On Occupy Portland News. {Oct18, Nov14-21}



We are calling for a Global Education Strike. It is the first time that an education strike is being coordinated worldwide. We will UNITE in solidarity, because no matter where we live, we face the same struggle against national state and profit driven interests, and their hold on education. Increasing tuition fees, budget cuts, outsourcing, school closures, as well as other phenomena are linked to an increasing commercialization and privatization of education. Only by uniting globally will we be able to overcome these and enable free emancipatory education for all. {etc. etc.}

via the International Student Movement.

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via Invisible Army. {Sept 17}

From the Debtor’s Jungle, Undisclosed Location

We are the Invisible Army of Defaulters.

We are millions. We are everywhere.

We are your neighbors. We are your family. Your friends.

We are the 99%

We are going to bring this system to its knees.

We can, because we wield the one power that all the armies of the world can never defeat: the power of refusal.

This power has destroyed the mightiest empires the world has ever seen. All crumble and dissolve the moment enough people simply withdraw their consent. Not loudly. But quietly, covertly. The Roman Empire was destroyed not by barbarians, but by draft evasion, tax evasion, and desertion. Alexander and Napoleon’s armies were stopped only when their own soldiers refused to continue, or simply went home. It wasn’t the Abolitionists who put an end to slavery in America: it was the dogged and ingenious resistance of millions of slaves, from foot-dragging and flight to endless acts of sabotage, that made the entire economic system based on slavery untenable. It was millions of acts of quiet refusal that rendered all the Soviet Union’s tanks and missiles and secret police powerless.

The same fate awaits the current system of mafia capitalism in America, an economic system driven by Wall Street CEOs who produce nothing, contribute nothing, who have bought our government and reduced it into a criminal enterprise whose main purpose is to support loan-sharking, gambling, extortion, and the slow reduction of every American citizen into debt peons. We cannot stop them through elections when both parties are bought and paid for. One thing we can do is to quietly withdraw our consent.

And so we have done. By refusing to pay the money they claim we owe them.

We may be doing so covertly, we may not yet dare to reveal our names and show our faces, but do not doubt for a moment that these millions of acts of refusal are, each and every one of them, acts of profound moral courage. All our lives we’ve been told to pay our debts. That it doesn’t matter that the game is rigged and that it was set up by liars and criminals. We are well aware of the shame, the harassment, the legal threats, humiliation, the sheer physical violence they will unleash on us. We are willing to defy these threats, because in the end, we know there’s something more powerful than fear: and that is the love we have for others. To be able to take care of our children, our friends, our families, the people that matter most to us, to learn, to teach, to foster, to give to our communities, is a value that no accountant can ever measure, that no government loan administrator or hedge fund manager can ever have the right to take away from us. Every dollar we take from a fraudulent subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from the collection agency, is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities, to those we love and we respect.

We are an army of lovers who cannot be defeated. We are laying the groundwork for another world.

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