Where should the Occupy Protests go from here?

They're protest seems to have run into the local city ordinances and 'powerful' local politicians (which I don't always agree with). This new police state would have crushed the civil rights protests in the 50s...and it looks like they are applying tactics used during the Vietnam protests.

But what should they want to accomplish? What should people change in their normal lives to make the changes we should all agree upon? How do you do anything to effect the 1% without them buying off a few people and making it more difficult too do?

http://conservativelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-wall-street-protestors-should.html

Here are my suggestions:

1. Fight and eliminate corruption and back-room favors, both in government and business.

2. Recommend to stop buying any product purposely outsourced to get around environmental or labor regulations.

3. Do banking transactions with a credit union.

4. Restore corporate ethics and reduce the wage gap + stock incentives for employees that produce or design products.

5. No more $1 CEO salaries, no more bonuses for anyone in the banking industry. There are plenty of people willing to do their job if they don't like it.

6. Shift the way government money is being spent, Term limits for congress (8 years, 4 year terms though)

7. Show people it is possible to live a good life without spending lots of money.

8. Create a political party, or work with the Greens to create some new ideas.

9. Make it easier for people to support small local businesses instead of the big companies.

10. Change park ordinances to allow protests at all hours of the night...

11. Move out of apartments and houses and adopt a simpler nomadic lifestyle and not give money to big banks or city governments.

Does the OWS protestors have a manifesto yet? What would they consider success?

 

In a small part I am against the Occupy protestors because I feel there's a sense of entitlement that they haven't worked for. But for them to consider their protest a success is a change in politics where it is partisan based rather than party vs party rivalry, at least that'll get the ball rolling into making policies that benefit people more than campaign contributors.

 

I think the belief that one is entitled to representation by people who will actually represent the interests of the majority is a reasonable one.

I think the protest needs to continue non-violently and win more public support.

I would like it to be a major factor in upcoming elections, helping to set the agenda for debate.

I'd like all political donations to be publicly declared and listed.

I'd like consideration to be given to increases in revenue (by rolling back tax cuts and ensuring that tax is not avoided/evaded unfairly) as well as to cuts, in all strategies for deficit reduction.

If things need to ratchet up, maybe support the boycotting of products from named corporations - even for just a week at a time. That would be a way for people who cannot attend protests to show support.

 

I think at least a few of these could be accomplished if they were forced onto the ballots as referendums in the next election. Of course, to avoid state by state prejudices over some federal issues, it would have to begin with an insistence that referendums be allowed at the federal level. I think their absence must surely be an oversight.

Has anyone heard of Small Business Saturday? It's on Nov 26th, the day after Black Friday (not a bad idea to boycott that consumerist orgy) for you non-Americans, Black Friday is the day after our Thanksgiving and is the 1st major shopping day of the Christmas season.

Small Business Saturday asks everyone to stop into local businesses on that day and make a purchase they might normally have made at a mall or major retail store.

It might be getting close to the time where the Occupy Movement will need to spearhead themselves to the next level. I don't know what that needs to be. A manifesto? Maybe. At least something concrete politicians can stand for or against. We, they and the banks know full well what needs to be included in that manifesto but having it written down may force address.

I don't agree.

It's not about entitlement - it's about fairness and a voice in our own government - a voice not drowned out by the interests of the wealthy.

The OWS movement welcomes Americans of all stripes and political persuasions into the fold and political bi-partisanship on behalf of the people would definitely be a great outcome, though I don't believe it's the main focus as long as both parties continue their very partisan efforts on behalf of the wealthiest sector of our society.

The voice most vocal in opposition to the movement speaks from the Tea Party Republicans. The Democratic Party is supportive of the movement, albeit, somewhat silently. As I've said before, that may change if Democratic politicians seeking to get elected or re-elected decide that being on the side of the movement is a vote getter.

 

I agree and folks in Ohio have evidently created an Occupation Party (pan might be interested) with a set of core values:

Restore Reasonable Regulation to the Financial System​

Ensure Equal Justice for All​

Enact Campaign Finance and Electoral Reform​

Implement Fair Tax Reform​

Implement Lobbying Reform​

http://theoccupationparty.org/platform​

You can drill down on each to see specific policy or legislative proposals.

