Introduction..............................................................4 On Public Space.......................................................6 Money, Politics and the Founders of The Republic.

8 The Great Recession and The Failure of American Government............................................................11 The First Stumbling Steps OF the 99% To Assert Their Power............................................................15 Rise of the Occupation...........................................17 The Meaning of the Occupation: It Means What It Is ................................................................................19

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Introduction
What are your demands? When will you stop? Are you losing steam? How long can this go on? What is it that you want? What does this mean? Shouldnt you just get a job and stop whining? Weve all heard the questions, the speculation, and the derision. It seems that everyone wants to know whats going on because they dont understand what it is. They dont understand it because they arent a part of it or because theyve been duped into thinking that they arent. The purpose of this pamphlet is to present the facts that have brought us to this point in our political discourse and to explain in plain language what it means that we have taken this tactic to make our voices heard. I am one of the 99% and while I speak only for myself, I do hope to make plain what has brought me to the movement and I believe that most of us share this view. If you do not understand what the Occupation is about,
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please take the time to read this and to share it with others. If you are already a part of the movement and you agree with what I have to say, please feel free to redistribute this pamphlet in whatever manner you see fit.

On Public Space
Public space, like all things produced in a capitalist system, is a commodity. In theory, as a commodity held in trust for the public by our republican (small r) governments, produced through public funds, maintained with public funds, and open to the public at no charge it belongs to all of us. In practice, it no longer does. The public airwaves are now in the hands of a shrinking number of media conglomerates. Many of our public spaces are plastered with advertisements promoting private gain, not the public good. There is a strong political current that has been vastly successful in privatizing our prisons, our health, our social safety net, our energy providers, our civic sanitation, and our elections. Those in favor of privatization are now looking actively for the next series of public goods that can be turned to private gain. Can it be long before our traditional public forums like parks,
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sidewalks and community gathering spaces are partitioned and sold off to the highest bidder?

Money, Politics and the Founders of The Republic

As Americans, we are fortunate to live in a nation founded on dual principles of protecting individual freedoms from the tyranny of the majority and a shared commitment to the public good that is a duty of all members of society. Put succinctly, our nation is founded on Liberty and Civic Republicanism. The constitutions of our various governments are founded on the principles of limited powers given to majoritarian elections and a system of negative rights that remove specific rights of the people from the power of the majority to threaten. By and large this has worked well. However, our founding fathers did not think that they were creating a perfect system of civil government. The preamble to the Constitution
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states that it is an effort to create a more perfect union. This recognizes that problems will come up with that were unforeseen at the time of the founding and that further steps would need to be taken to deal with those problems as they arise. Among the problems unforeseen by the founders and therefore not addressed in the Constitution is the influence of economic power on political power. The economy of the 18th and 19th centuries when the most important protections of our individual rights were established was very different from the globalized system of finance and trade that we now live in. As such, it was impossible for the people protecting those rights to envision the threat that private capital would have on our political rights. Today, it is recognized by the supreme court, probably rightly, that spending money on a political campaign is a form of protected expression. This is reasonable given the way that our current constitutions protect our freedom of expression. Clearly we must be able to spend money to
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broadcast our message should we choose to do so, and if we do not have that right, it becomes possible to silence us by limiting our ability to spend. The problem, however, is that over the course of the last thirty years public policies hostile to curbing the concentration of wealth have held sway. We live in an economy where money and the attendant power to be heard that money represents, has been come grossly and disproportionately concentrated in the hands of an ever-shrinking minority. This minority, euphemistically called the 1%, has interests at odds with the public good. The result has been the structural corruption of the political system where the good of the wealthy minority has the loudest voice. Today, the 1%s interests are served rather than those of the 99% who do not share in their wealth and influence.

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The Great Recession and The Failure of American Government

Ever since the success of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, the Republican Party has slowly driven from its ranks its liberal and moderate wings. All that remains of a party founded to oppose slavery and promote industrialization and the attendant social goods of an industrial economy is the dogmatic promotion of free enterprise above all else. Having consolidated its power under this singular principle and jettisoned all pretense of a concern for the welfare of society as a whole, the Republican party has become a one trick pony whose only answer to any social problem is the twin pro-business platform of lower taxes and deregulation. The
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party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthiest segment of our society and maintains political influence through the manipulation of social conservatives at odds with the social policies of the more liberal Democratic Party. In recent years, however, these social conservatives have become so vital to Republican electoral success that the Party is now equally beholden to far right paranoid organizations born in the Anticommunist movements of the 1920s and 30s. The situation with the Democratic Party is not much better. Having more or less destroyed itself during the1968 Democratic Convention and the attendant riots in Chicago, the last hurrah of New Deal economic populism in the Democratic Party was the unsuccessful presidency of Jimmy Carter. During the 1980s the party came under the increasing control of business friendly moderates from the Democratic Leadership Council and similar groups. Between the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s and the Clinton Administration of the 1990s, the Democratic Party became largely

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indistinguishable from Republicans in their attitude toward deregulation and free enterprise. As a result, by the late nineties it was no longer apparent that there was any difference between Republicans and Democrats where economic policy was concerned. This disenfranchisement of economic liberals within the political establishment provided an electoral landscape ripe for the ascendency of pro-business extremism and the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush. Without any real check from the Democrats in Congress, the Republican Party under Bush moved in lockstep to embroil the nation in two expensive wars of adventure, cut taxes on the 1%, and deregulate industry. This allowed for an unprecedented expansion of power for the private sector and the 1% who control it. When the reckless practices that this permissive environment allowed blew up on the ideological right in 2007 and 2008, the national economy was plunged into the worst economic crisis since the Great depression. As the nation suffered, the 1%
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were protected by their servants in government and have as of 2011 returned to their former comfort. That resurgence has not been shared by the 99% who have received little assistance in their economic plight from a political class that does not care to listen to us. They do not hear us because we do not have the power to be heard that the 1% has as a result of their concentrated wealth.

