.” The number of protesters are mostly young people. One young protester, formerly a consultant to investment banks for eight years, said that he’s sick of the money taken in and redistributed to the banks, never re-invested out in the world for the people. The protesters define themselves as the 99 percent who can no longer tolerate the greed of the 1% who have everything. So far, 12 arrests have been made.

It is simultaneously alarming and unsurprising that news coverage of the protests has been scant. This video is from this morning’s march and demonstration.

Not all are happy with this uprising. In the conservative publication The New American, and without a hint of irony, all the usual suspects were named:

“American radicals are planning hundreds of simultaneous violent uprisings to topple our system of capitalism,” warned Ron Arnold with the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in an e-mail. “I’m talking about anti-capitalist terrorists in our own country.” The “militant progressives” plan to fill American streets with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators “hell-bent on creating Marxist-style revolution,” according to Arnold. “Their ultimate goal is to kill capitalism and replace it with socialism. And I guarantee that they’ll stop at nothing to reach that goal.”

Adding insult to injury, Arnold noted, is that people “pulling the strings behind these protests” — at least some of whom are reportedly connected to the Obama administration — are receiving federal taxpayer dollars through front groups associated with the disgraced “community organizing” outfit known as ACORN. “We are footing the bill for their guerrilla demonstrations,” he charged.

Other protests have been planned to take place around the world, with the same purpose. Look for demonstrations in Madrid and Valencia, Spain, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Madison, Toronto, London, Lisbon, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers and Tel Aviv.

I’m bringing this story to you to share with others and to give you hope. Some of us may be tread worn from our years on the streets during the 1960s and 70s, but these kids are picking up the placards and the threads of history some of us may have forgotten — which probably got us into this situation in the first place. You know the drill. Send these kids and us your thoughts, prayers, pizza and donations, and maybe even your two feet.

The morning — at least for 2012 — has begun.