IMO, this is the necessary next step to grow from a protest movement to a political movement.

 

Campaign finance reform, the end of corporate personhood, increased taxes on the wealthy, and accountability for those who's gambling seems likely to crash our economy would be a good start. These seem to be nearly universally approved of by the general population regardless of political philosophy. The only ones starkly against it are crony capitalists and their mainstream media servants. And their opinions on the matter carry little weight.

The most important thing will be rallying large numbers of voters to remove the worst offenders from the House and Senate. OWS needs what the Tea Party had in 2010, a huge shift because of a successful voting campaign. If we can take back the House and get a supermajority in the Senate, and then scare the shit out of Obama so he'll be forced to do the right thing, this could work. Of course, that's like 100 steps from where we are now.

They have a proposed list of demands. I think it was meant to be a proto-document, something to spread throughout the movement to see if it was met with widespread approval or if there was room for improvement. Since then, I don't believe it's been 'ratified' or anything.

All that having been said, it's still too soon. As of tomorrow, the occupation is only two months old and is primarily just trying not to be beaten and kicked out of protesting locations by overzealous law enforcement. My hope is that eventually there will be a very big pendulum swing in response to the unbelievable police response and the movement will be given the breathing room to consider moving on to what's next.

 

Those proposed demands are mostly nonsense. I really don't see most of those going anywhere, regardless.

I find that Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's suggested list of demands to be more in the realm of the possible. They are demands that that vast majority of people can agree to and they address issues that are specific to Wall Street.

LINK

 

MY OPNION, they need to back to work and home and help stimulate the economy.

 

Ralphie,

Most of them don't have jobs (or homes in many cases) to go to!!!!! That's why they're so unhappy.

Get it?

 

i think they should:
-go home and sell everything they own
-bring all of that money together to buy tarps, sleeping bags, 550 cord, and farming equipment.
-buy some land in bumfuck Iowa
-learn to live off of the land

actually i recommend this for everyone (not just the Occupy folk) because as soon as the nobody wants stuff from the United States, the only currency worth anything will be hours of labor building shelter, skill with a band-aid/medicine, or pounds of food (fishies, cows, corn, taters, whogivesafuck). oh and hookers.

also, once you have 3 hot squares and a safe warm place to crash, what more do you really NEED? nobody needs internet, cable TV, porn, or skinny jeans. people need to stop bitching about what they don't have an appreciate what they do.

 

I am sure some would like to do just that. The thing is, the issue of corrupt bankers getting away with their fraud and corruption isn't going away. What you have suggested here is that the protesters stick their head in the sand and ignore the injustice that they were protesting.

 

keep your words etc away from my mouth.

what i've suggested is that if they don't like the system, they remove themselves from the system. you can't be affected by the stock market if you don't rely on that artificial construct called money. bankers gonna bank? politicians gonna lie? wouldn't mean a damn thing to me if i could feed myself and live under something water-proof. if they want to kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs, fuck em. little paper/cloth rectangles with numbers on em don't mean a fucking thing next to self-sustainability.

burying their heads in the sand would be jerking off to Fight Club and Wachowski movies that they got by driving their unpaid car, using gas they got with a credit card to a Wal-Mart, which gets a wholesale price for a movie produced in Hollywood, by a studio which keeps its money in a bank somewhere, which trades it on stocks and lends it out to people who can't pay it back.

 

EventHorizon
Potato, potahto...

It's still avoiding the issue.

