Monday, December 19, 2011

From Exposure to Action- A New Turn in the Occupy Movement

When the history books are written, this winter may be the remembered at the time when Occupy Wall Street moved from the exposure of the economic system's inequities to the active defense of the disfranchised. The actions taken to prevent evictions and foreclosures in Brooklyn to Atlanta show the potential of OWS to renegotiate the social contract for people who have lost their homes. The same thing can eventually be done for people who can't pay their student loans. The Eviction of the Occupiers has given the movement a priceless opportunity to help people fight back against impoverishment and marginalization. By next year, there may be thousands of once empty, now occupied homes and apartments throughout this country. There won't be enough police to evict them. And if that happens, local governments may declare this occupations "legal" as they did in Berlin after the fall of the wall, when artists from all over Germany and all over the world occupied abandoned space in the former "Eastern Zone" of the city!

Mark Naison
December 19, 2011

1 comment:

ScreamingInSilence said...

It's an interesting idea. I can't count how many stories I've read about the banks refusing to negotiate with home owners and then selling the homes for minute fractions of the original worth. That said, squatters squat now and from what I've seen in NJ no one really bothers them, some even have utilities hooked up. I'm not sure what the process is for evicting them, but there must be a process otherwise, I assume, they'd have been forced to leave by now.