Declaration of the Occupation of Fort Lauderdale

The Current State of Injustice

We, the people of the Occupation of Fort Lauderdale, inspired by Occupy Wall Street, have come together to establish a community with a just and open decision-making process and to create a new society. In 1776, thirteen colonies declared that there are certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Now, corporations and the wealthiest 1% of the population have caused repeated injuries and usurpations by corrupting that government with money, against the consent of the governed. That government helps corporations and the rich to accelerate an unconscionable inequality of wealth, helps a Military Industrial Congressional Complex to wage war upon the world for economic gain, to profit upon the despoiling of the planet which threatens the welfare of the species, and suppresses the civil liberties of all but the richest, by perverting the justice system so as to favor wealth and power, rather than truth and what is right.

A Process for the Future

We call for accountability: without it there is little hope that the greed and deceitfulness of banks, CEOs, the rich and politicians that have caused such great injuries can be changed. We invite everyone to join us in the exercise of our rights to peaceably assemble and to occupy public space. In this space, the commons, together with similar groups around the nation, we seek to create a process to address the problems we face, and together, generate workable solutions accessible to everyone. We seek to inspire all to participate in a process of open, transparent, direct democracy. The current system is undemocratic and corrupted. We call upon everyone to gather, to learn, to teach, to discuss and to act. An occupation can be a microcosm and a vision of a new and better society if we make it so. The future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members. Like other occupations, we list our grievances as a first step in resolving them. Let these facts be known:

Declaration of Occupation of Fort Lauderdale

January22, 2012 as approved by the General Assembly

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Grievances:
I. The power that corporations and wealthy individuals use to influence government and laws has resulted in extraordinary economic inequality, a shortage of jobs that pay a livable wage, inadequate access to healthcare, and deteriorating social and educational support systems. Banks have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage. In Florida, we have 58,000 homeless people yet 1.6 million vacant housing units, many of them due to foreclosures. Banks have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right. Banks have engineered bailouts from taxpayers and further endanger our economy through the actions of their privately held monopoly, the Federal Reserve. Elite financial and other institutions give Executives exorbitant bonuses and unreasonable compensation. In 1980, CEOs of the largest companies received 42 times the pay of their average worker. Today, it is hundreds of times the pay. Nearly all the wealth created by almost tripling productivity in the last thirty years has gone to the richest 1%, rather than being shared as previously. Multinational corporations drain the wealth of the 99% through an imbalanced economic system, exploiting labor, outsourcing jobs, off-shoring profits, and through special capital tax rates, loopholes and corporate welfare programs. Profiteering in the Wall Street casino also drains our economy of its wealth. The economic policies imposed by corporations and the government intentionally increase unemployment. The 1% have consistently cut workers healthcare and pay. The 1% strip employees of the right to negotiate collectively for better pay, safer working conditions and dignity in the workplace. The 1% have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them. The two party system offers no option to vote against the interest of the bankers and fields candidates who do not represent the people, only their

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own interests. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. The banks caused the rewriting of laws to prevent oversight of the fraudulent securities that the banks themselves called radioactive and destroyed a third of the value of all our homes, yet not a single banker has been jailed for it. Corporations have stolen publicly owned resources by buying them at below fair prices in the process called privatization, and further stolen by charging for those resources, from tolls on the roads we paid for to privatizing schools, to building private prisons that bribe judges to incarcerate innocent children for profit. Everyone has the right of equal access to public services in his country. The 1% have limited the access of citizens to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of themselves and of their families, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, necessary social services, cultural opportunities, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond their control. The 1% have also resisted reasonable health and safety regulation in the interests of greater profits. The 1% have forced a million people a year into bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills and cause 45,000 annually to die from lack of proper care. II. The rich and powerful profit by war, militarism and empire. They engage in drawn-out, costly conflicts abroad. These wars kill or otherwise destroy the lives of American soldiers and innocent civilians. Their cost drains money from domestic priorities. The government of the United States has perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad, maintaining over 800 offensive military bases in 130 countries. The government participates in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas. The Military Industrial Congressional complex continues to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.

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The military has used and thrown away the lives of countless veterans who thought they were doing right by their country, and who now attempt suicide at the rate of one every eighty minutes.

Government authorities cultivate a culture of fear in society at large, in order to create a timid society willing to trade liberty for a false sense of security, so that they may use public money to buy expensive weapons.

The Military Industrial Congressional Complex's Global War on Terror has created generations of enemies where only few existed by destroying whole countries for profit.

III.

The 1% keeps us under the looming threat of nuclear exchange that can extinguish the existence of mankind. A relentless, greed-driven drive for profit threatens life on Earth with global climate change. Government privileges polluters over people by subsidizing fossil fuels, blocking investment in clean energy and efficient transportation, and hiding environmental destruction from public oversight.

Captive politicians refuse to enforce environmental law and seek to weaken existing statutes. They have failed to prosecute British Petroleum for the death of eleven oil workers, as well as the deaths of numerous innocent species from the gulf oil spill.

The environment is threatened by the proposed resumption of construction of nuclear power plants, only months after the meltdown of Fukushima, including the expansion of a plant within 50 miles of Fort Lauderdale.

Corporate interests pursue land development at the expense of habitat protection for endangered species, diminishing the web of life and the natural legacy we leave to future generations to enjoy. Locally, a fossil fuel power plant is planned for the heart of primary Florida panther habitat in Hendry County.

Agribusiness has sought to privatize the essentials of life through genetic modification (GMO) and patenting of crop seeds. It has promoted monocultures at the expense of the genetic diversity of our food supply, rendering it vulnerable to crop failures. It has used political power to gain massive subsidies favoring their production methods over localized, sustainable production on small farms.

Factory farms treat the animals they raise with inconceivable cruelty. They use massive amounts of anti-biotics, hormones and genetically modified feeds, compromising the health of the public that consumes them.

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In Florida, our drinking water is threatened by runoff from agribusiness farming. Hydraulic fracking likewise threatens water supplies throughout the nation.

Our forests are being destroyed by fossil fuel production including the death of forests in Canada from tar sands development and biofuels grown in the Amazon. We cannot afford to lose the earth's forests that contain much of the world's carbon sequestration.

Out of control corporate and other fisheries are over catching and destroying our oceans. If we do not stop the accelerated destruction of nature and its ecosystems we accelerate our drive towards extinction of all life on this planet.

IV.

The rich and powerful have suppressed civil liberties and human rights; they have perverted the rule of law by creating a system in which corporations and the rich are not only not accountable but corporations are granted the status of citizens such that they can then anonymously spend unlimited resources to buy elections.. The 1% has limited the freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The government of the United States has created a surveillance state of omnipresent cameras, widespread electronic intercepts of voice and data communications and airport patdowns. The exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. Corporations have bullied and bribed prosecutors into plea deals that merely are a minor cost of business rather than punishment, even in the largest instances, such as in the case of our own Governor, head of the company that negotiated the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the United States ever. Law is the expression of the general will. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all. The 1% have limited the right of men and women of full age to have the right to marry and to found a family due to their sexual preference. The 1% have invaded and limited the reproductive rights of citizens.

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January22, 2012 as approved by the General Assembly

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The 1% have created a criminal class of millions of citizens who choose to smoke marijuana, using it as a particular excuse to jail whole generations of minorities.

They are restricting access to the polls by enacting impediments to universal suffrage, such as imposing class-based identification requirements, limiting hours and means of voter registration, and resumption of voting rights for felons who have served their sentences.

Join us and make your voices heard!

Declaration of Occupation of Fort Lauderdale

January22, 2012 as approved by the General Assembly

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