 

the occupation movement is not going anywhere. it's going to mutate...there is are problems of momentum and winter to deal with...my sense is that we are after quite big game so it makes little sense to be in any hurry to go the way of every single successful popular movement of the last 40-odd years and disappear into conventional politics when it is in significant measure conventional politics that is the problem...not so much at the level of procedure, but at the levels of class domination and ideological paralysis. and beyond that, there are problems of a fake democratic politics that's reduced to a soft authoritarian top-down management system that substitutes that paradigm of the consumer for that of a democratic polity. so the problems that the occupation is oriented around at the very least fostering a meaningful debate about (which presupposes that such a thing is possible in the united states, which, sadly, still remains to be seen) include the whole conventional political framework as an aspect.

how to break up the degenerate and destructive cluster of ideological statements that we've endured since the late 70s?

what sort of governance is appropriate for trans-national capitalism? what institutions? what does democratic responsiveness mean in a transnational context? clearly the models that exist---like the eu---aren't real responsive to the people within individual nation-states...so what kind of alternatives are there? no-one is talking about any of this in conventional politics, but it's self-evident that some kind of transnational institutional framework has to be constructed in order to bring contemporary capital flows under some kind of control....and this because these flows are not socially or politically functional, particularly not outside the lunacy of neo-liberalism. why is this not a central question within conventional politics? partly because of the ideological crisis of neo-liberalism; partly because of the backward attachment to outmoded ways of thinking like nation-states.

how to change fundamentally the american system, which is based on concentrations of wealth and power?

how to go about dismantling the national-security state? people bitch about deficits but fail to recognize that empire is *the* central driver of them. the conservative welfare state has to get undone. and it's obvious, if you actually look at the structure of the american empire as it is, that it serves no-one's interests in anything like a sustainable manner. the conservative welfare state keeps the united states the largest exporter of weapons and weapons systems on earth. we export death and then whine about what happens because of it. that's fucked up. that has to change.

there clearly has to be a basic rethink of priorities in the united states, but in what directions? how is it possible that social-democratic alternatives to cowboy capitalism have not been implemented? there's obviously something fundamentally wrong---you can see it everywhere---but there's a wholesale failure of imagination in addressing them. this is one of the areas that the occupation has already made an impact on---but it has to go further.

what is wrong with an emphasis on full employment? what is wrong with the state using its resources in ways that parallel almost every other place on earth to direct them toward politically beneficial ends? what is wrong with fostering informed debate--rather than the shallow, stupid nonsense the americans currently specialize in, behind which the plutocracy continues to do what it wants--about what these policy objectives should be? isn't that what a democracy does?

if there's no answers to any of these problems---which are just starters, really---within conventional political discourse, what's the point of rushing into that area?

as for the fatuous objections that use words like "entitlement" in trying to dismiss the occupation, suffice it to say that they aren't worth the breath expended on saying the word entitlement. they're fundamentally dishonest, uninformed bromides handed you by people who represent in the "free" press the interests of people who are threatened by everything the occupation is about.

 

What if what you want is to live in a society that has fair and true representation and is one you can be proud of being a contributing member of?

Withdrawing from society doesn't address that.

Edit: Simul-posted with Roachboy's post (not meant as a response to that)

 

i think we're going to have to agree to disagree.
to me, sitting on a piece of land saying "change stuff" is different than working a piece of land and saying "i'm past all that now that i can provide for myself"
--- merged: Nov 30, 2011 12:02 AM ---

make your own society, assuming that you're unable to change the one you're currently in
--- merged: Nov 30, 2011 12:06 AM ---

finally something i can say i agree with

 

yawn.

event horizon---it's funny reading you recycle the trajectory of the new left of the 60s and early 70s that prompted folk to go off the grid and so forth as if that did not result in exactly the things they were opposed to continuing in exactly the ways they opposed, all because they traded off some illusory personal purity for political action. those days are gone. those lessons have been learned. this is a different situation.

it's not real important whether you, based seemingly on no information, are inclined to oppose whatever you imagine the occupation to be about, particularly since it sounds a whole lot like the smug petit bourgeois horseshit that fox news specializes in producing.

things will change whether you like it or not.

 

...or i genuinely agree with you. even if i do disagree with what the Occupy movement, it doesn't mean that i'm blind to the fact that it won't stop at Wall Street. i recognize that it'll be around for awhile. Still, I'm glad we could keep our opinions respectful and on topic instead of (once again) taking jabs at each others' political affiliation.

 

i was just going on the previous posts here. i'm cool with a discussion. but it's better when cards are on the table. there's a lot of feints and baiting in these things. i am more blunt when that happens than a lot of folk are---but an actual discussion is always preferable.