Last Monday I visited the Occupy San Jose site to donate food to the occupiers. I had read in their facebook page that they were looking for donations after the police had taken their food and many of their supplies. When I dropped by, the group was in the middle of a meeting. A few of their members were planning to attend a City Hall meeting to engage in a dialogue about the councilmembers' concerns and to complain about the police taking their supplies.

As I've connected with various artists on Facebook, I discovered a great cartoonist in Alburquerque, New Mexico. J.P. Jasper is a cartoonist who has been posting his witty cartoons under the name Russell Millard Fillmore on his Facebook page that has gained a loyal readership and as he writes, "I'm still 'looking' for a job but in the mean time I'm enjoying the life of an educated bum..." He is a grad school graduate with a degree in Economics. His cartoons star a group of young adults who make wry comments on politics and culture. You can see his cartoons at his Russell Millard Fillmore facebook page or you could go to his webpage.

As the "Occupy Wall Street" protests have continued in the last couple of weeks, more religious people from many different religions have begun to join and make their presence felt. This is important, as religious people have made important contributions to past movements for social change, such as the civil rights movement, the woman's suffrage movement, the abolition movement, and the labor movement. The three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have especially have a historic concern for the plight of the poor and the marginalized that fits well with the concerns of the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters. Religious figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Joshua Heschel, Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, William Sloane Coffin, Pauli Murray, and others have all fought for similar economic justice issues that the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are fighting for today.

Here are some articles that I found on the struggling middle class. Illustrating this blog are more photos I took of Occupy San Jose last week.

One of my favorite Founding Fathers is Thomas Paine. The inspiration for this Everyday Citizen website, Paine was a strong foe of the aristocracy and the monarchy form of government. Despite his opposition to monarchy, Paine argued in the French National Convention during the Revolution against the execution of Louis XVI because of his opposition to revenge killings. Paine was able to separate his opposition to a particular system and his empathy to an individual within that system. I think of this often during the Occupy Wall Street protests against the 1% of the rich who own a disproportionate amount of the nation's wealth.

I share a lot of the anger of the Occupation Wall Street protesters about the wealthy class who have benefitted from this economic system and own such a large percentage of the nation's wealth. I want an economic system that more evenly distributes wealth towards a greater amount of people. My anger is more towards the economic system, though. I don't want to see wealthy people become paupers. I just want to see a system where everyone benefits and not just a select few.

I dropped by the Occupy San Jose settlement briefly today. Most of the activists were sleeping in their tents, but I got a chance to talk to a few people who were awake. That person told me that the group has been cleaning up the area and making sure that they have friendly relations with the police. The last time I was there, news was that there might be a possible clash with the police over a city ordinance banning overnight settlements on City Hall. The activists were cited, but were not kicked out.

It turns out that many of the police officers support the Occupy San Jose cause. The mayor also thinks that the Occupy San Jose protesters are justified in their protest, and said that evicting the activists is a very low priority in City Hall's agenda. So for now, the group has settled in.

Last week two people died who had a great influence on America and the world. One person, Steve Jobs, helped create technological wonders like the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad that have benefitted people throughout the world. Fred Shuttlesworth was the other person who died last week. Shuttlesworth was one of the most important figures of the Civil Rights movement, one of the four founding ministers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader in Birmingham protests. The death of Steve Jobs received front page news, while the death of Fred Shuttlesworth received less notice. Both men deserved to be highlighted for the great contributions they made for this country.

Here are more photos that I took from the Occupy San Jose protest that I visited last Friday. The protests have taken place in San Jose City Hall, where a group of activists have made encampments and plan to stay to highlight their grievances against Wall Street and the financial institutions responsible for our economic crisis. San Jose city officials have repeatedly warned the protesters that camping at city public facilities is prohibited. Yet they continue to camp out near City Hall, and they willingly face arrest as an act of civil disobedience.

Like most people in the Left, I'm fairly critical of the Capitalist system. It's a system that is often exploitative of workers, it exploits natural resources and causes environmental and pollution problems, it leads to great inequalities between the rich and the poor, it fosters a culture of greed and corrosive self interest, and it leads to unhealthy concentrations of wealth in a small group of people. I do think though, that Capitalism does have its good points: it fuels competition that leads to technological advancements; in the long run it helps more people get out of poverty and raise the living standards of many communities. So I think that Capitalism is a system with great benefits and great flaws. I think one of the reasons I have the views that I do is the place where I live. If I lived in Michigan or some other place that has been hardest hit by the economic crisis, I think I would be more of a revolutionary. But I live in Silicon Valley, where the benefits and flaws of capitalism are both very pronounced.