On Sunday, September 16, which was both the Jewish New Year and Mexican Independence Day, the Occupy Tacoma General Assembly unanimously supported the Chicago Teachers Union strike. We join with hundreds of other trade unions, Occupy affiliates, individuals, and organizations all around the world in this fight for teachers’ rights, as employees, and as human beings responsible for educating our children.
Superficially, this struggle seems only to involve Chicago’s 29,000 educational workers and the children they work with.
But in reality, these teachers are a part of the 99% like the rest of us. Their opponents are our opponents. Like us, they fight against the 1% and their political servants. Chicago’s teachers are fighting our struggle because they fight for a fair deal from the 1% establishment. In so doing, they educate us all in the best sense of the word. Continue reading Occupy Tacoma’s GA Unanimously Supports Chicago Teachers!
This video contains language some people may find vulgar or offensive. Please view at your own discretion. —editor
A year ago Occupy Wall Street burst onto the scene, changing the conversations going on around this country and perhaps the world. Has it had some defeats, some hurdles, some difficulties? Sure. But who honestly thought it wouldn’t? This war isn’t over. [LeeCamp.net]
NOTE!! This page has not been reviewed by the members of Occupy Tacoma or the smaller group of members that regularly attend the General Assemblies. The post does not necessarily reflect the views of Occupy Tacoma as a group. The ideas presented here are my own presentation of the realities with which we must deal in our quest for justice in regard to the 99%. I/We do not infer that the organization described in these articles actually exists or that it is intended to exist at the hand of “Occupy” or “Move To Amend” or any other know organization. — TruthMerchant
This is the second in a short series of articles to explore the possibilities of a People’s Constitutional Convention, which would be a national general assembly for the purpose or repairing our crippled and dysfunctional national government.
A Statement Of Purpose
The People’s Constitutional Convention exists to insure that the elected national government actually is representative of and operating on behalf of the people. This purpose is achieved by correcting decisions of the Supreme Court that tend to disenfranchise the people of the United States. Continue reading People’s Constitutional Convention II
Mike Plaid, an SEIU union janitor, posted a letter on Facebook that someone named Jerry Kunz wrote.
Mr. Plaid and Mr. Kunz object to Pierce County Transit management plans to cut sanitation services in downtown Tacoma in half, taking that work away from full-time union workers with union wages and benefits, and subcontracting it out to part-time, nonunion workers who work for substandard wages and little or no benefits.
Mr. Kunz’s letter lays out the issues pretty well. He addresses Lynne Griffith, the Pierce County Transit CEO, who received over $177,000 compensation for her role in the cutbacks to our services, mass layoffs, and eroding of worker income and benefits. Continue reading Stop Attacks on Tacoma Transit Janitors!
NOTE!! This page has not been reviewed by the members of Occupy Tacoma or the smaller group of members that regularly attend the General Assemblies. The post does not necessarily reflect the views of Occupy Tacoma as a group. The ideas presented here are my own presentation of the realities with which we must deal in our quest for justice in regard to the 99%. — TruthMerchant
This is the first in a short series of articles to explore the possibilities of a national general assembly (conceptually speaking) for the purpose or repairing our crippled and dysfunctional national government.
A majority of the American people have come to realize that their government is broken and that politics-as-usual is not working to promote the general welfare. One indication of this is the fact that Congress’ approval rating is at its lowest level on record. That rating reflects the total corruption of the Congress; its disregard for its role in representing the people and its focus on preserving and enhancing its own power and station. And to attempt to cure this malady through the use of a broken electoral system seems disingenuous at best.
This Congressional rating is extremely significant because under the Constitution, Congress is the only branch of our federal government that is explicitly commissioned to represent “We the People.” This should make Congress the first among equals insofar as a democratic republic is concerned. Yet this is not the case. Through the period of history between the ratification of our constitution and the reality of our current system of government we lost the preeminence of self determination and handed the final decisions on justice and righteousness to nine unelected members of the Supreme Court. You will not find this top down rule by the judicial branch in the constitution ratified by the people of the nation. I daresay that the people of that time who would not have ratified the constitution without the promise of a “Bill of Rights”, would have rejected our current “top down” rule by a “Council of Lords”. Continue reading A People’s Constitutional Convention
NOTE!! This page has not been reviewed by the members of Occupy Tacoma or the smaller group of members that regularly attend the General Assemblies. The post does not necessarily reflect the views of Occupy Tacoma as a group. The ideas presented here are my own presentation of the realities with which we must deal in our quest for justice in regard to the 99%. — TruthMerchant
So how many Occupy people does it take to change a light bulb? And how many does it take to screw the movement as a whole? This a question of quorum.
It has occurred to some of us that “general assembly” has a lot of flaws. But none are greater than the lack of a GENERAL membership. Far too much is made of the concept of “solidarity”. And, for instance, as we agree to lower the threshold of consensus for the adoption of proposals that insure “solidarity” we run the risk of being ever more exclusionary. All methods of selection other than unanimity are exclusionary. But even when statements of unity are unanimous within any group other than the entire community such statements are exclusionary. As such, any organization that seeks success in the larger community must be very careful that its “solidarity” does not preclude more than a very small number of the general population.
