Battle for the Soul of Occupy
Alright you jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,
First they silenced our uprising with a media blackout… then they smashed our encampments with midnight paramilitary raids… and now they’re threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation. This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?
It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed.
Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?
We are now in a battle for the soul of Occupy… a fight to the finish between the impotent old left and the new vibrant, horizontal left who launched Occupy Wall Street from the bottom-up and who dreams of real democracy and another world.
Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past. Let’s Occupy the clicktivists and crash the MoveOn party. Let’s #DEFENDOCCUPY and stop the derailment of our movement that looms ahead.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25, #26, #27 and #28 / Check out Oakland occupier Mike King’s take on MoveOn’s 99% Spring
306 comments on the article “Battle for the Soul of Occupy”
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Anonymous
That piece is completely taken down by http://tech.nycga.net/2012/03/25/reportback-the-99spring-training-for-trainers-and-the-plot-to-coopt-occupy/#comment-376 and the article that precedes that comment.
Anonymous
My way or rhe highway makes a lot of good people hit the road. I am a semi-socialist and work with many good groups trying to make positive changes, but have been saddened by the elitism of Occupy. In order to build an effective movement it is a really good idea to welcome others who are on your side. You don't have to participate in all their actions, but it is a bad idea to constantly condemn their actions or question their motives through assumption, hints and innuendo. It will alienate more potential allies than it will attract.
Groups that are forming the 99% Spring are trying to take action against coprporate greed and sociopathy. It may not be the way Occupy would do it, but, they are trying to do something positiive.
BTW, this is, after all, supposed to be a democratic country, ruled by the majority, with a moderate majority (barely). In order to get them on board a more inclusive stance makes sense. Is it right for any small group to decide what is best for everyone? The majority agree that corporations have way too much control and that the Citizens United decision was terrible. We are all in the same boat and must all row in the same direction. If people will support each other's efforts we can get more done. "Silos" are not helpful. joining hands is a better way.
BTW 2, MoveOn was pushing for campaign finance reform, getting money out of politics and closing the revolving door between politician and corporate lobbyist for at least two years. They have repeatedly put pressure on the POTUS to make real changes that will help people losing their homes, to refuse to let bankster mortgage lenders off the hook for their crimes and fire Frank Demarco.
Anonymous
But these positions you cited that MoveOn takes, are as meaningless as Obama proclaiming he's for Wall St reform, while he takes money from Jamie Dimon, at a fundraiser.
It's one thing to claim you're for something, but it's just fraudulent if you already know it can't and won't be achieved. Or even worse, doesn't solve the endemic corruption, but only make it appear that the corruption is lessened or gone, while the raping and pillaging of ordinary Americans continues. This is what the Democratic party has done for the last several decades. Pretended to be for the American people, but actually helped take away their jobs, their benefits and their chance to live outside the corporate wage slave system.
Judging from MoveOn's past behavior, they operate as another arm of the DNC. The type of communications that I've seen from MoveOn, have been lackluster grassroots rallies/protests to motivate Democratic party voters and volunteers to devote time and energy helping the Democratic party machine beat the Republican party machine.
And meanwhile, the voters are nothing more than manipulated pawns, eternally waiting for the Democratic party to pass legislation that's not written by a corporate lobbyists and lawyers.
The half measures that the Democratic party always proposes are nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
So why don't you explain how it's a good idea to welcome all parties and be more inclusive when you know they are using your movement, your efforts, to continue the status quo, to take away the media attention from your cause, and to shift the spotlight from the plight of ordinary Americans, onto Obama's re-election campaign?
If Occupy's aim is to elicit substantive change, MoveOn isn't going to help. I've yet to see anything from MoveOn that isn't a corporate con, disguised as progressive.
By the way, I think Van Jones is also a fraud who is in it for himself. He's been intimating that the only way to achieve reform is to do it from the inside (when he knows very well it can't be done) and is just trying to get a seat back at the table, so he can grab some of that cash that every single insider wants. I watched Jones on RT and Real Time, and he used language that was demeaning and condescending with regards to the occupiers. And worse. He tried to imply that it's he and those allied with him that have been co-opted by Occupy.
And what exactly do you mean by the statement you're a semi-socialist? Semi-socialism is what Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have now, and their rights and freedoms are being yanked from them, their standard of living is declining, their unemployment is rising, their benefits and pensions are in trouble, because transnational corporations and banks now control policies, internationally and domestically.
If you think that simply passing more progressive legislation is the answer, then I'm sorry, but this thinking is as uninformed and in denial as any Republican who believes that if the markets were just more free, and devoid of government regulation, then everyone could get rich.
The system doesn't work because capitalism and consumerism, morally bankrupts the soul, creates greed, insatiable needs, and a lack of empathy. Capitalism and consumerism encourage psychopathy and sociopathic behavior, inures people to violence, perpetuates wars for profit, allows massive market manipulation, speculation and financial malfeasance. It exacerbates poverty, leads to theft of common resources, squanders resources, exploits humans for their labor, ingenuity and creativity, while it sucks humanity dry, like a spider sucks the life out of a fly.
frankd1100
Your egotistical preaching has the divisive tone of a fundamentalist preacher. You believe that you have the uncanny ability to identify those who qualify as the elite foot soldiers whom you will allow to participate in the great battle to save the masses.
Please explain how passing progressive legislation is the same as supporting the kind of deregulated market environment that resulted in the ongoing economic devastation of millions of homeowners. How are progressive legislative efforts to guarantee every individual health care, the same as Republican efforts to build in greater profit for private sector insurance? You either have no sense of logic or you're blinded by an angry hatred that makes you as dangerous as the fascist oligarchs who are sucking this country dry.
