Why do I occupy?

By Max Anderson, Documentarian and member of Occupy Texas State

When I was a young boy I was told that I could be anything I wanted to be as long as I set my mind to it.  The possibilities were endless: a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut, a paleontologist (I really wanted to be a paleontologist), even the president.  Being the optimistic kid that I was I believed them; I set my expectations high.  I longed for the great pie in the sky.

As I grew older reality set in and I realized that this was not the great country I had once imagined.  Before I was even old enough to work millions of jobs had been shipped overseas with the passage of NAFTA.  America no longer produced goods, we just consumed them.  At the age of 12, terrorists wreaked havoc on America and sent us into a decade long war that costs taxpayers trillions of dollars.  With the start of theWar On Terror, so too did the encroachment on our civil liberties.  In 2008, the financial crisis seemingly shut down Wall Street and left millions wondering what the future would bring.  All of these factors have left me with a lack of faith in America.

And what of my fellow countrymen?  When I look around all I see is an apathetic populace and a culture that is obsessed with entertainment, celebrities, sex, violence, video games, sports, and reality television.  What should I expect from my fellow countrymen when they only care about the big issues as long as they can press a Like button?  How could I expect them to be the watchdogs of freedom when all of the media is controlled by the 1%, the corporations.  (Fox News is owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation; CNN is owned by Time Warner; MSNBC is currently part of NBCUniversal, a joint venture of Comcast and General Electric; ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Company.)  These companies do not have a vested interest in informing the mass of the public, why that would be unprofitable.  Instead the mainstream media divide people on hyper-partisan issues. I cannot expect the average joe to sift through all the misinformation, chatter, and noise and come to a reasonable, logical conclusion.

I do not have much faith in the future of America.  This once shinning beacon of freedom and liberty has mortgaged away its future.  I am of the generation that will not see prosperity and peace, instead we will face a mountain of debt and endless war.  A generation with millions in prison and even more in poverty.  A generation of uninsured and uninspired.  A lost generation.

The Occupy Movement gives me hope, because I know that I am not the only person that is pissed off with the current state of affairs.  It gives me hope, because the people are finally standing up to the status quo and making their voices heard.  “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” “End corporate welfare.” “Money for schools and education, not for greed and corporations.” We are the 99%, and together We can make a difference.

 

Occupy Movement Organizes On Texas College Campuses, Prepares For Future Action

by Teddy Wilson of the American Independent

Occupy Texas State rallies in the Quad at Texas State University - San Marcos. Photo by Caitlin Ortiz.

In the months since the Occupy Movement has begun, a significant segment of the protest has been focused on issues relevant to college students. The rising cost of higher education and the heavy burden of student loan debt have spurred students to get involved in the movement.
On college campuses around the country the occupy movement has been engaged, and the reaction to the protests by some administrators has spurred controversy. Democracy Now! reported that at the University of California at Berkeley police forcibly removed students and arrested 39 people, and at University of California, Davis, campus police pepper-sprayed student protesters as they sat together to protest the dismantling of the “Occupy UC Davis” encampment.

In Texas the occupy movement has been embraced on some college campuses, but there has not been the same types of confrontations with campus police that have been seen elsewhere. The students have often chosen to work with local occupy movement organizers than to focus solely on campus actions. However, as the movement has grown that appears to be changing.

According to the student newspaper the Daily Texan, a student walkout began the occupy movement at the University of Texas at Austin on October 5 as students joined with Occupy Austin. The event took place nationwide as Occupy Colleges called for students and faculty at college campus across the country to solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

According to the Occupy UT Austin Facebook page, the group stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. “The community is comprised of students, staff, faculty, and anyone affiliated with (or standing in support of) occupying university members.” A semester long event is being planned for January 16 until May 4 to occupy the University of Texas Tower. The Facebook event page says “that beginning on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Occupy Wall Street movement will come to the University of Texas.” According to the group’s web site, a planning meeting is scheduled for December 13.

The Occupy Movement has also come to Texas A&M University. In November students organized with professors and community members in Occupy Bryan-College Station protests. The Texas A&M student newspaper the Battalion reported that a protest in November organized on campus, and an estimated 40 occupiers marched to the local branch of Bank of America.

However, students at Texas A&M have not “occupied” areas on campus, and their activities have been limited to protests and days of action. Junior mechanical engineering major Justin Montgomery told the Battalion that it wouldn’t be effective to set up occupied encampments. “We’re doing this to show our support for what’s going on elsewhere, and also for all these people to have an outlet to voice their opinions,” said Montgomery.

