To our families, friends, and allies,
As a community longing for the freedom of all people, from all forms of oppression, we stand with the movement of the 99%, and encourage you to deepen your participation in whatever ways you can.
Despite the nationally coordinated evictions of many Occupy camps this past month, people throughout the US and around the world continue to come together, experimenting with direct democracy and demanding a new economic system. Many people are feeling their collective power for the first time. In a deeply promising departure from the global antagonisms spurred by the U.S. government’s post-9/11 imperialist policies, heightened grassroots internationalist solidarity is being forged between the popular movements of the U.S. and the Arab world. In one inspiring gesture of this, the Occupy movement received a
letter of support from comrades in Cairo encouraging our continued resistance.
We are becoming the movement so many of us have been working for. As the power, beauty, and multiplicity of the 99% comes into focus, we must continue to amplify the voices and support the leadership of the most oppressed sections of the 99%. The framing of the 99% has brilliant potential and has sparked many imaginations, but we must not let it flatten the real differences within the 99%, or those will become divisions that sap this movement's power.
![General Strike in Oakland, CA]()
We know that while we are part of the 99% inside the U.S., we continue to be the 1% of the world because of U.S. imperialism. Thus, in targeting Wall Street bankers we must also target U.S. wars of conquest and international financial institutions that perpetuate global inequality, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.
Additionally, we want to acknowledge another 1%; the 1 in 100 people currently locked in U.S. prisons, jails and detention centers. As we build bridges across borders, we must also build windows through walls, and work to include the voices of the millions of people struggling to survive within the prison industrial complex. We stand with
Iraq Veterans Against the War, who led a
veterans march against police brutality, demonstrating the radical potential of war veterans determined to take a meaningful bite out of the power of
U.S. militarism at home and abroad. We stand behind organizations including
Critical Resistance and Oakland's
Stop the Injunctions Coalition that have been building community power to stop repressive tactics of racial profiling, criminalization, and gentrification, and to demand community self-determination particularly for working-class people of color, who are among the most targeted by the 1%.
It’s time to build the world we have all been holding in our hearts.
We encourage everyone who longs for justice to deepen your engagement in this moment:
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Check out your local occupy and find meaningful ways to engage with people. Lean into it. Meet people where they are. Make a heart connection and move with people towards justice.
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Bring the spirit of Bernice Johnson Reagon's wise words into your work building the fabric of this movement, in this powerful and complex moment: “If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition."
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On that note: Opportunity brings challenge! Don’t settle for sitting back and criticizing the shortcomings of this movement from the sidelines. Bring your principled, anti-racist leadership and encourage others to share their skills. Help open the space to be more fully open to more of the 99%. Talk about the root causes of oppression in an accessible way, and discuss strategies for social transformation.
Ask the questions that will help us figure out our common struggle, such as: How did the 1% get to be the 1%? What keeps the 1% in place, while keeping the 99% divided? As the EZLN saying goes, “We want to live in a world where many worlds fit.” Occupy is a cry of many voices carrying this desire. Raise yours.
With Love & Hope,
Catalyst Project