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The First Stumbling Steps OF the 99% To Assert Their Power

The election of President Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in Congress was a first expression of the desire of the American People to turn away from the failures of the Bush years. This was not enough and has as of 2011 failed to produce the changes in public policy that are necessary to right the ship of state. The failure comes from two sources.

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First, the Republican Party and a small cadre of Conservative Democrats as well as former Democrat Joseph Lieberman acted in concert to defeat almost all of the progressive reforms and actions proposed by the House and President Obama. This reaction came out of their extreme sense of entitlement born of thirty years of virtually unchecked power for their right wing economic policies. Second, xenophobic and racist activists on the far right fringe of the Republican Party, galvanized by the election of a Black President and propaganda demonizing immigrants, formed the Tea Party movement and recaptured the House of Representatives in 2010. This was significant as House Democrats under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been the strongest voice for the 99% since Lyndon Johnsons Great Society plan of the 1960s. With extreme right wing pro-business conservatives like John Boehner and Eric Cantor in control of the Houses Agenda, over the last year the business of governing in an economic crisis has ground to a halt. Although only in control of a narrow majority
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in one house of congress, the entitled servants of the 1% have effectively shut down the Federal Government at a time when the States and individuals are desperately in need of the sort of economic assistance that only the Federal Government can provide by increasing the level of demand in the American Economy.

Rise of the Occupation

The Tea Party backed Republican reaction in 2010 led to sweeping majorities for right wing extremists in many states. Key victories for Republican Governors and Legislators in Wisconsin and Ohio led to those states passing hugely unpopular antiworker laws that led to mass protests in those states. The protests received a great deal of attention from national media and revitalized the interest in direct action by many who had been
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disaffected by the failures of the war protests during the Bush administration. Additionally, the success of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt and Tunisia in overthrowing autocratic dictators once again demonstrated to the world that non-violent, sustained popular uprisings are a powerful tool for positive change. While the Arab Spring transfixed the world, we also learned of the power of social media as an organizing tool and the possibility of a leaderless movement to give voice to the voiceless. In this emerging environment, when the Canadian leftist magazine Adbusters issued a call to Occupy Wall Street a small but growing cadre of activists moved into Zuccotti Park and began the occupation. It was the moment that many of us had been waiting for, and soon the Occupation spread across the nation and the world. We are now present and agitating for economic equality across the United States and Europe. Whats more, we have already succeeded in wresting the political discourse away from the 1% and their
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servants in Washington DC. After months of wasted time spent arguing over non-issues like the debt-ceiling and repeated attempts by the Republican House to pass symbolic measures aimed at everything but improving the economic situation for the 99%, it is now the only issue that matters, and is on the mind of every pundit and politician in the country.

The Meaning of the Occupation: It Means What It Is

It has been amusing to watch the disdain and confusion on the part of political commentators who have been so universally baffled by the meaning of the Occupy Movement. What are your demands? they ask. How can you hope to accomplish anything if you dont have a message?
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The answer to this question is simple: we do have a message and we do have demands, and if you take the time to look at what we are doing, they are plain as day. The Occupy Movement means what it is. We have moved in a symbolic and expressive way to take back our public spaces and our public discourse from those who have been working for so long to suppress our power to be heard. We are the 99% and we demand a return of our Agency in a government that should be of, by and for the People, but that for too long has been of, by, and for the 1% who can afford to be heard. The Occupy Movement exists because we have been ignored. Because our problems and our issues have been drowned out. Because our economic security both long and short term have been continuously sold out in favor of the economic security of those least in need of fearing for it. Because the American Dream that we have all worked so hard to achieve has become the American Nightmare of no work to be found.
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Because we are tired of seeing our friends, our loved ones, and our neighbors struggle to survive while the Political class has wondered whether the current government is too unfriendly to business. Because we are tired of the loud voices of the 1% complain about class warfare when they have been waging war on us for a generation. Because we all did what we were supposed to do by working, by educating ourselves, by trying to plan for our retirement and provide for our families and the social compact that we entered into in doing so has not been honored in return. Because those we elected to serve our interests have sold us out to the highest bidder. Because we are tired of the divisive tactics used to alienate us from our brothers and sisters and weaken our voices even further. The Occupy Movement means that we will no longer stand to be ignored and we will not stop until our demands are met and our economy and our government are returned to our control.

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We are the 99%. This is what democracy looks like. We want justice, we want it now, and we will have it no matter how long it takes. The 1% would do well to get out of our way.

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