No, were not talking about the Avenida Revolucion, in Tijuana, B.C., Mexico, the world-famous introduction to Mexico visitors receive when they cross over the World's busiest border crossing from San Diego, CA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenida_Revoluci%C3%B3n
An avenue that as a child, opened my eyes up to the shocking poverty and hopelessness of life in the "Third World". The state of Baja California Norte, and the city of Tijuana have taken great pains over the last 25 years or so to "clean up" and improve the image of the central core area of the city, yet you still only have to walk a few blocks off Revolucion or the other main drag, Avenida Constitucion, to understand what the "Third World" really means.
But the Avenida Revolucion we're talking about now is Wall Street. Because there is a revolution now occurring, and spreading across the World, from and because of it.
And which is very inspiring, and if it continues to grow and spread, will bring about meaningful changes toward building a more sane and just society in this and other countries. This is a revolution in spirit, and non-violent direct action, inspired by those which started in Tunisia and Egypt, not a violent overthrow of an existing regime, as say occurred in Russia in 1917, or France, in 1789. Though if the "corporatocracy" which continues, so far, in it's unabated sociopathic path of greed, and destruction of lives, hope, and the environment, across the World, is not checked, it will eventually be. Fortunately, "practising idealists", thousands and thousands of them (and hopefully soon, millions!), who realise in the core of their beings, that "ends do not justify means", are working cooperatively to bring to light and change the destructive, unjust aspects of our current predatory Capitalistic socio-political and economic system.
Corporate media sources have been criticising the movement as being filled with lazy, shiftless, unemployable "hippie" types, just coming together to party. And wondering why there have been no demands stated. Yet there are, this is a declaration issued by the main "Occupy Wall Street" working group. https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/ The #OWS movement started over the past year, as a loose coalition of different working groups, with no central authority and leadership, and continues to evolve that way, now with increasing support from organised labour, and a few politicians. Though great care is being taken not to allow the movement to be subverted or strangled by partisan politicians, because they know that by doing so, it's great power will be lost. None of the great changes in U.S. society since the country's inception, the end of slavery, woman's suffrage, labour reforms, civil rights, etc.., came about through the ballot box, but from direct action and civil disobedience, often at great sacrifice, and so it must be again.
Once again, one of our favourite authors, Chris Hedges, who lives in New York City, and is a part of the movement, wrote an inspiring piece about the movement, which we'd like to share part of:
A Movement Too Big to Failby Chris Hedges
"There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.
Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises. These protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional “liberal” establishment has steadily refused to do—fight back. And it was deeply moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street. It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase “too big to fail.”
photo: Daniel OliverioTinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back. It has no other way of defying the corporate state. This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one. It affirms our dignity. It permits us to become free and independent human beings.
Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices. King too was a radical. He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or justice. He understood that movements—such as the Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women’s rights, the labor movement and the civil rights movement—have always been the true correctives in American democracy. None of those movements achieved formal political power. But by holding fast to moral imperatives they made the powerful fear them. King knew that racial equality was impossible without economic justice and an end to militarism. And he had no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal establishment that called on him to be calm and patience. “For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King said shortly before he was assassinated. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.”
Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices. King too was a radical. He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or justice. He understood that movements—such as the Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women’s rights, the labor movement and the civil rights movement—have always been the true correctives in American democracy. None of those movements achieved formal political power. But by holding fast to moral imperatives they made the powerful fear them. King knew that racial equality was impossible without economic justice and an end to militarism. And he had no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal establishment that called on him to be calm and patience. “For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King said shortly before he was assassinated. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.”
King was killed in 1968 when he was in Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers. By then he had begun to say that his dream, the one that the corporate state has frozen into a few safe clichés from his 1963 speech in Washington, had turned into a nightmare. King called at the end of his life for massive federal funds to rebuild inner cities, what he called “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” a complete restructuring of “the architecture of American society.” He grasped that the inequities of capitalism had become the instrument by which the poor would always remain poor. “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” King said, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” On the eve of King’s murder he was preparing to organize a poor people’s march on Washington, D.C., designed to cause “major, massive dislocations,” a nonviolent demand by the poor, including the white underclass, for a system of economic equality. It would be 43 years before his vision was realized by an eclectic group of protesters who gathered before the gates of Wall Street.
The truth of America is understood only when you listen to voices in our impoverished rural enclaves, prisons and the urban slums, when you hear the words of our unemployed, those who have lost their homes or cannot pay their medical bills, our elderly and our children, especially the quarter of the nation’s children who depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are marginalized. There is more reality expressed about the American experience by the debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all the chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the airwaves.
What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?
What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?
“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”
“The black vote mean [nothing],” the rapper Nas intones. “Who you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan? In the hood nothing is changing,/ We aint got no choices.”
“The black vote mean [nothing],” the rapper Nas intones. “Who you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan? In the hood nothing is changing,/ We aint got no choices.”
