Weekend Economists Ring in the Old, Wring Out the New: Dec. 30, 2011 to Jan. 2, 2012

[Demeter]

80. The Occupation Thread

I'm going to post links to articles on the Occupy movement here. they aren't easy to sample, so look them up!

Occupations in winter

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/26/occupations_in_winter/singleton/

Protesters nationwide link up through large-scale conference calls and plan what's next...

Ten Winning Moments for the 99% in 2011

http://www.truth-out.org/ten-winning-moments-99-2011/1325084815

Small Occupy Movements Across the Country Accumulate Victories

http://www.truth-out.org/small-occupy-movements-across-country-accumulate-victories/1324565239

Occupy Rigged Elections: A Call for the Second American Revolution in 2012

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-rigged-elections-call-second-american-revolution-2012/1323891807

Our electoral process is rigged in the following ways:

• Corporate personhood and the legal determination that money equals speech.
  
• Corporate campaign financing and lobbying; billions to buy our elected representatives.
  
• Corporate restriction of candidate access to the media and to participation in vital debates.
  
• Corporate media exit polling, which often alters results to manufacture a false "red shift" of rightward-moving electoral outcomes.
  
• Manipulation of electoral structures and mechanisms
  
• Partisan redistricting, which re-draws electoral district maps that favor a particular party.
  
• Voter ID laws that disenfranchise young, poor and minority voters.
  
• Fraudulent purging of voter rolls, including "caging" - removing a voter from the rolls or discarding their vote based on the return of direct mail to their listed address, a practice found to be used fraudulently and with racial bias, making it illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
  
• Disenfranchisement of felons, many poor, black or Hispanic, and convicted on drug offenses.
  
• The centralized rigging of computerized voting machines.
  
  The battle to topple the corporatocracy must strategically attack all of these points. But for the purpose of this call to action - Occupy Rigged Elections - we're going to focus on the last, least understood bullet point: computerized election fraud.
  
  In the end, how ballots are counted - the central control mechanism of democracy - could prove the easiest piece to reclaim; our first real step toward radically shifting power back toward the people...
  
  
  OCCUPY WEBSITE: http://interoccupy.org/