You end your diatribe spewing out significant words in such a way as to rob them of all meaning. Why not take the time to focus on an idea, expanding the concept to reach out to those who are on the path. We might not all be as smart as you, but if that's the criterion in your mind, then you've become the spider.
Anonymous
Passing progressive legislation? Perhaps like the JOBS act that will most assuredly increase fraud by de-regulating and opaque-ifying the IPO market? Or maybe something like the Mortgage Fraud Settlement that amounts to another stealth bailout for the banks? Obama is a problem, not a solution, and Move-One, Van Jones and the rest that keep telling us we have to reelect him because, you know, maybe he might actually do something positive this time are not our friends. Either they haven't been paying any attention or they are actively working to quash the movement. How can Occupy Wall Street supporters also support Wall Street's biggest and most effective defender, the President? We can't, not if we want to keep our integrity intact.
Aquifer
See, here is the problem - all that "deregulated market environment" that caused the crash was put on steroids in the Clinton administration, pushed by his Sec of Treas, Rubin and friends - the same guys, Summers, et. al. that Obama put in charge of his economic team. And when you consider all those "free trade" deals, again on steroids with Clinton - NAFTA and WTO - and furthered under Obama, what you discover is that for all the Rep rhetoric - it is the Dems who routinely deliver on it.
As for healthcare - oh please - Obamacare is Romneycare writ large, everybody knows it. It does not, nor was it even designed to, guarantee every individual healthcare - the only thing that will do that is single payer and Obama took that off the table even before he was elected. What it does do is guarantees that everyone would have to buy private insurance - pay through the nose to a lousy company for a lousy product, and still wind up with inadequate coverage and healthcare they can't afford ..
You are either not paying attention or you are so blinded by love for Dems or "an angry hatred" of Reps that you cannot see that BOTH parties are dragging us down and we need to reject them lickety split.
i happen to think that Occupy would be immeasurably strengthened by having a political arm - to put a tip on the end of it's spear, but that is up to it. In any case it sure as hell can't be either of the 2 parties that got us into the mess that Occupy is protesting ....
Anonymous
Pony party 2012
Anonymous
My point was that the deep denial is the same, whether it's from Democratic voters, or Republican voters, because the corporations and banks and corporations own and control everything. There's really no such thing as progressive legislation or free markets. They're illusory, because there's only corporate legislation, with a few crumbs thrown to either base, depending upon which party holds power. Transnational corporations and the banking cartels, own and control the power structures; all three branches of govt. every govt. agency, security apparatus, lobbyists, regulators, judicial system, prison complex, at the state, federal and local level. And most importantly they own and control the media, including 'so-called' progressive media like the Nation, Mother Jones, Alternet, Salon.com etc. Working within a system that's so broken and so filled with endemic corruption, based on an economic system of greed and human exploitation can't possibly bring about meaningful change.
Change must be gained externally, otherwise it's comparable to putting a bandaid on a gaping wound, while the infection spreads. If change within the system was going to work, it would have worked already.
My comment wasn't about being smart, it was about recognizing simple truths from propaganda and commonly repeated lies. The words I used only lack meaning if you haven't spent time thinking about how the world around you works, and what part you play within that system. If you're passively part of that world, and are comfortable with the continuing exploitation of human beings, then by all means, carry on. That seems to be the impression you're conveying.
Good cop/bad cop isn't democracy, it isn't even constitutional. We all live on large chunks of land with fictional lines called borders, where we are forced to comply with state sanctioned laws penned by corporations, that are enforced through oppression, in order to become dutiful, compliant wage slaves and indebted consumers. Tell me how that's not factual.
If that's the system you're comfortable with and want, then keep working, voting, blogging and masturbating for the Democratic party. Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
frankd1100
In February of 2003 I joined a couple of dozen people from my town in Massachusetts making the trip to the Mall in Washington DC to protest the coming war. The corporate press, Tom Friedman and his ilk, downplayed the effort estimating a crowd of twenty thousand or so, when it was closer to half a million, filling the mall from end to end. It was a bitterly cold day but everyone was enthusiastic because we actually believed it would make a difference. Those of us who were old enough to have participated in Vietnam anti-war efforts were hopeful that this was the start of something, an awareness of the tyranny that was throwing off its camouflage to brutally stomp on any semblance of a peoples' voice.
I had written to Sen. John Kerry outlining simple, obvious objections to the invasion of Iraq. I seem to recall that a majority shared this sentiment. He ultimately voted for the resolution in support of the invasion. I still have his two page reply, a long convoluted attempt to justify his vote. It was clearly a shamefully transparent set of lies that he and his advisors felt would help set the stage for his presidential candidacy, painting him as enough of a warmonger to defeat Cheney's pape-rmache' dummy warmonger sitting in the white house.
I went back to DC to join a smaller, but still significant gathering of people, to protest Bush's second inauguration. It was eerily confirming of the fascist nature that had quietly, and completely infiltrated every point of power in what was no longer, the 'peoples' government.
In both gatherings there was a mixture of young, energetic activists and older, frightened adults like me. Many had kids of draft age. We elders were all fearful of the fundamental erosion of rights and the replacement of our democracy by the imperialist, dictatorial regimes that had occurred on our 'watch.'
So, Anonymous, I am not naive and I am on your side. On that inauguration day a small number of us got through the active duty soldiers at the massive steal barricades that blocked every single point of access to the inauguration route. It just seems to me we need every person we can get to join our cause and to use every tactic, even the subterfuge of moving under the flag of so called progressives, until we get close enough.
Anonymous
Good stuff there. :-)
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