Joshua Christopher Harvey, one of the organizers of Occupy Texas State, told the Texas Independent that he became involved in the occupy movement because “over the years it had become apparent to me that our government has grown less accountable to the people.” Harvey went on to say that the “encroachment of corporate personhood in our society and its impact on our political system was also of great concern.”

“Here in Texas,” said Harvey, “grants and funding for higher education were and are being cut. These cuts have led my university to increase the student population in an attempt to balance the $10 million budget cut by the state. This puts a great burden on our teaching staff. Due to further cuts next year, our tuition will rise. The Occupy Colleges Movement, which started in California allowed me and others an outlet to be a participant in the greater movement at a local level and to seek solutions to counteract the negative effects of corporate personhood and a failed economy on education in our state.”

Like Occupy UT Austin, Occupy Texas State is also planning future events, including the possibility of acts of peaceful and minor civil disobedience. These events could be “sit-ins or erecting a tent on the Quad and occupying it for a number of hours or possibly days to challenge university policies that we feel limit free speech and expression,” said Harvey. In addition Occupy Texas State is planning on working with the Texas State Employees Union, CWA-TSEU, in the coming weeks to “address cuts and freezes to faculty and staff pay at our university.”

Moving forward, Harvey says that the Occupy Movement on the Texas State campus is going to continue its efforts to further the message of the movement and engage students in action. “We will hold more Days of Action rallies, shows of solidarity to the greater Occupy Movement and seek to work with our local and state governments. We feel it is time to move from demonstrating to action and we are planning a host of activities for the Spring semester including a voting drive to register the incoming students in time for the 2012 elections,” said Harvey.

The Roots Of A Movement

Submitted to Occupy Texas State by Gregory VanWagenen, Philosophy Major at Spokane Community College

Missing amid the cornucopia of goodies shoveled at the feet of the one percent, provided endlessly and thanklessly by the productive American worker, is a list of demands, a manifesto, an explanation for the appearance of so many people flooding the streets during the occupy protests.

Critics of the occupation – both the wealthy and their closest lackeys – are united around the idea of entitlements. The same people who create the vast majority of this society’s wealth, it is assumed, owe those who buy and sell, but produce nothing. The producers don’t merely owe their masters money, food, a life free of taxes. They also owe them a categorical explanation for everything they do and say. The same workers and farmers and thinkers, once they quit working and farming and thinking, owe their overlords an explanation for the mass gathering that has taken shape in Zucotti Park and which has subsequently spread to cities and towns throughout the world.

What the banker class and their media seem not to understand is that they were not owed anything, ever. They can’t be faulted. Those same people were born, and came to adulthood in an era in which such an unnatural state of affairs was deemed to be normal. Many of them likely imagine that this is the way life ought to be. A few people get to live well without working, while millions struggle to provide them with wealth while enduring deprivations.

In fact, this is not a normal state of affairs. It isn’t healthy, sane or sustainable. The advanced industrial societies of the world are all built upon a structure which is now collapsing beneath the weight of its own internal contradictions. The occupy movement is not an ordinary protest. It is not a protest which seeks to change some superficial aspect of the system, so structured as to make the protest irrelevant once a few grievances are addressed. The fact that it seems directionless is not an accident. Rather than a movement with a manifesto, it is a tendency driven by conclusions rooted in the dissonance of modern life. A hundred people come together in a park one day, each convinced, in his own unique way, that the social order is dysfunctional. Within a month, he’s joined by three thousand others.

The protests are not taking place in impoverished nations, or in nations which are particularly brutal to the majority populations. The occupy protests, post-modern and leaderless, are constructing a critical theory of societies which have, for generations, provided a minimum level of subsistence for the material bodies of their inhabitants. At stake is not reform, but the necessity of consolidating an entirely new theory of social praxis, of including aesthetics, sensibility and sensitivity in the social contract. Most importantly, they seek to address an oft neglected dimension of human existence within the ongoing discourse.

If there is an underlying issue, then, it is psychological rather than physical, expressed in the conscious drive of the inhabitants of the affluent society, toward making an absolute break with the social structure they find themselves in.

Police Brutality Unacceptable At Occupy Movements

by Isabella Wisinger , Marketing Freshman at Texas State University

The Occupy Wall Street movement is no longer a local, state or even a national movement. It is international, with hundreds of cities holding occupations all over the world. However, this growing force has been met with much resistance from local police forces, especially in the U.S. The kind of brutality that has been displayed by police in the past week has been an abuse of power. Police are unnecessarily breaking up groups of peaceful protesters and using near-lethal methods against unarmed citizens when they should be working in the interest of the citizens.

