Episode 027 Goes downtown, comes back, eats something, then takes a nap

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We interview more Occupy San Antonio participants!

This Week: hh:mm:ss
00:22 Occupy San Antonio Interviews
01:18 Interview with an organizer: Daniel
14:33 Website organizer: occupyvirtually.org
17:13 Legal advice and council National Lawyers Guild
18:24 In the studio, Andre looks for a good foil for his interviews
24:00 AT&T gets spurned in a merger in spite of their charity letter campaign
45:45 Greece's austerity problems
52:30 Education and the job system progress

http://www.occupyvirtually.org for free forums and organizing for smaller groups that don't have a web presence or skills to

set one up

http://www.nationallawyersguild.org


blog: http://injudiciousrambling.blogspot.com
email: injudiciousramblings@gmail.com
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Andre Writes II

Suppose… suppose we no longer knock timidly on the doors of the halls of capitalism and ask, ‘..please sirs let us in.” Suppose we no longer ask the media, like a modern day twist asking for a dollop of gruel, to cover the stories of our plight and suffering. Suppose we no longer have to ask the democrats and republicans, and all the other political gangs to feed our poor and homeless. Suppose we no longer have homeless. Suppose we- we with our cuts and bruises, our ailments and our physical cares- are no longer denied care, but are taken care of, regardless of health insurance and HMOs and PPOs and them with all their filthy acronyms that are all euphemisms for ignoble death. Suppose we stand fast when they come to steal our homes and call it foreclosure. 

Suppose…suppose those we place on the margins of society, those heroes willing to sleep in the cold, hard, unyielding, reluctant embrace of parks and sidewalks are no longer relegated to the outer edges. Suppose they are embraced and welcomed.  The gays, and the blacks, and the homeless and the skaters and the drummers, and the smokers of weed and tobacco, and the transgendered and the most excoriated of them all, those who want something more… suppose we medicate them with free hugs.

Suppose we do this already. Suppose we call this Occupy Wall Street.

Suppose we form our own halls of community – our own microbanks (see India)

Suppose we make our own media – occupy wall street journal

Suppose we feed the poor and homeless – any occupy site in any city in the world

Suppose we have no homeless - occupy is our hall

Suppose we have health care – the medic tents at any occupy

Suppose we refuse foreclosure – an occupy in California already saved someone’s home

Suppose we no longer place people on the margins – those people are the movement, they are the heroes, they are the links that connect Martin Luther King jr. to Martin Luther the reformist. And no, I am not a catholic, nor am I even religious, but those with the courage of conviction have throughout the ages walked among us lesser beings. And from them we draw our hope.., sometime we leech it from them until they are empty husks, but…but they  provide us with the lamps of aspiration, and we follow the breadcrumbs they leave. And we gird our loins and follow those crumbs which lead us to confront the witches in their gingerbread cottages. The witches who would bake us in their ovens fueled by greed , derivatives and general goldman sachery (copyright). The witches who would say “let them eat cake”. For they fatten us and then they eat us. Also, those witches have never died. 

The fight to occupy Wall Street, I imagine, cannot be compared with the fight to acknowledge your difference in a world of uniformity –to tell your father  that you are gay, or your mom that you are a man in woman’s body, or that you can’t be a dentist but that if you don’t play music you life will be more of a finality than your eventual death is so much more of a fight than facing down the paper vultures on wall street. 

On behalf of those of us who have never fought a major fight, thank you for leading and teaching us. 

You are heroes!

Andre writes I

I suppose any progressive writer worth his salt, must start off any article with a reference to occupy wall street. I am nowhere near an iconoclast as those good people sleeping out in the frigid wild of liberty plaza, so I will observe protocol. 

Here goes. 

Occupy wall street, you beauty. You are the embodiment of hope, the fulfillment of yearning, the return on investment made over years and decades by fighters solitary,  and movements small, and marches ephemeral and causes unconnected.  You have been mocked and scorned and derided as being hippies. You beat drums in circles. But in doing so you scared us. You started the docile sheep that are herded by corporate dogs into their cubicles and their faulty insurance plans and their underwater mortgages. But they are scared so they baaa at you in derision.   

