And it all started happening on Monday, August 15th, 2011. An entire public rail system was brought to a halt by strategically located flash-mob protests throughout the system. Because this happened in a very important city with a big financial district, the media had to cover it... It so happens that the corporate-owned media tries to distort or diminish the impact of protests, but this time leaders of the resistance movement know exactly what to do in order to break through the information blackout.
The same thing happened in another big financial center city in the country's East Coast: Huge, sporadic, flash-mob-type protests across the rail system brought it to a stand-still.
Websites of major corporations which have been identified by the leaders of the protest movement were also forced to be taken off line...
All of the sudden throughout the country, at very exclusive, high-end, extremely rich and wealthy neighborhoods, flash-mob protests erupted... Some of them had 50 people, and some other 2,000. At many of these neighborhoods that had private gates and were not accessible, the protesters blocked the entrances, or made it difficult to go in and out.
Extremely rich and wealthy people in these enclaves were panic-stricken since they never expected something like this. They know that usually protests and riots happen "somewhere else," in inner-city ghettos, and they may hear about it at their country clubs, or watching FoxNews, but to see huge crowds protesting right in their neighborhoods, or blocking entry to their exclusive gated communities is something they never imagined.
In the country's capital, thousands of fax machines are jammed with a very curious, and very short message in huge letters: MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE PROSECUTE THE CRIMINAL BANKERS - NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE - STOP THE WARS AND THE PROFITEERS - IT'S TIME TO STOP THE MACHINE - TAX THE RICH - CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE. Similar massive fax sends are received in the capital of multiple cities. All government officials receive thousands of emails with the same message. The email servers crash.
Somehow, the most wealthy and protected heads of huge financial conglomerates encounter jeering crowds everywhere they go. All of the sudden their sense of security and invulnerability that comes from their usual surrounding (luxurious corporate board rooms, private jets, yachts, million dollar penthouses, country clubs) vanishes. They can't understand how these jeering crowds tend to appear everywhere they go. And even thought they have body-guards, security personnel, and the police, protecting them, they start feeling afraid and uncomfortable. Some of them may start to wonder if they have pushed things too far...
And this is just the beginning... All of the sudden a crowd appears in the nation's capital, and as the week goes on, more and more people start to show up until you have 100,000 people the first week, and it keeps growing by the day. And similar occupations of key financial and media centers throughout the country take place, with tens of thousands of people appearing, seemingly out of nowhere.
And somehow the leaders and organizers of these events have gotten wise to the fact that twitter, and facebook, and the ISPs, and phone companies, would all collude with the oppressive regime to try to stop the people from exercising their legitimate and constitutional rights to assemble and seek redress, and so they have devised very sophisticated methods to organize without using their services (alone).
All of the sudden, tens of millions of people who were resigned to their lot in life and accept whatever the exploiters had in mind for them, are awaken from their stupor, inspired by the actions of the first wave of protesters who rose in objection to the criminal acts of the corrupt ruling class and their enablers in government... And you start seeing work stoppages, rolling strikes, entire key sectors of the economy and government calling in sick one day, work slowdowns, disruptions across the entire system, baggage handlers not loading bags on planes, traffic controllers not showing up on time, even police officers calling in sick in many cities, by the hundreds.
And then, when the youth that has been disenfranchised by the criminal and exploitative system, and for which college tuition has been raised so high that they can't no longer obtain an education without incurring in huge debt, takes to the streets in multiple cities across the country, all of the sudden the corrupt powers have to pay attention.
This goes on one week, two weeks, one month, and after three months, government officials across the country are having daily emergency meetings to address the situation. All along they know what needs to happen...
Remove personhood for corporations; remove corporate money from the entire election system; break up media and financial conglomerates; fund education, social safety net. And those are just the easy things... There are more demands, of course. And once they are met, returning the country to a lawful democratic system under the rule of law, then the protests will stop.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
- Mario Savio
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