via Shadow and Act
Famed director Melvin Van Peebles, who knows his share of controversy, decided to lend his support to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. His 1971 song “Love That’s America,” from his first Hollywood film Watermelon Man, has been used with various OWS promotional videos circulating on the web now. The latest one, below, is by Cypher Films.
The Occupy activists and their supporters have brought us together as the 99%. They call upon the majority to stand up against the minority. The old minorities, in effect, are the new majority. There are major responsibilities attached to this decision to forge such an expansive community of resistance. We say no to Wall Street, to the big banks, to corporate executives making millions of dollars a year. We say no to student debt. We are learning also to say no to global capitalism and to the prison industrial complex. And even as police in Portland, Oakland and now New York, move to force activists from their encampments, we say no to evictions and to police violence.
Occupy activists are thinking deeply about how we might incorporate opposition to racism, class exploitation, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, violence done to the environment and transphobia into the resistance of the 99%. Of course, we must be prepared to challenge military occupation and war. And if we identify with the 99%, we will also have to learn how to imagine a new world, one where peace is not simply the absence of war, but rather, a creative refashioning of global social relations.
via Black Agenda Report
The question for Black America is not what’s going on in the heads of young white people in Zuccotti Park, but how WE will organize in our own defense against Wall Street, which has “done more damage to Black people than anyone else” in the country. Barack Obama, “most of the traditional Black organizations, and the entire Black Misleadership Class” are all bought and paid for by finance capital. “Our job is to wake our people up, so that we don’t sleep through this moment.”