What is Occupy Wallstreet?

[Quark]

I gotta admit I find this thread funny. For the past month I've seen the same storyline (starting with "stupid hippies want freebies"), but it's already been much further progressed in both my other forum and the mainstream media itself.

Ashock took the original Fox News selling point and ran with it, congratulations! Even got to throw in some French Revolution imagery, even though Occupy is based on the same structure as the Arab protests. Too bad even Fox News has backed down from such an analysis.

'Occupy Wall Street' -- It's Not What They're for, But What They're Against

Critics of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement complain that the protesters don’t have a policy agenda and, therefore, don’t stand for anything. They're wrong. The key isn’t what protesters are for but rather what they’re against -- the gaping inequality that has poisoned our economy, our politics and our nation.

In America today, 400 people have more wealth than the bottom 150 million combined. That’s not because 150 million Americans are pathetically lazy or even unlucky. In fact, Americans have been working harder than ever -- productivity has risen in the last several decades. Big business profits and CEO bonuses have also gone up. Worker salaries, however, have declined.

Here's some snippets from the other forum, all from Viator unless otherwise stated. Added emphasis in a few spots:

Paul Krugman - Confronting the Malefactors

(This was posted by someone else, but Krugman generally piques my interest. The key:

A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

------

The Belgravia Dispatch: Occupy Wall Street: An Early Assessment

(Link posted in an otherwise useless post countering another useless post)
------

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on with the core groups, though, especially on the part of Democrats. At one of these assemblies, it's completely democratic. Everyone can speak, people can vote down (through hand motions, so as to not interrupt) a speech which meets disapproval and anyone can make a proposal to vote on. Their beliefs are remarkably clear once the GA adopts them. Where things fall down are goals.

And here's why that is: there's no hierarchy. And if there's no hierarchy, it's slow going getting some uniform list of goals out. This is incredibly confusing to the media. They don't get it. They look for a spokesperson or some way they can frame this as a movement to get Democrats to do what they want; I think that's what it's going to look like in a month, if it's still going. It doesn't mean that there aren't achievable goals here but right now everyone is asking questions of the GAs which are antithetical to their very nature.

Now, is this how I would do it, if I were High King Protester? No. I'd march people in suits with professionally made signs like it was Birmingham in the 50s, daring the media to portray us as hippies. I'd pull a funhouse mirror Tea Party and primary every motherfucker who refused to sign a pledge co-sponsoring a Constitutional amendment fixing Citizens United and campaign finance, generally.

But there aren't enough mes to do that. If, by some chance, there are then we can show up at Occupy Raleigh's General Assembly tomorrow night and we can do it my way... that's the beauty of it, even if it's weird. You can show up tomorrow, unbidden, and put forth a vote if you're sincere.

If I wait for my march, for my movement, I'm going to be waiting a really long time. There's this expectation that a bunch of 23 year old kids are going to spring forth in a country which hasn't had a mass protest movement in 40 years knowing the right way to do it, a nation of Fanonists just ready to go from zero to sixty at the drop of a hat. It doesn't exist. It won't exist.

So I'm not going to be a member of Occupy Armchair anymore. I'm not at the point in my life where I can camp out all night or get arrested. And that's okay. But I'm not waiting for perfection anymore, goddammit, and nobody's going to come provide it for me.

------

fe: This is also an extremely good analysis of the political angle going on here. If you extrapolate it out, it explains why the two parties and the media simply aren't getting part of this.

Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' - NYTimes.com

------

Hit Occupy Raleigh today. It skewed surprisingly middle class and older than you might expect. The mic was pretty tough to hear from our spot on the periphery when people were speaking but a couple speakers were really good. The Ron Paul nuke the fed guy had the misfortune of not only being unintelligible but also speaking right as the march began.

We marched down Fayetteville Street from the Capitol and back. What was interesting, and if you don't pay attention to anything else I write pay attention to this part, was that the crowd grew as we went. Middle class bystanders who were just downtown for lunch or a walk got in line, marched and chanted.

One couple in particular stuck out for me. They looked to be in their 60s and were standing on the corner, watching everyone walk by (official count at the end was somewhere between 250-300 marching, many, many more back at the Capitol). Conservatively dressed, normal fucking people, as Harry Dean Stanton said in Repo Man. They were just watching, unmoved, until the chant turned into "How do you close the deficit? End the wars and tax the rich!"

At that point, they got in line right behind me and were chanting with gusto. I overheard the woman say to her husband, "End the wars and tax the rich... that's something I can get behind!" That's the kind of thing that should make career centrist politicians' blood run cold.

Messaging was remarkably focused. Overwhelmingly, the focus of the signs and conversations was money in government. Household debt was mentioned, sometimes loudly, but if there's one overriding message it's getting money out of politics. And, again, over half the people there were my age or older, middle class. Lots of kids, lots of families. This is not a hippy movement made up of unemployed 22 year olds or an army of failed English majors.

-------

Obama very quietly leaked yesterday that he's hitching his '12 wagon to this. I don't personally know that it's going to work as well as he thinks it will but that, again, is a shift. We went from "anything left of Obama the Centrist is public hippy bashing territory for the WH" to "Obama as quiet protest supporter and public populist". In a month. Even if it's insincere, that's a huge shift from where we were this past summer.

fe: Those movements look a lot more organized in retrospect than they were at the time, outside of Civil Rights, which seemed to coalesce around individuals. But that brings up another thing that's breaking the paradigm of older movements: there's no leader. It's diffuse. Dealing with strict dichotomies of left and right and hierarchical structures in our politics means that a movement ruled by 90% votes to get even minor things done can be hard to comprehend. If there's one thing that's tripping up the discussion, I think it's that. I have a hard time getting my head around it, myself, sometimes.

But maybe the mere fact that a collection of communists, libertarians and disaffected middle class mainstreamers voting with 90-10 majorities to march on Times Square is the most important thing going on. Think of that as a counter to Nurru's worry... that these people, ideologically diverse, are as close to 100% united as can be reasonably expected on the important matters animating them.

No, their explicit goals aren't clear. That's because they need a 90% approval to be considered. Worse, having goals with this group is dangerous. How often will people give a list of goals, they get one of those accomplished, and suddenly the gas pedal is let up and everything falls apart. The first step is to force the conversation - which they've clearly already done.

Everyone not in the top x% has been in a decline since the deregulation in the early 80's, and if you can't see how unbalanced things are now then you're quite frankly a lost cause. Citizens United itself is putting us back a few centuries.

I don't want handouts. I want the top to actually pay their share, and not be able to buy out politicians.