September 17, also known as S17, is the next major day of action in the OWS calendar. When I referred to it the other day, I had some inquiries as to what I meant. So, with all due allowance for the fact that I speak for no-one but myself, here’s why you should keep September 17 free.

It’s one year of Occupy Wall Street. A year in which we changed the political vocabulary with the phrase “We are the 99%” and the concept of Occupy. A year of consolidating and organizing the vision that another world is possible, outside the atrophied structures of all-money-all-the-time “politics” as usual.

Did we “win”? If you go back to the materials of the time, everyone kept saying the same thing: there are no demands. So “winning” or “losing” cannot be measured by the accomplishment of this or that benchmark. The original call spoke of being encamped downtown for  “a few months.” Perhaps we fell a couple of weeks short but the park was the most intense time in many people’s lives and should not be measured by the calendar.

So this year once again there will be a call to assemble in New York on September 17. As S17 is a Monday, there will be major events on the preceding weekend and in the week afterwards. As it happens, S17 is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. But the NYSE is open, as are most financial institutions.

What exactly is going to happen and what the messages will be are being determined by the usual working groups. There’s a widespread sense that S17 should be the beginning of a new phase of the movement, such as the Strike Debt campaign that I am working with. No one wants to repeat the post-May Day hangover, where we’d organized for months only to not be sure why afterwards.

The reasons to be there are very clear.

• If anything, the above is more true than it was a year ago.
• Montreal is still on permanent unlimited strike.
• Austerity is a palpable disaster, inducing double-dip recessions worldwide.
• Spain, Greece, Ireland–solidarity with the IMF colonies
• Capitalism is killing the planet: Greenland and the Arctic are melting, there is a drought in half of all U. S. counties, there are floods in China.
• No bankers are in jail, even though they have been caught money laundering, fixing interest rates, losing clients’ money and other crimes above and beyond their incompetence and greed.
• Tens of millions are so in debt that they have become part of the Invisible Army of debt defaulters and strikers.
• 50 million people have no health insurance in the supposedly richest country in the world.
• Politics is so obviously for sale to the highest bidder, it has become more brazen than organized crime.
• {put your own reason(s) here}

If none of that is enough, I guarantee you’ll have a lot of fun, meet some great people and feel better about yourself.

September 17. New York City. Try and come. See you there.