We have received photos and accounts from three Mountain Community residents who visited the “Occupy” movement in Los Angeles last week. Here’s an OpEd from one of them.

By Mindy Moffatt, Pine Mountain

We . . . are . . . the 99%!” was the rallying call of thousands of people on Saturday Oct. 15 at the ongoing Occupy Los Angeles movement at the L.A. City Hall. Pine Mountain residents Mar Preston and Mindy Moffatt, and earlier, Katherine King, ventured into the crowd of thousands on the ‘The International Day of Action’ to learn more about this growing movement.

Occupy Los Angeles grew from the September 17 Occupy Wall Street people’s movement against bank bailouts, corporate greed, and the unchecked power of Wall Street in Washington D.C. To date, this movement has spread to over 1,000 cities in the U.S. and 71 countries in the world.

The Los Angeles City Council supports the Occupy Los Angeles movement. Police commanders have said the participants have complied with requests to stay on sidewalks and out of heavy commuting traffic. Damage to the City Hall lawn may top $50,000, but protesters said they would pass the hat to reimburse the city for that.

So who are the ‘99%’? We wanted to find out. They are the 99 percent of Americans who are not millionaires nor billionaires. Millionaires and billionaires are the top one percent.

The 99% at the L.A. City Hall, represented by thousands of people, were peaceful, calm and friendly. We found that they were people from all walks of life and all ages who are coming together in hearts and minds to make sure that 99% (not only the top 1%) of the lives in America fulfill their dreams for their children and themselves which are the dreams that they’ve worked for all their lives.

We learned that the 99% are the people who, during the past several years, have lost their homes to foreclosures, have lost their jobs, pay more taxes than the top 1% of millionaires and billionaires, have lost health care benefits, have seen the future they envisioned for themselves and their children lead to poverty and toward the destruction of the middle class of Americans, have watched their rightful benefits which they have paid into all their working lives (such as Medicare and Social Security) put on the chopping block to balance the federal budget while the top 1% (millionaires and billionaires) get tax breaks and loopholes and run multinational corporations which pay little or no taxes toward funding our American democracy and our American dreams, but which are making more profits than ever before.

Now we know that the 99% are patriotic Americans who love our country and who pay taxes to support our democracy.

The 99% are people, not large corporations. During the Industrial Revolution, in the 1800s, the U.S. Supreme Court gave extraordinary rights to corporations (“corporate personhood”). Corporations receive more tax breaks and loopholes from the government than the 99% of real people.

We learned that the 99% of the people in our United States of America are patriots who believe our democratic government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

And we’ve heard people in the Tea Party make connections with Occupy Wall Street, about the need for change in government to listen to all the voices in the United States instead of only the voices of money and corporations.

Thus “the 99%” are making their 99 percent of the people’s voices heard in their Occupy movements across the country.

We know more now. We are glad we went.

For more information about the Occupy movement, see: www. facebook.com/OccupyKernCounty and http://occupylosangeles.org.

This is part of the October 21, 2011 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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