This quotation from an article in CounterPunch brings some well considered rcommendation re: what is needed from OWS based on where “the problem” lies. Watching Bill Moyers talk to the authors of a book called “Winner Take All Politics”, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the normal “democratic process” has been increasingly rigged over the past 30 years.
Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC plans for the campaign following his testimony before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in October 1967. Speaking to the commission he insisted that news coverage of the recent urban uprisings failed to acknowledge the “greater crimes of white society†and everyday violence of poverty. At a press conference afterwards, King declared that “The time has come if we can’t get anything done otherwise to camp right here in Washington… and stay here by the thousands and thousands until the Congress of our nation and the federal government will do something to deal with the problem [of poverty].
The author of this article makes a well articulated point regarding the aims of the OWS movment that serves to suck the ait out of the inane complaints of the media and others that OWS “lacks a startegy”. It seems to me rather obvious that “lack of clearly stated aims” is a problem in American politics in general.
The disparate circumstances that motivated people to participate in the campaign produced multiple perspectives that could not be adequately expressed in a single set of demands—something that perhaps the New York Times today would deride as a “lack of clear messaging.
“Occupying” DC is the obvious step for the Occupy Movment now. I mean, beyond having a local expresssion in OccupyDC. The whole movment needs to have a General Assembly (GA) and have it in masse, for an extended period of time, in Washington DC . The authors of “Winner Take All Politics” have given us some compelling reasons why this should be so.
For the Tea Party to be so “anti-protest” is inanely blind. They are dissing the use of what they strongly insist is their own right to stage protest. But they are woefully ignorant of the issue and purpose of civil disobedience. They complain that OWS “breaks the law”, and yet “The Tea Party” was itself an “illegal act”. And this “illegality” was the most often heard complaint against the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the marches, and the sit-ins. Tea Party folks who try to maintain that they support what MLK did and yet use practically identical rhetoric against it as the Segregationists did against the movement, will try to insist that there is no parallel. But there is.
