#OWS On The Ground Reporting in NYC

One of our volunteers, Jennifer Slattery, is heading back to the Occupy Wall Street site in New York and will be reporting live via Twitter @CorporationFilm, and blogging regularly on TheCorporation.com. Check it out to see what is going on at #OWS!

OWS & ACT UP Demand Wall Street Ante Up

By Jennifer Slattery

After a long winter, it's time to go back to Wall St. for this activist. And I am very excited about the first action I will be attending this Spring: 

To commemorate its 25th anniversary, ACT UP (the activist group that took on AIDS issues in the 80's) teamed up with Occupy Wall Street to hold a massive demonstration and march on Wall Street on April 25. Why Wall Street? Because the corruption of the corporate class has a ripple effect throughout our society that goes far beyond jobs, and debt. The crisis they cause leads to human suffering. Act Up, in many ways, served as a model for the Occupy movement's leaderless, non-violent, and creative, direct action tactics. It is an honor to not only carry on their fight, but to have them stand beside us, and teach us from within our own ranks. 

When I first arrived at Liberty Square six months ago, reporters asked me what real solutions I personally wanted to be achieved by protesting. My answer, repeatedly, was the need for a Financial Transaction Tax. None of the reporters ever printed my answer, instead running the same lie over and over for months: no one at Occupy has any ideas, no solutions. That was a lie, and I know because I heard many others talking about the same thing. We never stopped talking about it, and the media may choose to ignore us, but we will only get louder. A "Financial Speculation Tax" (Fi.S.T.) on Wall Street will be our rallying cry with Act Up on the 25th.

ACT UP is calling for a tiny, miniscule tax (0.05%) on Wall Street transactions and speculative trades in order to raise the money needed to end the global AIDS epidemic and provide universal healthcare in the US. To put it simply, it’s like a toll on the bridge that these trillions of trades travel over every day. Every time someone buys or sells on the stock market a fraction of a percent goes into a coffer to be spent on social programs. This way, even when the speculators crash the market, they do not bankrupt the country’s most vulnerable the way we see today. 

If they want to gamble with our economy, they should have to ante up. 

Only 44% of people who need HIV treatment have access – more than 8 million worldwide are left to die. The revenue from a Financial Transaction Tax could bail out the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, and could also help pay for universal healthcare in the U.S. The fact is, that the amount of money gathered painlessly through this tax could fund education, jobs, and help to develope green alternatives to tackle climate change.

If you have to pay to use a public bridge, then the traders should have to pay for using the public’s economy to generate and hoard mass amounts of wealth. 

I am looking forward to updating everyone on how this incredible event goes. It promises to be a historic day, and I’m so proud to be a part of it. And I'll be keeping this blog updated with weekly posts on events going on in the American Spring at Occupy Wall Street. And May 1st I'll be updating the corporation blog live via twitter, so please check out @corporationfilm on Twitter if you haven't yet.

—Jennifer Slattery