201 N. Greensboro, Carrboro, NC
For more info:
http://carrborocommune.wordpress.com
@carrborocommune
carrboro commune at livestream.com
Welcome Back!
The end of 2011 saw a blossoming of self-organization and struggle across the US,as the Occupy movement illuminated people’s anger, imagination, and desire. Issues that had been simmering below the surface of political discourse exploded onto the public stage. From Oakland to New York, from Seattle to Chapel Hill, we started to find each other, to find that we are powerful. None of the tensions that catalyzed the movement have dissipated. Bosses, bankers, politicians, and police still hold our communities hostage—no armed evictions, government cover-ups, or election-year sloganeering can hide this. We have occupied this building in the spirit of this growing movement. This is not a temporary protest, but a permanent occupation intended to establish a social center in the heart of Carrboro, instead of the CVS that would have been here.
The proposed CVS has faced near-unanimous local opposition. The building would be out of proportion for the location and a logistical nightmare for nearby neighbors. Local residents have repeatedly expressed that the site should serve some kind of community interest rather than corporate profits.Yet outside the zoning process, where at best we can delay the inevitable, the channels at Town Hall offer no meaningful way for affected community members to determine what should be here. We aim to provide such a venue by occupying this site and holding open assemblies.
This will allow local residents to come together, roll up our sleeves, and share a sense of real ownership over the site. This would be impossible were a corporate drug store to be located here.
This isn’t just about CVS. It’s about an economic system that prioritizes profit over people, a legal system that violently defends it, and a political system that rubber-stamps it. North Carolina is in the midst of a deep recession and budget crisis: education, libraries, healthcare, unemployment benefits, food and housing support, and other services face drastic cuts. Rather than wait for politicians to fix the problems they’ve created, we should be occupying the holdings of corporate profiteers so that people hurt by this crisis can directly decide how to use such resources for community benefit. Corporate and banking interests created this crisis; this occupation is one way of responding while creating something positive at the same time. The space, resources, and activities of our town should benefit everyone. We should have direct decision-making power over the resources of our neighborhoods and workplaces, rather than live at the mercy of speculating absentee landlords, out-of-state drug corporations, or town bureaucrats and politicians.
“Occupy” Squat, Seattle 2011
75 River, Santa Cruz 2011
Rachel Corrie Center, Olympia 2011
The violent eviction of last year’s peaceful Yates Building occupation demonstrates that the governments of Chapel Hill and Carrboro are willing to use potentially lethal armed force to protect the “right” of the wealthy to profit on empty buildings. We are here to show that we are not intimidated by armed police or their bureaucratic defenders. We will not live our lives in fear merely to relieve the political anxieties of a mayor who sips tea and quotes Gandhi while evicting demonstrators at gunpoint.
To that end, we once again encourage residents—in particular service workers, the unemployed and underemployed, the homeless, and those displaced by racist gentrification and outrageous housing prices—to imagine what this “really really free building” could be, free from the stranglehold of rent and the profit motive. A free health clinic? A mutual aid center to help people find work when the economy has failed them?
A community library or media center? A place for free childcare or a free school? Through open assemblies, we can decide together, rather than being forced to accept the decisions of an out-ofstate corporation guided only by profit.
Please join us, not just in supporting this occupation, but in making it your own. We have a world to win, and this is just the beginning. Imagine what this “really really free building” could be, free from the stranglehold of rent and the profit motive:
• A free health clinic?
• A mutual aid center to help people find work when the economy has failed them?
• A community library or media center?
• A place for free childcare or a free school?
Through open assemblies, we can decide together, rather than being forced to accept the decisions of an outof-state corporation guided by profit.
It is encouraging to see that there are people who are willing to just straight up say what is going on. Everything is a choice–especially how we organize our society and our communities. It is not inevitable that one percent of our population controls almost all of our resources, nor is it natural. It is not even a matter of legality, because the laws that enforce unnatrual imbalances are only as strong as the enforcement behind them. So what really is the law? Violence. There would be no food deserts if we were allowed to use our land, no homeless if we were allowed to build our homes, and much less sickness and dispair if we recognized that the medical system at hand has the sole goal to disempower us and make us beholden to pharmecutical companies that steal the secrets of plants, and then exterminate our community’s knowlege of how to treat itself.
But people with guns tell us we can’t have that land, and people with guns tell us they will throw us in prison and take our things if we build our own homes to our own specifications, and people with guns say they will throw us in a box and ruin our lives if we are not certified, verified by their standards when we treat eachother and call it medicine.
Call yourselves Occupy Everything, call yourselves what ever. I don’t know who you are, but I like what you are doing.
Posted by Jerry Mander | February 4, 2012, 8:13 pmIf you are really concerned about the profit over community in terms of this building in Carrboro your movement should be protesting Weaver Street Market. They convinced the community to help them raise money to buy the building in the first place to protect it from becoming a CVS or Walgreens. When Weaver Street ran into a budget crisis due to financial mis-management Ruffin Slater and the board went directly to the developer they rallied against a few years earlier rather than putting it on the open market. There were/are numerous local business people with the financial means and desire to purchase the property who spoke out after the sale was made public. These local business people would have made the property a benefit to the community and the money derived from the businesses located there would have flowed back into our community instead of out of our area. Blame Weaver Street and go dance on their lawn.
Posted by t | February 5, 2012, 11:19 pmWhile the folks who run this site arent the same as those who did this building occupation, i think its safe to say they would share your criticism of weaver st. But its probably more important to point that CVS is only one part of this picture; as their welcome packet text points out, “This isnt just about CVS…” It was an attempt to take over a piece of unused (or misused) property and reclaim it for community control. While certainly anarchists dont want a CVS there any more than most other Carrboro and Chapel Hill residents, it seems equally relevant if it the building was owned by some other rich absent landlord, like the Yates building.
Of course, theres no reason to think that money “derived from the businesses [that would have been] there” had weaver st. not sold it to CVS, would go to the “community” – unless by community you mean carrboros small-business owning classes…Friends have worked at weaver st. and other small businesses in carrboro for years at near minimum wage jobs – the idea that these businesses “bring money into the community” is ridiculous liberal claptrap – these folks can barely pay their rent and certain cant afford to shop at the politically correct overpriced grocery store of weaver st. The problem isnt one of CVS vs. small businesses – its one of capital and labor, service work economies, collective vs private ownership, a liberal bureaucracy, and also race.
Posted by trianarchy | February 6, 2012, 10:58 am