Or listen to hip-hop artist Talib Kweli: “Back in the ’60s, there was a big push for black … politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our communities are so much worse. A lot of people died for us to vote, I’m aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at all. Politics is not the truth to me, it’s an illusion.”...
The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve. It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. This is what happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is King, especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader.
...The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class. It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets. Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater. But that game is over."
Here in Anchorage, we have our own "Occupy" movement. The last two Saturday's have seen a few hundred people marching and carrying signs representing the movement around the central part of downtown, near our swank Performing Arts Centre and Museum. This past Saturday Mattie and I were able to attend and get a feel for the strength of it, and meet a few people. We arrived around 1500 in the afternoon.
The park square where the movement gathers is bounded by the two busiests streets coming in and out of Downtown Anchorage, 5th and 6th, which form the Glenn Highway, the only route north out of the city. There were people on both streets holding signs, above, and we were very heartened to hear and see nothing but support from the passing cars, honks and waves. Not a single disparaging comment. And, there were no police in evidence, either! It was a cool, drizzly day, about 4C (39F), but at least, not raining hard.
In the square between the two streets, about 150-200 people were gathered round, and some tents were set up, providing food, a library, and information about the "occupation". The plans are not to continuously occupy the square, as in NYC and other cities, but to keep returning on evenings and weekends. http://www.facebook.com/OccupyAnchorage
Non-violent civil disobedience training was offered shortly after we arrived, and we took part, as the basics were explained, which we were familiar with.
Non-violent civil disobedience training was offered shortly after we arrived, and we took part, as the basics were explained, which we were familiar with.
This lasted about a half-hour, then that was it for the organised events for the day. A planning meeting was set up for later in the week, for other events to follow.
We thought this young man's sign was interesting, and we checked out these links. They are worth looking into, check them out, see what you think. www.opensourceeocology.org www.verticalfarm.com www.windowfarms.org That's one neat thing about when idealistic, progressive people come together, we all can learn quite a bit from each other.
We were very encouraged by the support of the passing people, both on the street, and in their cars, for the movement, and by the lack of police presence. And we look forward to reporting on Occupy Anchorage's activities, as they develop. Our climate, obviously, isn't very encouraging of outdoor protests and civil disobedience type activities, at least for half the year, all the more reason to support them in their efforts, and join in when we can. Please join us. Viva La Revolucion!
EL PROYECTO MALASPINA
Your lead editor will not be able to attend any of the Occupy Anchorage activities the next few Saturday's, due to our long-planned trip to the Malaspina Glacier, the largest tidewater glacier in Alaska, on the Gulf of Alaska coast near Yakutat. 
Our friends at Ground Truth Trekking, http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/About/, Hig and Erin, and their two small children, Lituya (9 months old), and Katmai (three years), are engaging in a remarkable journey, which started last 15 September, and which will end on 15 November. During which they are hiking/pack-rafting the edge of the Malaspina glacier from northwest to southeast, in about a 110 KM traverse, utilising a few pre-set caches of food and supplies. To document changes in this amazing glacial system of the last several decades, re-occupying sites, which in some cases, haven't been visited in 100 years.
Global warming is causing most of the glaciers in Alaska to rapidly recede, especially the lower-elevation source-region ones. 
The Malaspina, though it's source region is in the highest elevations of the St. Elias mountains, is still receding, and in very interesting ways, which we'll be discussing when we return. And since global warming will be accelerating in the coming decades, the changes we'll show you, will be as well.
I am fortunate enough to be able to join them, for just 8 days, beginning this friday, with a couple other of their friends. We'll all be surveying the southern part of the glacier, taking photos and video. We won't be moving camp every day, probably just once or twice in the 8 days I'll be there, but doing day trips up onto the ice and around the edges and along the coast. Here are some scenes from their passage through the area in 2007:
Our intrepid assistant editor Mattie will have to remain here at the Chugach Front Research Centre unfortunately, but she will be in good hands and ready for action, when I return.
Needless to say, this is during the peak of the Gulf of Alaska fall storm season, which can offer up storms at any time with 80-160 kph winds (50-100 mph), along with heavy rain/snow. There haven't been any this strong yet, during Hig and Erin's time there, and hopefully the worst we'll see are ones half that strength. Between 1-2 day storms though, there are usually at least 1-2 nice days, where beautiful views of the wild coast, glacier, and St. Elias mountains come out. And which will enable us to work more, and move camp, when needed. This will be a good test of my best outdoor gear. Because we are right on the coast, temperatures will be fairly mild, -10C to +10C (18F to 50F), so the main issue will just be keeping dry in our tent, and outside, while we are working.
So forgive us for dropping out of contact for a few weeks. We'll be back on the 29th, and will share with you as quickly as possible, what transpired there, and our findings, in this amazing place. Cheers.
