"We Aren't Talking to Them"

The following is the Editorial, "We Are Free People" from the just-printed issue #4 of the Occupied Wall Street Journal:

"Democracy is not simply speaking truth to power, to ask, politely or not, for reforms great and small. Sometimes you have to do it yourself.

The 1% is just beginning to understand that the reason Occupy Wall Street makes no demands is because we aren't talking to them. The 99% are speaking and listening to each other. 4,167 people have been arrested since the occupation began; millions more are reimagining the world we want to live in.

Police forces have been deployed by Republican and Democratic politicians alike to break a movement that was first ignored and then mocked in what passes for news. It's not just America. This is a living democratic movement that is global in scale and growing in real time. That this beautiful thing is met with state violence says everything we need to know about the perpetrators. It also means we're on to something. Their attacks are based on an understanding of power that's dying, if not already dead.

Mubarak is Berlusconi is Bloomberg is Quan is Walker is pepper spray is broken politics bound to the past and we make no demands of them because free people constitute governments, not the other way around.

We don't know how this is going to end, but the beginning is near."

(Photo is a sign at this week's 30,000+ rally at New York's Foley Square: "Not a different slice, we want a different pie!" After his cops tried their best to harass and repress the rally and march afterwards, Mayor Bloomberg said, "That's not even Occupy Wall Street...those were trade unionists." How very little he understands.)