These sheep have no pasture because it has been razed by the shepherd. But they, comfortable in being shorn of their wool, mock you who have taken off your wollen coats.  They want you to dress like they do and look like they do: To cut your dreads, not to wear tye dye, not to wear masks and beat drums and to only shred your guitars for corporate rock, but never to play a protest folk song. They want you to get a list of demands so that they can stroke your head like you are a recalcitrant child, and wink over your head at the other grownups, and send you to your room with vague promises and then shred your demands in the same machinery that grounds up your contemporaries in the dustbeds of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

They look at your signs, somehow magically as large as crop circles, but mysteriously residing on donated pizza boxes and are dismayed to find that no three of your signs in an area the size of a squared circle, carry the same message. Because make no mistake: they want you to carry the same signs, have only one message.

Because they face forward, their views filled with only survival and selfishness that they have been told is their lot in life and their salvation. You, with your global worldview is an affront to them. 

How can you- how dare you- care about suffering iraqis, veterans, homeless, the American elderly, the capitalism ravaged Haitians, the bullied LBGTs, the debt burdened students, and the forgotten poor- all the same time!  That’s how they divide you and muffle your cries. 

They want you to have only one issue; they know empathy removes blinders. They know that the love of money is the tar sands derived crude that fuels the good ship wall street , is the most efficient  delivery system for evil- and that all of the evils together corded up in the holds of that ship like so many blacks slaves in times past.  They know if all of you protesting all the evils protest them together, stack them one on top the other, they will reach the heavens, a modern day tower of Babel, threatening the gods of plunder and avarice. And the establishment liberals let the establishment liberals sneer as they, tongues hanging out of their mouths, pant for the ambrosia that trickles down from their modern day mount Olympus-wall street . Nectar of the gods indeed! But even the gods on mount Olympus could not have sat on such treasure as they do today. So they let some treasure drip, slowly, down to the democratic party in the form of naked bribes, which they attempt to disguise dress like a cheap whore in expensive dress which they call lobbying.  And like that ambrosia of old, it turns them into gods. These young gods are as unable to abrogate the intoxication of that elixir as they are unable to shed the oily, noxious, writhing veneer of disdain for the shaggy haired, drum beating, finger wiggling, 90 percent general assembly having, beacons of light that you are .  

They say that the winds of the artic will sweep down, freeze your will, and blow you away like chaff, along with your message. 

They say you will not last. 

They say that the police- call them mercenaries, because soon they will take their future and their pensions, and pay them by the hour- but they say those mercenaries will feed you the mist of pepper and roughage of batons and you will not last. They say that you will be arrested one by one till your will is broken by fines and swallowed by the yawning chasm of the judicial pit hole. You can not last.  

But You will last. 

I do not doubt your longevity. Because your living capital is no longer bound up in the continued  sacrifice of beds and TVs and video games and showers and hot food and plumbing and the other pacifiers that they who would rule your soul and legislate spirit, trust to keep you pliant and servile. 

You will last because you have planted a seed. That seed you planted is now drifting lightly on the soaring wind. And the thing about those arctic winds if that while they might freeze you, and shatter you at liberty park, they will lift up those shards and scatter them and bear those seeds to Texas, Taiwan, Australia and Sao Paolo. And unlike a Monsanto seed, you ask no royalty on the fruits, except that they be consumed and used for energy to fuel the movement. 

And because they have ploughed us and reaped all we have to give and more, the world is fertile, receptive ground.  So, the fruit will grow, in and out of season. It will grow in the season of war, in the season of child slavery, in the season of ocean poisoning, in the season of disaster capitalism in the season of…in the season of pain. 

The world celebrates your arrival, occupy wall street, and we wait- together- and work- together- and you will make this world over in your image.

Episode 026 is a mic-slinger with the fastest recorder in the west

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This week we interview Occupy San Antonio participants.
http://www.occupysatx.com

This Week: hh:mm:ss
01:02 Derek (student)
04:45 Jezette, mother of 2 children
11:55 Carl (father of Pam, veteran) and Pam (working mother)
26:20 Megan Owen, Occupy SATX media committee member
34:50 Kathy Howard, F.A.C.T. member
38:45 Dan, F.A.C.T. member, part of a Prayer In School lawsuit


blog: http://injudiciousrambling.blogspot.com
email: injudiciousramblings@gmail.com
iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/injudicious-ramblings/id435520148
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Episode 025 Protests itself

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This Week: hh:mm:ss
02:30 Racism and bigotry, language and actions
32:48 Occupy Wall Street
48:15 Teachers and education

email: injudiciousramblings@gmail.com
iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/injudicious-ramblings/id435520148
Leave a review or comment wherever you like.
Thanks!