There have been numerous cases since the inception of Occupy Wall Street involving officers arresting nonviolent civilians under the guise of things like trespassing, disorderly conduct and violating a city ordinance when the only crime being committed is standing on the wrong piece of land while working and fighting for a just cause. Police should give more lenience and stop resorting to methods that put a division between them and the people.

Police have been getting entirely too violent without just cause. Take the story of Scott Olsen, former Marine and two-time Iraq war veteran. While participating in Occupy Oakland, he had his skull fractured after being hit by a tear gas canister thrown by police. Then, when fellow occupiers tried to step in to offer their help, police threw in a flashbang grenade to break up the crowd. If you watch the videos of what Olsen was doing prior to being hit, he was simply standing with a fellow veteran, showing no violence toward officers. The fact that police would go after a man who has shown such commitment to our country and then proceed to break up the group trying to help him is truly sickening.

In Austin on Saturday night, 38 were arrested for refusing to comply with the two-day-old city ordinance that food tables must be put away between 10 p.m. and 6 p.m. This occurred the weekend after a group of about 200 Occupy Austin activists showed their support for Scott Olsen by getting candles and holding a silent march from Austin City Hall to the Texas Capitol building. The protesters held a rally for about half an hour to show solidarity with Occupy Oakland and to protest police brutality. A moment of silence was held before the group began chanting, “We are Scott Olsen!” and marched through Cesar Chavez and Congress Avenue back to City Hall.

Joshua Harvey, organizer of the Occupy Texas State movement, was active in the silent march in Austin. He noted while he saw little resistance from the police, their march seemed to have caused City Hall to take action.

“It was interesting, right after that happened, City Hall implemented all these new rules restricting the protesters being there, pretty much making it so that they have to find somewhere else to go,” Harvey said. “I’m thinking that that was in retaliation because no one got arrested that night. And then, the weekend after that, suddenly 38 people were arrested and all these new rules had been implemented.”

It is clear that activists in the Occupy movements are not asking for violence, nor want to provoke it. They are willing to work with the laws put in place, as long as these laws are just in themselves, and aren’t being abused. These recent cases of police brutality, all occurring within the past week, show our policemen fighting against the people they are sworn to protect. The fact that it has come to this — police officers trying to break up a crowd offering medical attention is a sign that things need to change. People deserve to know when they are falling asleep at night that their police force is on their side.

Occupy Texas State And Occupy San Marcos Stand In Solidarity With The Move Your Money Project

On November 5th members of both Occupy Texas State along with Occupy San Marcos plan to pull their money from large corporate banks such as Bank of America and instead with to a local credit union. A+ Federal Credit Union which is hosting a “Go Bank Free” event between now and November 5th.  A+FCU will deposit $50 into the members savings account for every Checking account opened and give a $20 deposit for every friend that is referred and becomes a first time member. On November the 5th they will have special extended hours and will stay open until 4PM at all branch locations to make switching more convenient. To make the deal even sweeter they are doing HOURLY prize drawings for Visa Gift Cards from $25-$100 for those who open up new checking accounts on Bank Transfer Day. This event was inspired by the The Move Your Money project is a campaign that aims to empower individuals and institutions to divest from the nation’s ‘Too Big To Fail’ Wall Street banks that  have wreaked havoc on our economy and created the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Below is information taken from their site:

WHY SHOULD YOU MOVE YOUR MONEY?

Moving your money out of the big Wall Street banks to small community banks and credit unions is a great idea for a number of reasons: you will get better rates and fewer fees, your comunity banker will learn your name and provide you with more personal service, and you will be keeping money in your local community which increases economic development and eventually, creates more jobs. Yet the most important reason to move your money is to make your voice heard, to stand strong and no longer help a banking system that has run amok

INVEST IN MAIN STREET, NOT WALL STREET

When you keep your money in a local financial institution, that money in turn is reinvested in local businesses, which is important for building a stable economy and encouraging local growth. Put your money in the big Wall Street banks however, and they will use your deposits to make risky investments, gambling at the expense of the economy as a whole.

END TOO BIG TO FAIL

The big banks on Wall Street gambled with our money, then demanded a bailout of $700 billion. The size of these Wall Street “Banksters” threatens our economic system, yet their size has only increased since we bailed them out. According to FDIC data, the largest 5 banks held 13% of US deposits in 1994, today they hold 38%. If the government wont step in and break them up, then we must move our money ourselves and end ”Too Big To Fail” once and for all.

