Occupy Wall Street Protesters…

…. are still going strong and there is a planned “ occupation “ today in Washington, D.C. Let us hope that there is a massive gathering of supporters at this event, and that at least one major mainstream news outlet is there to cover this with some real, actual reporting. That omits FoxNews by default.

    This is a movement which needs to gather more steam with each passing day not only in Manhattan and D.C., but in cities and towns all over the United States.

   Wake the hell up, people! The time is now to partake in some non-violent civil disobedience!

Jonathan Zimmerman, at The Christian Science Monitor:

Taking aim at corporate greed and corruption, the demonstrators embody a venerable tradition of American populism. From the dawn of the republic until the recent past, Americans celebrated hard-working folk and denounced financial titans who preyed upon them. However intemperate or excessive, their protest language fueled some of our most important social reforms – including the regulation and control of the financial sector itself.

Start with the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who feared that a “moneyed aristocracy” would bind the young nation into a new set of chains. “And I sincerely believe...that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies,” Jefferson warned. He reserved special disdain for financial speculation, which he labeled “a species of gambling destructive of morality.”

Several decades later, Andrew Jackson denounced the Second Bank of the United States as essentially a scam to enrich the wealthy at the workingman’s expense. He also helped sweep away property requirements for voting and office holding, rendering every white male the political equal of the “stock-jobbers, brokers, and gamblers” he despised.

By the late 1800s, as massive financial corporations clustered in lower Manhattan, the populist animus found a new target: Wall Street. “A name more thoroughly detested is not to be found in the vocabulary of American politics,” thundered Georgia’s Tom Watson, vice-presidential nominee for the upstart “People’s Party” in 1896. “Here is Wall Street: we see the actual rulers of the Republic.... The Government itself lies prone in the dust with the iron heel of Wall Street upon its neck.”

      As a side note, today is also the 10th anniversary of the  U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan. A very good day for a protest!

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