“It is Bank profits before people.”
“The banks are above people being able to eat.” This quote is from an occupy protester as she was interviewed by Amy Goodman for non-profit radio. As Amy let the woman speak, the woman’s story unfolds: She has a master’s degree in social work and a student loan dept that she cannot afford to pay. She is the mother of a college-age daughter. With opportunity for sustainable employment in question for college graduates, as is her experience, mother and daughter are questioning whether or not the daughter should attend college and end up underpaid, in dept, or worse — unemployed with dept.
The message Goodman found prevailing among the occupy citizens is “It is Bank profits before people.” The few continue to hoard and accumulate before immense populations of people around the world have stable or even temporary jobs, food, and shelter.
The Occupy Wall Street movement started as a voice of the unemployed or underpaid. Around the globe, masses of citizens, as in the US, are standing up to be acknowledged. They request opportunity in career, homes, food, air, water — simply reciprocity in life and work. As a spark catches fire in a dry forest, the spark and light of these voices light other voices, like a flame becoming a field of light.
Level Playing Field — Give up the Cheat Codes
As Matt Tibbai points out in a recent Rolling Stone article, “People aren’t jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes…”
The voices, bodies, and groups of citizens are done with accepting the cheater’s game in lieu of stable careers — sustainable livelihoods — for every man and woman. The hope for a fair opportunity has become broken due to profit being put before people. In all areas of big business, we find vested interests. The links of these interests are always found to control and dictate policy to government. They often sit in the very political bodies meant to support equality as a voice and width of all people.
Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo
Along with sustainable jobs, there is the air we breathe on this planet, the water we drink, and access to food for all. This discontent of intelligent, peaceful people and the crumbling denial that has kept Corporate Politics and Banks above people in place is moving things. The denial is being broken open with the birth of Occupy Wall Street. The movement is young, now worldwide, and growing. The unrest that gave birth to it has been around a very long time.
Executive Director of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, says: “I have seen first-hand how corporations are given license to pollute and control our environment.” Among the cited, he points to Fukushima and the cosy relationship between the nuclear industry and governments, as well the consequences of radiation contamination and of deforestation in Indonesia, the Amazon and Congo (due to commercial interests).
Kumi Naidoo is only one of thousands now pointing out, peacefully, that “almost always it is the poor that pay the price first.”
Non-violent, civil disobedience is the vehicle of change that is commanding an honest inner voice outwardly for these poor, for all of us, the unwillingly polluted inhabitants of earth. Greenpeace sent out a solar truck, “Rolling Sunlight,” to help power the OWS media center in New York.
Greenpeace believes the most urgent issue facing our people and planet is climate change It also believes the time for debate is gone. Only action will work now. Action is alive across the world — from Sydney to New Delhi to Rio de Janeiro to New York.
Rapid transition to renewable energy is what must occur. By moving their bodies, minds, and spirits into front and center, the 99% is asking for a vital dialogue beyond the cheater’s game. Their aims are honest, simple, sparked by courage and integrity, and they will keep asking for it. This is what healthy democracy is all about.
Peaceful Civil Disobedience
The value of civil disobedience is now, is manifesting in all countries, to end poverty. The voices consider, understand, and aim to protect people within the environmental movement and beyond it. As Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace, and humanitarian activists around the globe believe, “what the people want is a peaceful, equitable, green planet.” As Tibbai points out,” it just wants everyone to live by the same rules.”
All photos published under a Creative Commons license by Kimberlyki