I do not believe that there is any way to achieve societal consensus on POSITIVE ACTIONS among 99% of the population. Many people, however, believe their cause so righteous as to approach that mark and they believe that the failure to achieve their political ends is merely a lack of education on the part of the masses. The existence of all the various political activist groups belies the claims to righteousness. Each group represents a small number of the total population that are in “solidarity” with one another. And, as such, they work and play well with other members and they trust and respect and may even love one another. But when members of the greater society are unwilling to “drink the Kool-Aid” then they are not admitted to the club. Such activist organizations are doomed to failure with regard to their purported goals. Because exclusionary organizations in “solidarity” can never change the society. They preclude too much of the general population. Continue reading The Quorum Question
Move to Amend had a booth at Ethnic Fest and I was pleased to participated in that effort. In my opinion and the opinion of the other participants, the booth was a resounding success. We collected more than 200 new enlistments in the effort to amend the constitution in such a way as to end corporate personhood and the current association of money with free speech. And that 200 is a major achievement that will bring further increases in the number of people aware of the problem and prepared to vote accordingly.
Move to Amend Tacoma was started by Occupy Tacoma people and its “executive board” (the people that plan stuff like the booth at Ethnic Fest) is still composed mostly of Occupy Tacoma people even as it is a separate organization. To some of us it represents a way forward in achieving Occupy’s current mission.
But now I want to turn to some interviews I had with two particular people at the event. I was involved in many conversations, but I learn stuff when I get to hear the views of others that are not part of my typical left leaning community. I first discuss the old guy with a Romney sign on his coveralls. And yes… He was wearing a straw hat and looked like farmer. Continue reading Report on Ethnic Fest
Unanimous Resolution of Occupy Tacoma General Assembly In Support of the Rights of Assembly and Free Speech For Occupy Seattle and Red Spark Collective!
According to several accounts, on the morning of July 10, 2012, the Seattle Police SWAT team, armed with flash-bang grenades, tactical rifles, and a search warrant violently invaded an apartment at 5 in the morning where some Occupy Seattle activists live. The SWAT team used a battering device to break down the door, awakening the residents, pointing firearms at them. Police put residents in zip ties for over an hour.
The warrant the police used to justify this attack had authorized them to look for some unspecified “anarchist” materials. During this raid, police seized some leaflets, tore down a curtain, and destroyed a bookshelf.
The police themselves conceded that the residents were “cooperative” with this so-called investigation and arrested no one. This raid appears to have no legitimate rationale in terms of law enforcement and reeks of political intimidation.
Many of the apartment residents are members of the “Red Spark Collective,” well-known as being supporters of and builders of Occupy Seattle, and also well-known as being an openly communist grouping, which is quite different from an anarchist grouping. They have not been accused of any illegal activities and appear to engage only in constitutionally-protected political and free-speech activities. Continue reading Occupy Tacoma GA Resolution: Support Occupy Seattle and RSC!
The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily express the views of Occupy Tacoma. –TruthMerchant
Perhaps the label of “Occupy Tacoma” seems out of place since we no longer “occupy”. Yet it can and will take on a different meaning. In the earlier marches we saw signs reading “Occupy Your Mind” and the like. It was suggested that the event MTA Olympia and we produced about the Citizens United supreme court decision should have been renamed “Occupy the Constitution” as opposed to “Get Money Out of Politics”. “Occupy the Constitution” seems a very fitting title for a “play” about what we intend doing in response to the usurpation of power conducted by the Supreme Court with its Citizens United ruling. And “Occupy the Constitution” seems a fitting moniker for a movement that wants to bring about substantive change that addresses the plutocratic and despotic problems in our current government. For without constitutional change we cannot repair the disorder. The manifestations of the problem are obvious in such things as the bank bail out, the Patriot Act, and the continued dominance of two major political parties in an electoral system that gives us few real choices. And all of these problems seem rooted in the inability of the current system to provide true representative government for the people.
But simply claiming to stand for something does not evoke change. Before we can further develop our primary mission and our goals and objectives we must insure that we are working toward what we all see as a future society. We must use the consensus of the people’s visions because democratic principles are the root of anything that would be proper government. Any government that does not “promote the general welfare” is a despotic government and is assumed to be undesirable to the majority. The “visioning process” is designed to fill the need of ascertaining the future desired by a great number of people as opposed to basing our actions on the assumptions of a “core” group. We cannot directly ascertain the visions of the 99%. But we can try to ascertain the vision of our own members. Continue reading More on Visioning
In the last couple of weeks the General Assembly has devoted efforts toward discovering what the vision of the individuals involved in Occupy Tacoma might be. I am not certain what prompted this endeavour but I think we can learn some lessons from the recent Philadelphia Gathering. (Why it is that people felt they had to travel all the way across the country and sit on the ground in a park in order to discover their values is a great mystery to me. But all such non local “gatherings” are a mystery to me. We have the technology to do away with that sort of crap and yet we persist in it as though riding a horse for several days to get to the nation’s capital and locking ourselves into a closed meeting is some sort of virtue. But I digress.)
I am absolutely not a big fan of anonymity. I think that it has produced a bunch of totally self centered liars that say the “politically correct” thing in public and then vote their true values in a secret poll. The least we can do is allow people to profess their visions in the open and to defend them as need be. Those who are unwilling to do so should probably go join the elephants or the donkeys and get out of our movement for true representative government or more direct democracy (Note that I am asserting a sort of mission statement here that is NOT necessarily a shared mission or opinion). Continue reading Visioning and Process
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On Sunday, September 16, which was both the Jewish New Year and Mexican Independence Day, the Occupy Tacoma General Assembly unanimously supported the Chicago Teachers Union strike. We join with hundreds of other trade unions, Occupy affiliates, individuals, and organizations all around the world in this fight for teachers’ rights, as employees, and as human beings responsible for educating our children.
This is the second in a short series of articles to explore the possibilities of a People’s Constitutional Convention, which would be a national general assembly for the purpose or repairing our crippled and dysfunctional national government.
