JANUARY 17th GENERAL ASSEMBLY-APPROVED FINAL DRAFT VISION STATEMENT:

We the people of Occupy Wall Street gather in the canyons of wealth to reaffirm our inalienable rights. United with the peoples of the world, we declare our rights to a just society and a flourishing environment for future generations.

Our political and economic systems are broken. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we live in a world where wealth is power. Our democracy now belongs to the highest bidder. Today, we must remember the lessons of history, restore human dignity, and begin anew to build the bonds of trust and goodwill among all.

From the General Assembly to the people of the world, we offer a Declaration of our Vision for the future.

We envision a free, democratic, and just society, built on the following principles.

LIBERTY: whereby we secure the full spectrum of human rights – political, civil, economic, social, and cultural – against violation or infringement, particularly by unchecked corporate power and unjust governments;

PEOPLE POWER: whereby governance, in every form and at every level, exists by the will of those governed; where neither wealth nor history alone will justify power; where everyone’s voice is heard, and no one is marginalized;

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT: whereby we value human dignity and needs over monetary gain, elevating them to a place of primary importance; among these are the rights to meaningful and fairly rewarded work; a decent home; abundant sources of clean air, pure water and natural, nutritious food supplies; and free, comprehensive healthcare and education;

FAIRNESS: whereby we collectively call on all who enjoy society’s benefits to accept their share of society’s responsibilities; where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive, and power is shared equitably by all so that no one is allowed to exploit, oppress or enslave another.

EQUALITY: whereby we reject all forms of institutionalized discrimination and oppression, on any basis, including but not limited to race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, nationality or economic standing;

JUSTICE: whereby transparent and accountable social, political, legal, and economic systems work to benefit all, not just a privileged few; these systems are restructured or replaced when they fail to do so;

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP: whereby the wealth of our economy emerges from the health of our environment and therefore all societal activities are conducted with respect, humane treatment, and foresight to ensure that all life is sustainable and that the world has room to flourish, now and for future generations.

PEACE: whereby non-violence is embraced as a way of life, and we resolve to live together in harmony and celebrate principles of compassion, appreciation, and respect for diversity and the differing views of others;

It is not enough to know better; we must do better. Our social and political ideals have to be claimed and asserted by each generation.

And we look forward to a day when we can shift our focus beyond the notion of individual rights, towards a culture of sharing, where our love and compassion for each other and our world will be the only guides we need.

We affirm our commitment to live this new world in our hearts and make it a reality.

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The same thing goes for international relations. If Mozambique owes the US 10 billion dollars, Mozambique has a big problem. If the US owes Japan10 billion dollars, then Japan has a problem, because there’s no way it can force the US to do anything it doesn’t want to.

Or even France: in 1971 when Charles de Gaulle tried to call in his US debt in gold, which he was legally entitled to do, Nixon just shrugged his shoulders said “fine, then I’ll go off the gold standard.” What was France going to do? Nuke us?

Actually, most of those countries that own all those T-bonds know they are losing money by sitting on them (the yields are less than inflation), and they’ll never get all their money back. But most of them – Japan, South Korea, the Gulf States – are regimes under US military protection, in fact, with huge US military bases sitting right on top of them, so really we’re talking about protection money—in whatever sense of the term.

David Graeber studied 5,000 years of debt: real dirty secret is that if the deficit ever completely went away, it would cause a major catastrophe

"

The creeping attempts at legislation are down to the power of what he calls the “copyright monopoly”, and although the US record industry and Hollywood studios view file-sharing sites as theft, and this week succeeded in having the founders of one site, Megaupload.com, charged with racketeering, Falkvinge is clear that it’s no such thing.

“It’s not theft. It’s an infringement on a monopoly. If it was theft and it was property, we wouldn’t need a copyright law, ordinary property laws would suffice.” Nor does he have any truck with the argument that file-sharing hurts art and artists.

“It’s just not true. Musicians earn 114% more since the advent of Napster. The average income per artist has risen 66%, with 28% more artists being able to make a living off their hobby. What is true is that there’s an obsolete middle market of managers. And in a functioning market, they would just disappear.”

But in any case, he says, it’s not about the economy or creativity. “What it boils down to is a privileged elite who’ve had a monopoly on dictating the narrative. And suddenly they’re losing it. We’re at a point where this old corporate industry thinks that, in order to survive, it has to dismantle freedom of speech.”

http://m.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/22/rick-falkvinge-swedish-radical-web-freedoms?cat=technology&type=article

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Mr. Chomsky said he had taken no offense at Mr. Chávez’s remarks about his being dead. In fact, Mr. Chávez’s promotion of the book propelled it yesterday into Amazon’s top 10 best sellers.

While retired from teaching full time, Mr. Chomsky still goes to his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, occasionally lecturing and also working on a new book.

A Scholar is alive, actually, and hungry for debate

Noam Chomsky on the Responsibility of Intellectuals: Redux

"It seems that most of us get more pleasure out of doing than out of having. Though the line between “doing” and “having” is not always a bright one (for example, is the $5,000 ski trip “having” or “doing”?) Leaf Van Boven, Tom Gilovich, and their collaborators have shown that doing satisfies us more than having does. In reflecting on the past or contemplating the future, people are happier when they have experiences on their minds than when they have things on their minds. And the higher a person’s income is, the bigger the disparity between the joys of doing and the joys of having. Moreover, we don’t adapt to doing to the same degree that we adapt to having. The museum trip, the hike, the bike ride in the hills, the informal dinner with friends keep satisfying long after the Mercedes has stopped providing a thrill. And a great thing about at least some “doing” is that it doesn’t cost much money. Furthermore, people seem to get an extra shot of well-being juice when they do things that serve others rather than themselves. The pleasures associated with our own acts of consumption tend to be short-lived. The pleasures derived from doing something for others linger."

Consumption Makes Us Sad? Science Says We Can Be Happy With Less - The Daily Beast

"So no, Mitt Romney, when we say that Americans are waking up to the reality that inequality matters, we’re not guilty of “envy” or “class warfare,” as you claimed to Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today. Nor are we talking about everybody earning the same amount of money – that’s the straw man apologists for inequality raise whenever anyone tries to get serious."

America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters | On Democracy | BillMoyers.com

"

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it’s all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take
over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.
We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we’ve stayed out of the
USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.
They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with
trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that
you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the
hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to
mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.
To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re
creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls
become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching
movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones
is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had
no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy
in the world - because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more
honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information
when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

https://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt

"While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements. "

8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

"During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life."

8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance