If you would like to be a point person for your local occupy, please email us at OccupiedSOTU@gmail.com for instructions

Occupied State of the Union Address Video Project
"He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient. ” — Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution

Once a year the President delivers the State of the Union Address to Congress and the Nation. Followed immediately following the speech, the party, not of the President, does a rebuttal response via mainstream media. On January 24, 2012 this event will happen again and we have an opportunity to speak ourselves, through the internet.
Individuals from around the country have worked to write an Occupied State of the Union Address (Cali, Nebraska, Iowa, NJ, IL, NY). This is a once in a year opportunity that we are taking advantage of.

This is an individual video project and we are calling for participants.

The Plan:
1) Get the speech submitted to as many Occupiers around the country as possible. We will be asking not to release or post the speech online in hopes of protecting the language of it from getting to the press before it is released to the People. This may include livestream. The only thing we can do is ask from this to be kept tight based on the honor code and cross our fingers that people respect this and not leak it to the media.


2) Have those individuals video tape themselves and/or other occupiers reading the speech. If you, as an individual, do not agree with a section, you can opt not to read it for the video compilation. This is to ensure that you will not be edited as saying something you do not support. 


3) Have the video footage uploaded to a secure server for editing.

4) Edit video footage collected into one speech delivered by people from around the country.

5) Encourage individuals to tease to mainstream media about this project.

6) Release the video simultaneously over the internet through YouTube, Livestreams, and promote it through social media (including hashtag) the moment that the Republican rebuttal is done.


Speech Theme/ Concept
The goal is to awaken those who are empathetic by realizing that "Occupy is a State of Mind" and that we do it every day. It is designed to have an audience of those not active onsite at a local Occupy Movement, do due any number of reasons, including that they do not yet exist locally. It speaks to where they are in their lives. It is not designed to speak to the converted, so to speak. It addresses the economy, money in politics, and ways in which people can engage. It runs about 8-9 min long. There is no language of the 99% vs. 1% due to the co-opting of that language already for political campaigns. This is a non-partisan speech.


Timing on this project is tight due to the date of release, endorsements, gathering video, editing together, then re-distributed for release.