Category: Power to the People

‘I don’t think this is a difficult question’

~ susie

David Swanson:

If we want to end wars and cut military spending, will we accomplish that by changing the faces of the military industrial complex’s representatives in Congress and the White House or by educating the public about the human costs, financial costs, environmental costs, civil liberties and democratic costs, and the endangerment of us all caused by dumping 65 percent of discretionary spending into the war machine? Will we get further by funding candidates or by using civil resistance to disrupt the work of the makers of war? We can do both. We must do both. But which should we prioritize? Which should we make subservient? Do we want a culture passionately demanding peace and compelling all elected officials to work for it, a culture we approached, for example, in 1928? Or do we want a country in which loyal Democrats denounce Republican war funders, but nobody at all denounces Democratic war funders?

Should we be dumping what resources we’re left after paying our war taxes into electoral campaigns or into independent activism? I don’t think this is a difficult question.

“Oh no! If the good people stop funding elections, only Republicans will have money!”
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Occupy Philly

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

First of all, so far, the City of Philadelphia is supportive of the protesters. (Mayor Nutter has informed them that tonight he will host a showing of Game 5 tonight of the Phillies-Cards series.) I even talked to a cop who shrugged and said, “These people are no threat to anyone. They have a point of view and they’re expressing it.” (He said he was more worried about the crowd they might get if the Phillies win tonight.)

Police Chief Charles Ramsey is having the First Amendment read regularly over the police radio, and reminds his officers that citizens have the right to record or take pictures of police activity.

And the city even blocks traffic for them and lets them march around City Hall during rush hour. So far, so good. We’ll see.

***

Cleveland Johnson, 64, (“Cleveland, like the city”) lives in Pennsauken NJ but grew up in Philadelphia. He said in the Sixties, he walked picket lines in Philadelphia for the integration of Girard College. “I was here when Rev. Martin Luther King came through,” he said.

Then he pointed to the diverse group of young people.

“That was our time, and this is their time. They’re standing up for what’s right.”
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The crazy ones

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

A nice Mother Jones piece from Obama’s former campaign blogger:

When we finally made it to Zuccotti Park, the first person I saw camping out was a stoned-looking guy with a banjo standing next to a guy holding an upside-down American flag. These are the heroes we marched in solidarity with? This guy is our Wael Ghonim?

When I got home, I heard that Steve Jobs passed away. I was much more upset about his death than I expected to be. I’m not sure why but I immediately went on YouTube and looked up the “Think Different” commercial. My younger, more radical self hated the ad for exploiting Martin Luther King to sell computers, but I was moved this time around. “Here’s to the crazy ones” the narrator reads, “…the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

I thought about the drugged-out dude with the banjo: one of the crazy ones. And the dude with the upside down flag and the one with the severed head and the anti-fracking obsessive and the people jonesing for a confrontation with the cops: all crazy ones. Crazy ones who sparked the first mass outpouring of left-wing activism in years, who have finally provided a visible counter to the free market fanaticism of the Tea Party. Crazy ones who have reignited a conversation about class in America.

The pragmatic progressives like me didn’t start this movement. We thought about the long-term impact for the Left and the short-term electoral optics for Democrats. When the economy collapsed, we were quiet, the Tea Party spoke up, and the rage the country felt was directed towards government, not Wall Street. In short, we were afraid.

Thankfully, the crazy ones weren’t.

And in spite of all I saw that I didn’t like, there were clear signs that the movement is maturing, getting more organized, coalescing around a message: “We Are The 99%.” Like the protesters in Tahrir, there are clean-up crews keeping Zuccotti as spiffy as possible. Organizers are even enforcing message discipline by urging supporters on Twitter to shorten protest-related hashtags from #OccupyWallSt to #OWS.

Perhaps it’s a natural evolution, but it also seems likely that the movement is changing because the seasoned organizers and pragmatists are working alongside the radical idealists who were there from the start.

The only reason those pragmatists are there is because the crazy ones took the first steps.

On OWS

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Krugman:

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.

A better critique of the protests is the absence of specific policy demands. It would probably be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to see enacted. But we shouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.

Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I’ll second that, because such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover. I’d suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment — not more tax cuts — to help create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.
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Terra terra terra!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

What on earth would the security apparatus do without hippies to spy upon?

Word is going around Minneapolis that the FBI is looking for a few good spies to break up the dangerous world of vegan potlucks. That’s right — the nation’s newest terrorist threat is not from explosives or Al Qaeda — you should be worrying about the imminent threat of soy dogs and tasteless, overly dry chocolate cake.

The FBI is actually looking for moles to infiltrate the not-so-shady world ofbicycle enthusiasts and vegetarians to learn more about protests planned for the2008 Republican National Convention. The problem with this infiltration is that they aren’t just seeking to disrupt crime, they are trying to stop the protests altogether. At the 2004 RNC convention in New York, the police cracked down on political speech, protest, and dissent. The NYCLU has tons of great documents that chronicle how the NYPD went about using fear over “terrorism” to justify squashing free speech. This summer’s conventions, in Minneapolis and Denver, are shaping up to be a redux of the 2004 debacle — anyone else remember the “free speech zone” cages? —where the FBI used the guise of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to suppress speech.