How the People Got Their Groove Back: What a Bunch of Farmers Can Teach a Bunch of Occupiers About How to Keep on Going

Ashley Sanders wrote the following zine for and about the Occupy Movement.  Go here for the booklet form to print and distribute!

Not so long ago, Americans witnessed the beginning of a mass democratic uprising. Thousands of average people, disgusted by greedy elites and corporate control of government, launched a movement that spread to almost every state in the nation. They did it to reject debt. They did it to fight foreclosures. They did it to topple a world where the 1 percent determined life for the other 99. And they did all of it against incredible odds, with a self-respect that stymied critics.

The year? 1877. The people? Dirt-poor farmers who would come to be known as Populists.

Now it’s 2011, and the People are stirring again. It’s been over two months since a few hundred dreamers pitched their tents in Zuccotti Park and stayed.

These people weren’t Populists, but they had the same complaints. They couldn’t make rent. They had no future. They lived in a nation with one price for the rich and another for the poor. And they knew that whatever anyone said that they didn’t have real democracy.

Okay, and so what? What do a bunch of century-dead farmers have to do with the Occupy movement? Well, quite a lot, actually.

The One Percent

I have a nagging fear I may be running behind the rest of the pack on this one, but I just saw the documentary “The One Percent.” Trailer here. Not a very well-made film; but the director, a younger member of the “Johnson & Johnson” family, provides fascinating, and infuriating, glimpses into how the very wealthy in the U.S. talk about their wealth. Includes interviews with Ralph Nader, Steve Forbes, Bill Gates Sr., and Milton Friedman (who, if D&C 104:18 is accurate, has since retired to a place considerably warmer than Florida).