Dear ableist assholes in Occupy Seattle

Letter from Noah to ableist assholes:

Dear ableist assholes in Occupy Seattle,

I am a wheelchair user who took part in the December 12th West coast Port shutdown. I want to say fuck you to all the people who belittled me and talk down to me while I was out there.
To the person who patted my back and thanked me for braving the march. Fuck you! Our society treats people with disabilities like shit, so thank you for putting your white able bodied privilege on hold for one day.
To the people who said “At least you know you won’t get arrested” Fuck you! When the cop was hitting me with his bike at pier 18 I don’t think he cared I was in a wheelchair. When the cops threw the chemical flare at us I wasn’t magically immune.
And finally to the Asshole who came up to me and said ” I wouldn’t wish it on Hitler but if anybody gets pepper sprayed today I hope its you because you will make a great press release” Fuck you! I am not going to idly sit by to help this movement. If I do get brutalized by the cops it is not going to be for a press release it is going to be because People with disabilities are constantly being hurt by this economic system.

In solidarity with some of you, the rest can fuck off

Occupy Seattle Anti-Oppression and Accountability Principles

Occupy Seattle Anti-Oppression and Accountability Principles

Wed, 10/19/2011 – 10:53

We are the 99% and our task is to unify the 99%. Unfortunately, we live in a society that is racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and ridden with various other interconnected forms of repression.

As the Occupy Seattle community, we will consciously and urgently work on dismantling these systems of oppression in our movement. We are working on creating a comm unity where everyone’s autonomy is respected, protected, and treated equally. We all have different levels of privilege that we strive to acknowledge and educate ourselves about, in order to ensure that these privileges are not used to oppress others. We want to have an inclusive atmosphere of ideas in which we do not police each others’ thoughts, but we have absolutely no tolerance for oppressive or intimidating words or actions.

We do not accept any of the following in our community:
■ White supremacy (racism against people of color)
■ Patriarchy (sexism)
■ Ageism (oppression against youth and/or elders)
■ Heterosexism (oppression against LGBTQ people)
■ Transphobia
■ Anti-Arab sentiment (or Islamophobia)
■ Anti-Jewish sentiment
■ Religious intolerance or intolerance of non-religious people
■ Class oppression (classism)
■ Cultural intolerance
■ Oppression based on immigration status
■ Oppression based on experiences with the justice system
■ Disregard for indigenous autonomy
■ Oppression based on appearance or size
■ The following behaviors are also unacceptable:
■ Representing the Occupy Seattle movement to the media or to any other entity without approval of the general assembly
■ Negotiating with the police or the City without approval of the general assembly
■ Instigation of violence in all its forms, explicit or implicit, whether physical, emotional, sexual, verbal, written, graphical, or through indirect means such as calling the police on another person when one is not in imminent physical danger

An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports

[NOTE: This letter was not drafted by those maintaining this website and there is no direct affiliation, we simply want to act in solidarity with the port truck drivers and to help be a platform for this message]

An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports

We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.

We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, and Seattle to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the four of us we have six children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 31 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.

We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.

Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?

We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families.

There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.

We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.

Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.

You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.

Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.

It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.”

But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal operator that runs one of the West Coast’s major trucking carriers, Shippers’ Transport Express, doing this? Why would mega-rich Maersk, a huge Danish shipping and trucking conglomerate that wants  to drill for more oil with Exxon Mobil in the Gulf Coast conduct business this way too?

To cheat on taxes, drive down business costs, and deny us the right to belong to a union, that’s why.

The typical arrangement works like this: Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks. The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it. Our employers do not have to pay the costs of meeting emissions-compliant regulations; that is our financial burden to bear. Clean trucks cost about four to five times more than what we take home in a year. A few of us haul our company’s trucks for a tiny fraction of what the shippers pay per load instead of an hourly wage. They still call us independent owner-operators and give us a 1099 rather than a W-2.

We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?

Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who haul clothing brands like Guess?, Under Armour, and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. The carrier they work for in Los Angeles is called Toll Group and is headquartered in Australia. At the busiest time of the holiday shopping season, 26 drivers were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. The company hired an anti-union consultant to intimidate the drivers. Down Under, the same company bargains with 12,000 of our counterparts in good faith.

Despite our great hardships, many of us cannot — or refuse to, as some of the most well-intentioned suggest — “just quit.” First, we want to work and do not have a safety net. Many of us are tied to one-sided leases. But more importantly, why should we have to leave? Truck driving is what we do, and we do it well.

We are the skilled, specially-licensed professionals who guarantee that Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart are all stocked with just-in-time delivery for consumers. Take a look at all the stuff in your house. The things you see advertised on TV. Chances are a port truck driver brought that special holiday gift to the store you bought it.

We would rather stick together and transform our industry from within. We deserve to be fairly rewarded and valued. That is why we have united to stage convoys, park our trucks, marched on the boss, and even shut down these ports.

It’s like our hero Dutch Prior, a Shipper’s/SSA Marine driver, told CBS Early Morning this month: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice.

Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.”

But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here.

We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.”

Thank you.                                                            In solidarity,

Leonardo Mejia

SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express

Port of Long Beach, 10-year driver

Yemane Berhane

Ports of Seattle & Tacoma

6-year port driver

Xiomara Perez

Toll Group

Port of Los Angeles, 8-year driver

Abdul Khan

Port of Oakland

7-year port driver

WHY ARE WE HERE?

WHY ARE WE HERE?

