Occupy: In their Own Voices

Welcome to “Occupy – In Their Own Words”

10/27/11

My name is Steve Mitchell, science librarian. This educational event has been organized by the Librarians Association of UCR with lots of help from individual members of the campus community including UC AFT librarians and lecturers. Our goal today with this dialogue with Occupy is to advocate for the clearest possible understanding of what they are about. We wish to thank the Librarians Association, the Library, the campus and the lecturers for their help. We wish to thank Juan Felipe Herrera for agreeing to moderate this event. And most of all we wish to thank organizers from Occupy Riverside, Occupy UCR and Occupy LA for taking time out to teach us about their movement: its goals, process and aspirations.

This is our agenda:

• Intro (Steve)
• Poem to convene this event (Juan)
• Intro of panelists (Juan)
• Brief discussion by each Occupy chapter as to what they are about
• Questions from you folks to Occupy

The amplified portion of the event ends at 1 at which point Occupy can continue here, move to the Free Speech location, break into small educational groups

 We librarians felt this important given continuing grim news about the state of the country and world:

Close to 50 million people are now in poverty. The concentration of wealth is at historically high levels with the top 1% owning 40% of the wealth…economic injustice is rampant. Very high unemployment (and underemployment) rates, close to 14%, plague us in Inlandia. Theres almost  complete government gridlock.

For me personally :

My interest in Occupy has developed after hearing about UCR students, including last year’s  graduates, like my friend Fortino Morales, a UCR student leader,  who has been looking hard but just cannot find employment…nothing is out there.

Its about my brother who got laid off two months ago….nothing

But mostly , for me, it has been about hearing recently that for my 20 and 24 year old daughters, and for many of you gathered here today, that they/you are expected to graduate into what is now being termed by the media the “lost decade” . That is, you and my daughters will be graduating into a very dim future and all of us are being primed to accept this. I cannot accept this.  I know you cannot accept this.

So, I am looking for an effective alternative, a new path:

Occupy is among those that I’m checking out and hope to learn from today. Lets learn from them today and see what they are about. I am hoping all of you will have good questions for them.

Fairness Clause:

I do have to say that Librarians are nothing if not about FAIR and balanced information.

To this end I thought, whoa, whats missing here with this panel???…  Why, it’s the 1%. We’ve forgotten to include the 1%

To correct this I started with a call yesterday to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan…he wasn’t available but his people said they will get back to me. So we have the 1% in the pipeline for a future event.

If any of you out there know any of the 1%, can I see a show of hands?, please forward their names and numbers to me so I can contact them.

I would now like to introduce our moderator and facilitator for the open discussion to follow:

Juan Felipe Herrera is a renowned poet, performer and activist. He is in our Creative Writing Department. We are fortunate to have him as our moderator and facilitator today. Juan will read us a clarity/empowerment poem to start us on the right foot. And he will introduce our panelists from the Occupy Riverside / UCR / LA Movements and begin the dialogue.

Thank you Juan and thank you panelists!