One year ago on September 17, a few activists began a peaceful protest just outside Wall Street in New York’s financial district. That action sparked a sweeping movement of public space “Occupations,” in which citizens could air their grievances against corporate greed, protected interests and much more. Encampments sprang up across the world, from Oakland City Hall to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Police cleared out the tents months ago, but the networks of activists, young and old, remain intact, as evidenced by this weekend’s packed schedule of Occupy actions. Watch this video to see what activists, union workers and students in debt are planning for the second year of Occupy.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is largely credited for reframing the national dialogue on economic inequality and popularizing the phrase: “We are the 99 percent.” We host a roundtable with Frances Fox Piven, an author and professor at City University of New York who has studied social movements for decades; Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence, which has extensively covered the Occupy movement; and Suzanne Collado, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street since its inception and member of the group “Strike Debt,” an effort to organize a mass upsurge of debt resistance.
Filmmaker Dennis Trainer Jr. on his new film and the challenges facing the Occupy Movement.
http://www.Occudoc.org
written, produced & directed by Dennis Trainor, Jr
contact dennistrainorjr (at) gmail (dot) com
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Associate producer/ co-editor/ graphics/ color & titles: AJ Russo
https://vimeo.com/ajrsuper8
Gerald Epstein (Political Economy Research Institute, and Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst): The basic policies must change or recession and high unemployment will continue
So the conventions are in the books, and we’re two months away from the election. We’re two months away from Americans having an ultimate choice – vote for the Democrat or vote for the Republican. Actually…that’s not really much of a choice at all. In fact – other Democracies around the world would laugh at us if we claimed that a vote between one of two major parties here was ACTUALLY a legitimate choice. The truth is – a two-party system isn’t really that Democratic at all. And most of the other Democracies on the planet know that – that’s why they’ve reformed their elections to prevent a two-party duopoly from taking over their representative governments.
Did you know there are six political parties represented in the German Congress – the Bundestag – and even more parties represented in state parliaments around Germany – including the Pirate Party? Australia, too, has six parties represented in their parliament. In the Italian Parliament as well – there’s six major parties represented – and more than two dozen smaller parties that are represented in some way as well. Brazil has 15 parties represented in Congress. Heck – Israel’s Parliament has like 18 parties in it. …
Ed Yohnka, Director of Communications and Public Policy for ACLU-IL (American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois) speaks on voter suppression and the Republican electoral strategy to stop poor and the elderly from voting.