Ask any two people involved with the Occupy Movement this question and you are most likely to get two different answers. What must be recognized when attempting to define the Occupy Movement and when seeking to identify its goals is that we are a movement composed of vastly varying perspectives. “We are the 99%,” but “the 99%” contains people with a mass of different grievances and potential solutions to the current state of the world. We have all come together in response to the same call to action, “Occupy Wall Street.” However, this call to action is only a common catalyst; we have been mobilized by the same target—Wall Street and the vast inequalities in material wealth and power represented by it. What this movement is about then, is creating new spaces for political activity and community engagement to take place. We declare the spaces of the occupations as places where an equality of voices may exist; the spaces of Occupation seek to build democracy from the ground up.

Right now, the process of democracy is the most fundamental aspect of this movement and must not be undermined by a sense of urgency for products or other results; because our primary product is democracy itself and we have already begun to take possession of it through the creation of these spaces. Allow this to continue to unfold.

In broader society, outside of the spaces of the Occupations, many people have their attention captured and their imagination dominated by a story being told. This story is continuing to be told in a way that supports those who are telling it and which also controls those who are uncritically listening to it. This story is being told by all of the mainstream media corporations, elected officials, and their mutual friends in the major banks and other transnational corporations. The story says that there exists a power elite who control our world and that the rest of us need to appeal to them or attempt to get more of ‘our own’ within their ranks in order to affect change. This is not actually the case.

What we are realizing with the Occupy Movement is that the power is within all of us—all we need to do is realize this and cease to believe the stories telling us otherwise while shifting our focus to building a better world. The dominant narrative of the world now, the story being told by “the 1%,’ is that only one possible world exists and the majority of people have no power to create it. It is the job of the Occupy Movement to subvert this message and liberate our self from that horror story. All of the laws empowering corporate interests, waging war on the planet and its peoples, torturing people, and putting masses of people in prisons in order to protect the interests of “the 1%,” and even the people who feel trapped into playing their roles within this grand story—the inflexibility of all this goes away once we begin to act as beings capable of telling our own stories. Act as though the world is not doomed to be as it is.

For this movement to continue to gain momentum, we need more people to wake up from the matrix created by the mainstream media and all of its mutually reinforcing storytellers; stop believing that we are powerless to create a better world and begin working with others to create a world in which many worlds fit—a world in which each and every being has agency that is recognized and valued by everyone else. Wake up!

DECLARATION OF DECOLONIZE/OCCUPY SEATTLE

DECLARATION OF DECOLONIZE/OCCUPY SEATTLE

AFFIRMATION of Decolonization of Seattle with Northwest Indigenous Peoples

WHEREAS, those participating in “Decolonize/Occupy Seattle” acknowledge that the United States of America is a colonial country, and that we are invaders and squatters upon stolen indigenous land that has already been occupied for centuries, Seattle being the ancestral land of the Duwamish and Suquamish people; and

WHEREAS, indigenous people of this land have continued to resist the violent conquest, oppression, exploitation and victimization by the invaders and colonizers since they first arrived on this continent; and as a result have endured a great amount of trans-generational trauma and woundedness; and that their experience strengthens this movement to expose those on-going inhumane crimes; and

WHEREAS, after centuries of disregard for the welfare of future generations, and the repeated disrespect and exploitation of the Earth, we find ourselves on a violated and polluted planet, lacking the Indigenous people’s wisdom and knowledge to live in balance, harmony and at peace with the community of Life; and

WHEREAS, the term “occupation” has been used by imperialists to colonize indigenous lands

WHEREAS, the term “occupation” has also been reclaimed by militant workers of color from Latin America (Oaxaca, Buenos Aires, South Korea, China among other places) to describe their occupation of factories, schools and neighborhoods, to strike back against the oppressive forces led by racism and capitalism. It is in this context that we use the term “occupy”

WHEREAS the borders of the United States of America are a colonial construct based upon the violent destruction of indigenous land across the continent and therefore illegitimate in our eyes

WHEREAS this land is currently occupied by descendants of slaves kidnapped from the African continent, as well as economic refugees forcibly displaced by the forces of capitalism and imperialism around the world, therefore

AFFIRMED, that we prioritize the involvement of indigenous sovereign people in the redesigning and rebuilding of a new way of living on their ancestral land in the context that there is one mother of us all, our earth mother; and

As a Decolonization Statement to the national “Occupy” movement and to indigenous members who have been excluded by the colonialist language used to name this movement, it is declared that phrase “Occupy Seattle” is reframed to the inclusive cross-cultural term “Decolonize/Occupy Seattle” to affirm the guidance and participation of indigenous peoples; and to affirm the history of militant labor struggles associated with the term “occupy”

Awakening to compassion and extending an open hand of friendship and partnership, we hereby invite indigenous members of the Pacific Northwest and all displaced peoples to collaborate with us in this event remembering and reawakening to our original identity as humane beings – that is now initiated on this continent and worldwide simultaneously.

We intend to facilitate the process of healing and reconciliation and implore Indigenous Peoples to share their knowledge and wisdom of stewardship of the earth, water, fire and air to inspire and guide us restore to pure democracy rather than representative democracy as design failure in governing for collective survival; and to initiate a new era of cooperation and peace that is cross-cultural, intergenerational, inclusive and universal in practical application upon Mother Earth with the original indigenous inhabitants of this land.

http://occupyseattle.org/blog/2011-10-25/declaration-decolonizeoccupy-seattle