Welcome to Occupy Denver's corner on Tumblr, serving the purpose to broadcast information, pictures, articles, and opinion pieces relating to not only Occupy Denver, but the whole Occupy Wall Street movement.
This blog also allows submissions from our readers, to learn more about submission guidlines, click here. For more information about Occupy Denver, please consult this
Occupy Denver could always use supplies. If you would like to donate or know what you can do to help, please look through this and see what you can bring. Even the littlest of things help!
Other donations can be mailed at 1550 Larimer St. Box 224 Denver, CO 80202!
Alright, let’s ignore Occupy for a moment. This is beyond that.
In case you’re wondering, basically, there’s a very privileged and rich force that wants to criminalize homelessness. How?
Shelter funding has been dramatically cut over the years in Denver. And a lot of homeless folks have nowhere else to go are forced to sleep on doorsteps, including business centers. If this ordnance passes, it will make it illegal to sleep out on the streets. These people have NOWHERE else to go. Homeless shelters are over-crowded. Many organizations who help the homeless, including Colorado Collation for the Homeless have voiced concerns over this ordnance.
Albus Brooks is an outspoken proponent for the ordnance, putting business over people, calling himself a minister. He forgets the fact that Jesus Christ himself would advocate helping the homeless. This man and many of the Denver City Council have never talked to the homeless. Many of the homeless are veterans and have been neglected by the system.
I cannot support this government until the OWS manifesto is addressed and recognized.
Dear fellow Americans,
We are assembled in Zucotti Park — which we’ve renamed Liberty Plaza — in the financial district of New York, because we believe that the American economy is heading in the wrong direction and we have a few ideas for what to do about it.
There is a feeling shared by a growing number of people on the streets of the world that the global economy has become a kind of Ponzi scheme, a global casino, run by and for the benefit of the 1 percent.
We believe that it is possible to inject justice into the global economy. We have come up with the following list of things that can be done right now to rejuvenate democracy and economic justice in our country:
• Halt foreclosures for the unemployed, sick and elderly
• Increase funding to public services by taxing the richest 1 percent
• Forgive all student loan debt
• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act in order to control speculation
• Work with the other G20 nations to implement a 1% “Robin Hood” tax on all financial transactions and currency trades
• Ban high-frequency ‘flash’ trading and bring sanity to the markets
• Break up the “too big to fail” banks that threaten our future
• Arrest the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown and bring them to justice
• Ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence corporate money has on our elected representatives in Washington
If you agree with any of these demands, then join us! We will stay here in our encampment in Liberty Plaza until President Obama responds to each of these demands. This is just the beginning, there is more to come as we work together to reshape America.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is urging his City Council to enact strict new restrictions on many forms of protest on Wednesday, January 18. Local advocates say the Council is distracted by a fierce redistricting battle and that the new ordinance is likely to pass unnoticed, unless there’s a huge outcry.
According to the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal, the proposed ordinance imposes impossible-to-meet requirements, confusing restrictions and sky-high fines on protest organizers and participants, including:
A 2-hour time limit on all protests;
An increase in minimum fines from $50 to $1000 for violations of “parade regulations”;
A curfew in public spaces; and
A requirement to pre-register “attention-getting devices”, including signs and megaphones, at least 1 week before the event.
Perhaps most startling is the provision that would allow the Mayor’s office to sign no-bid contracts with security companies — whose employees may lack suitable training and oversight to prevent gross abuses.
Occupy Rogers Park and Occupy South Side started the petition because they believe that “this ordinance is a direct attack on anyone in this city who might ever walk a picket line, attend a rally, or stand in solidarity with others in support of a cause.” They want to flood City Council’s inboxes with messages opposing Chicago’s proposed anti-protest legislation, and make sure this message is heard loud and clear before Wednesday’s vote.
Glenn Beck has recently found a soul mate in Thomas Paine, the Founding Father known for his Revolutionary War tract Common Sense. So much so that he’s gone so far as to rewrite Common Sense for the modern era, essentially stuffing words hand over fist into the mouth of a centuries-dead political philosopher for the soul-shriveling disgust Beck knows Paine would feel about Barack Obama.
Libertarians and tea partiers are so enamored by their new ideological BFF that they’ve taken to dressing up like him on YouTube and spouting off about the evils of taxation, weak foreign policy and too many brown people.
But Beck and his minions could probably benefit from actually reading some Thomas Paine. The guy whose 17th century ghost waxes emotional about 9/11 and congressional pay raises on the Internet is also responsible for these ideas:
“Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.
“It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread… pay to every such person of the age of fifty years … the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty… This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.
An entitlement paying old people to support them for not working? That sounds like Social Security, passed by…
“There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it.” Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.
It almost sounds like he’s about to say we should all share in the wealth or somethi-
“Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.
