Occupy Needham! (Needham News Channel)

Needham Channel coverage of last month's standout in Needham:

Occupy Politics/Occupy the Burbs coverage

It's a MAIN STREET movement. (Natick MA 11/2011)

This is a new thread (instead of cramming more and more into old ones) for coverage on "phase 2" of Occupy tactics (engaging politics) and a running list of press coverage of MA Burb'ish Occupations.

(click here for other posts on this blog re: Occupy)

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"In Needham - activists see a need to bring Occupy movement to the suburbs" - The Boston Globe

In Needham - activists see a need to bring Occupy movement to the suburbs - The Boston Globe:
'via Blog this'

The sign by the front door of Artie Crocker’s Needham home bore a plain message: “I am the 99 percent.’’

At 52, the graphic designer and engineer still lives in the town where he was born and raised. He has two grown daughters, an aging cat, and a growing sense that somehow the America around him is just not right anymore.

Like others in support of Occupy protests on Wall Street and elsewhere around the globe, Crocker feels that America’s richest 1 percent have benefited fabulously in recent years while the other 99 percent have seen their wages and living standards stagnate.

“I saw what was going on on Wall Street and then I heard it was going on in Boston and I said, ‘I just can’t sit here and do nothing. I just can’t do it,’ ’’ Crocker said during a lull in the action at his home Sunday night.

There, crammed on green floral-patterned couches and folding chairs in the small living room were about 30 like-minded men and women from Boston’s suburbs who wanted to help keep the message of the Occupy protest in Boston and all around the nation alive - without having to actually camp out downtown.

The gathering was a pilot meeting, Crocker explained, for an expansion of the downtown-centered protests against big-money influence in politics to the suburbs.

Occupy Needham / Occupy the Burbs Pilot Meeting

(UPDATE: Press Coverage links are now in their own post, for clarity's sake)
On Oct 23, at Artie's home in Needham, 30 people from all over the metrowest suburbs came for a standing room only meeting to discuss how we can support the Occupy Boston movement--from our own communities.  Following are the notes from the meeting: 
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Let's keep the momentum going!

Meeting notes from last night are after the flip.  You can find one of the handouts from last night here.  

Why We #Occupy (the Burbs).

Here's why:

(1)   Our ECONOMY is working only for a very privileged few (the 1%. If you make less than $320,000, you are in the bottom 99%)

(2)  And our POLITICAL SYSTEM has been hijacked, because of the corrupting influence of $$$$ and the faulty premise that ‘MONEY = SPEECH’.  Therefore, POLITICS AS USUAL cannot solve the problem of our broken economy.  POLITICS AS USUAL can only be be fought by a POPULAR MOVEMENT--a large and loud enough demand from the public that cannot be ignored because it is so large and loud.  


(3)  These are facts we all know, have known.  Many people and groups have been working on changing this for a long time (e.g., Common Cause has been talking about “The Other 98%” for a while).  HOWEVER, OCCUPY has been the first movement to successfully break thru the clutter and seize NATIONAL ATTENTION to these problems. (Polling shows broad support for Occupy)



(4)  Because of this broad buy-in/attention to the OCCUPY movement, WE HAVE THE FIRST OPPORTUNITY SINCE THE 60s to demand and GET systemic changes. These changes will ONLY happen with broad support; without broad popular demand for change, THE CORRUPTED SYSTEM WILL CONTINUE AS USUAL (see #2 above).



(5)  Therefore, for the Occupy movement to succeed in creating the political will to effect the massive changes we need, it is IMPERATIVE that the Middle-Class, Suburbs, and people who do not normally “get involved in politics” BUY-IN/SUPPORT the Occupy movement and message. (it’s also imperative that poorer, urban communities and communities of color are involved, but that’s not Needham)

(6)  THE RISK/DANGERS:  

**	The Occupy movement, with the passing of time, runs risk of fading from public attention, or perhaps worse, becoming painted in a distasteful light that turns the “mainstream” (white, suburban middle class) against the movement.  If that happens, we will have LOST/SQUANDERED a very rare opportunity to change the system.
Those w/vested interests* in maintaining the status quo are desperate to smear Occupy as hippies, hypocrites, mooches, suckers, racists...	*or have been convinced by the 1% to fight against their interests

(7)  However, with GOOD GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING, we can productively (not reactively) BUILD and SPREAD the movement--ON OUR TERMS, THE TERMS OF THE 99%.  That is why we are here tonight:  

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TO BRAINSTORM HOW WE CAN HELP

- build broad support for and

- spread the movement,

and then

GO OUT AND DO IT.

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