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PROLOGUE and MISSION STATEMENT (Est. Dec 2013)

 

PROLOGUE – WHAT MADE US MAD IN THE FIRST PLACE (“peace” and “the world” added in 2016)

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 is not past but prologue.  We have lived through decades of deregulation, deunionization, privatization and free-trade agreements.  Many, in positions of power, project the idea of the “free” market into every corner of our nation’s life.  In order to perpetuate this belief, they spread the idea that we “have an excess of democracy”.  The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the hub of American political and economic power.  For instance:

  • The largest players in the financial/corporate industries and the politicians who do their bidding have, for a generation, transferred wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and maneuvers, leading to corruption throughout our economic system.
  • Via the cult of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan and the propaganda of “free market” ideologues, American citizens have been and are being bamboozled into supporting strategies that have transferred billions to Wall Street while creating food shortages around the world.
  • The Corporate Elite now dominate politics and kill labor unions.
  • Indentured politicians and investment bankers are privatizing America’s infrastructure.
  • Healthcare For All was abandoned to accommodate private insurance and drug companies.
  • Our world has reached a stage where fewer and fewer individuals hold more and more of the wealth and the rest of us are falling into hunger, homelessness, and all the degradations of poverty.

The Occupy Movement is part of a growing group of people who are no longer willing to tolerate the tyranny of the few at the expense of the many.  To quote Senator Elizabeth Warren,    “The system is rigged against you.”

See also original OWS documents:

http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/declaration/

 

OCCUPY BELLINGHAM MISSION STATEMENT

Occupy Bellingham is an autonomous non-violent community-based movement begun on October 2011 that stands in solidarity with the intent and purpose of OWS begun on September 17, 2011 and Occupy movements across the country and the world.

 

Our mission is to peacefully call out, expose and oppose the unregulated corporate and capitalist economic structure(s) that are derailing America’s Democracy, further oppressing our citizens and causing a collapse of the ecological life structure of the planet.  These structures now seek corporate sovereignty over nations and the people of this earth.  We seek to educate the greater community and ourselves about ways to transition from our current system based on power and greed resulting in wealth for a few and misery for the many to building a new system based on the values of peace, justice and human rights that lift up communities and heal the planet.  We willingly and courageously accept responsibility of co-creating a more loving, vibrant, resilient and democratic Whatcom County, hence the world.

 

Occupy Bellingham will accomplish this mission by,

  1. Standing in solidarity with other occupations, movements and organizations with a similar purpose throughout the world and,
  2. Giving support to and engaging with other local movements in their pursuit of peace and a sustainable earth for 7 generations, and
  3. In accordance with our vision established November 2012: “I want Justice and I want Democracy”, we will have clear, strategic objectives/demands/goals to direct our future actions.

See also original OWS documents:

http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/principles-of-solidarity/

http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/statement-of-autonomy/

 

Adopted at OCCUPY BELLINGHAM General Assembly by consensus on 12/19/2013

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