FEWER FEES, MORE SAVINGS

Worried about ATM fees? You shouldn’t be. More and more community banks and credit unions offer ATM surcharge-free networks, providing you with even more access to ATMs nationwide. Community banks and credit unions also charge on average less in fees, and often pay you higher interest on your accounts than big banks. The numbers are clear: the bigger the bank, the higher the fees.

GET MORE PERSONAL SERVICE

According to JD Power and Associates, small banks have consistently rated higher in overall customer satisfaction than their Wall Street counterparts and the gap has only widened in the last few years. Customers of community banks and credit unions talk to actual people when they call, instead of robotic phone-trees. Tellers often know them by name and treat their customers like family.

LEND A HAND TO LOCAL BUSINESSES

Smaller banks do disproportionately more small business lending than the big banks. Small businesses, in turn, are the main engine of job growth, accounting for 65% of new jobs. Banking locally is a great way to support independent businesses and create more jobs in your home town.

 So go out into your local community and move your money! 

Harvard Economics Professor Lawrence Lessig on the Occupy Movement

Harvard economics professor Lawrence Lessig offers his thoughts on the Occupy Movement. He compares it to the citizen uprising in Wisconsin and says that the movement might unify left and right against the corrupt influence of corporate money on politics.

Justin Marquis Ph.D. On Education and the Occupy Movement

What it Should Mean for Public Education

Young girl at Occupy Texas State protest on October 13th. Photo by Lindsey Huckaby.

What would an equitable system of education look like at the elementary and secondary levels? For starters, we need to understand one thing that I have been aware of since my first student teaching experience in a public school – equal and fair are two different things, and things do not have to be equal in order to be fair. As a way of clarifying this, look at Brown v Board of Education (1954). In this landmark civil rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate, but equal, is not equal. This decision illustrates how things that may seem equal may also not be fair.

So my opinion of fairness in education is going to tread a very fine line. For starters, a “fair” system of education requires adequate funding. Now adequate means a very Marxist thing here – from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. This notion removes “equality” from the equation. Some schools and individuals simply require more funding than others based on the demographics of the school and the pre-existing skills and abilities that students in a particular area bring with them when they enter the school. A school with students who are less-well-prepared would require more fiscal resources than a school with better-prepared students. Now this does not mean that either group of students should be forced to do without anything that would make their educational experience rich, meaningful, and rewarding. Adequate funding means just that – giving each school the funding that it needs to provide a positive educational experience for every student.

That said, fairness in education also has a great deal to do with autonomy, or, if you prefer, separateness. Each teacher, school, or district needs to have the discretion to run their classroom(s) or system in a way which they, as the local experts, know will best benefit their students. Students, parents, teachers, and administrators in impoverished rural or urban areas need to have input into decisions that concern their school in the same way that parents in suburban schools often do. National control and standards do a great injustice to the individual student by failing to account for differences in social, ethnic, gender, or other background factors that affect performance on these tests and should be abolished in favor of authentic assessments that measure innovative and critical thinking within a context that has meaning for the student and their community. This move away from standardization can only happen through local autonomy.

What it Could Mean for Higher Education

Higher education is a different animal than public education to its very core. In the U.S., there is no free, compulsory higher education. It is a luxury rather than a mandate. This is the first area in which a movement towards creating a fair society would have to look in terms of higher education. Signs of this are already starting to emerge. Yesterday I received an email from moveon.org asking me to sign a petition to have the federal government forgive all outstanding student loans as an economic stimulus initiative. While unrelated to Occupy Wall Street on the surface, such an initiative is very much inspired by the fact that a significant number of the protestors are disgruntled college students or recent graduates who are saddled with insurmountable college debt and little real hope for employment in a struggling economy (NPR, Oct. 14, 2011).

I am not going to propose that all colleges and universities should be free.  It will not happen. In the same way that some people choose to enroll their children in private schools, some, regardless of any societal shift, will enroll in high-cost, private colleges and universities. However, there needs to be a free, government funded college option for anyone interested in pursuing higher education. This free option could be through community colleges, state universities, or some other new system involving online and informal learning. Regardless of what the actual system looks like, the value of higher education is currently out of alignment with the actual costs. Given the immense value of learning and the importance of continuing education for all Americans, easily available free educational alternatives should be a priority of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Originally published on October 18th, 2011  in full here.