Marty Kaplan

October 3, 2011

Opinion: Occupy K Street

Police square off against protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge during an Occupy Wall Street march in New York on Oct. 1. Photo by REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

It’s premature to give the Nobel Peace Prize to those Occupy Wall Street kids. But it also may be too soon to blow them off as clueless hipsters “with nowhere to go,” as New York Times columnist Charles Blow did, calling the two weeks “a festival of frustrations, a collective venting session with little edge or urgency.”

But there is somewhere for them to go – for us all to go—and it really does have enormous urgency.

Campaign finance reform.

I know. Dream on. Can you think of three words less likely to ignite a movement?

Even if you give it a snappy name – the Times’ editorial page called it “sewer money” for a few years – it always polls way down on the list of issues voters care about.

There’s a lot of noise, but Occupy Wall Street sort of has a message. It’s unfair that our generation has to pay for the mess Wall Street made. They have us over a barrel. If the banks screw up again, they can just hold the world financial system hostage, and we’ll have no choice but to bail them out again. And then they’ll give themselves more billion-dollar bonuses just to stick it to us. While the rich get unbelievably richer, the rest of us are struggling. We can’t find jobs. Our prospects are bleak. This isn’t how America is supposed to work. Something’s got to change.

It’s good that some people who are not in the Tea Party are also getting their voices heard. The more talk about reining in the excesses of a runaway financial services sector, the better. But I wish these protesters were more pissed that whatever changes they want, the political system they will task to bring them about is rigged for the rich. It’s hard to imagine anything getting better without first ending the insane, obscene money chase at the heart of our democratic institutions.

But politicians know that as issues go, getting big money out of Washington, and out of state capitals, too, is about as sexy as steamed broccoli.

The $6 billion it will take to run for office in 2012 has to come from someone, mainly in big bundles, and that someone isn’t you or me. Those contributions come with strings attached. It’s illegal to trade money for votes, but few politicians are stupid enough to get caught doing that. There’s nothing illegal about privileging your big donors and their lobbyists with access to you and your staff. It’s perfectly understandable that you say, and even believe, that you make decisions by weighing the merits, not the wallets.

But wouldn’t it be bizarre if the insurance companies, securities and investment firms, real estate interests and commercial banks shoveling money into campaigns were doing so without expecting to get something for it? Drug companies, energy companies, telecoms and agribusiness aren’t in it for generic good government; they’re in it to get the legislative and regulatory outcomes they want. The same is true for labor. This is the interest-group system we have, and anyone too pure to play it is committing unilateral disarmament.

The money that politicians raise, and the money raised by “independent” super PACs, doesn’t go for golf trips or tanning beds. (Not usually, anyway.) Nor does what campaigns pay for travel, field staff and events amount to much. The paid media budget is what counts. It’s the ads, stupid.

Campaigns spend three out of four dollars on media, which is a huge bonanza for TV and radio stations, and for political consulting firms. The latter not only get paid to produce the ads; they also take a nice slice for buying the airtime from the stations.

The stations, in turn, have a monopoly on the broadcast spectrum, which we – the owners of the spectrum – license to them in exchange for zero dollars, plus their straight-faced promise to serve the public interest.

For years now, conservative judicial activists on the Supreme Court have been striking down every legislative attempt to check the power of big money in politics. Their argument is that money is speech, so you can’t restrict it.

Other democracies guarantee free airtime to candidates and put limits on ads and contributions. Not us.

Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the Constitution’s framers created a genius of a system that has withstood the ages. But they could not have foreseen that there would one day be a de facto fourth branch of government, powered by big money in politics, and so they did not check that power with other power.

The Founders could not have imagined how technology and mass media could hypnotize a free people, and how the imperative to buy as much of that juju as you can would throw the whole system they created out of whack.

They could not have anticipated Karl Rove, Dick Armey or the Koch brothers. Or the National Association of Broadcasters, Roger Ailes, media illiteracy, civic illiteracy, entertainment-über-alles, the flight from reason, the collapse of moral consensus, and a Supreme Court confirmation process during which nominated Justices pledge allegiance to settled law without meaning it in the slightest.

Without campaign finance reform, the future belongs to the big dogs in the money game. I wish Occupy Wall Street would connect the dots between whatever their issues are and the mother of all issues.

Sure, there are slackers, tourists, naïfs, nutcases, opportunists and superannuated hippies among the people being pepper sprayed, dragnetted, or just showing up to say there’s something’s really wrong. That’s the beauty of spontaneity – real democracy is messy. But something connects Occupy Wall Street with last summer’s protesters in Madison, Wisconsin: the embryonic notion that the right does not own dissent in America.

No one knows if this whole thing will fizzle, or be the start of something. But if those kids turn their attention from how much money there is on Wall Street to where that money goes, they won’t be called kids for long.

Marty Kaplan holds the Norman Lear chair in entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

AlterNet.org

ACTIVISM & VISION

AlterNet / By Adele M. Stan and Don Hazen

Van Jones on America's Uprising: It's Going To Be an Epic Battle

Jones talked to AlterNet about the growing social movements for change, running real progressives in 2012, and how we can train a million new leaders.

October 4, 2011 |

As the grassroots sit-ins and marches that originated as Occupy Wall Street spread to other cities, Van Jones, lead evangelist for the American Dream movement, took the stage Monday at a Washington, DC hotel where organizers of the institutional element of the progressive movement converged at Take Back the American Dream. The gathering was organized by the Campaign for America's Future in partnership with Jones' new organization, Rebuild the Dream. Jones voiced his support for the spontaneous Wall Street uprising, and for the U.S. Marines who agreed, he said, to protect the protesters while wearing dress blues.

Jones said that after he left the White House, where he served as a green jobs adviser to President Barack Obama, he occupied his time studying how the Tea Party movement came into existence and marshaled its power. Jones had been a target of Tea Party ire, stoked by Glenn Beck on his Fox News Channel platform, back when Beck served as the de facto community organizer for media baron Rupert Murdoch, before Beck fell out of the mogul's favor.

Jones explained the Tea Party's "leaderless" model to the activists with a PowerPoint showing how the instigators of the Tea Party movement -- leaders of groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity -- didn't so much create a top-down organization as they did a network that fostered the development of local Tea Party organizations by local activists, who then took ownership of their own corners of the movement. "The Tea Party is an open-source brand," Jones explained, "that 3,528 affiliates use; none of them own it." For all their talk of rugged individualism, Jones said, the forces behind the Tea Party "have enacted the most collectivist strategy for taking power in the history of the republic."

Jones also demonstrated, with modeling schematics, how progressives had initially, during the 2008 presidential campaign, centered their movement more around a person -- Obama -- than their own issues. In no small part, Jones implied, progressives were drawn to the Obama campaign's branding, with its iconic "O" logo onto which people projected their own aspirations and beliefs.

"It has been a tough couple of years," Jones told his audience. "We went from hope to heartbreak in about a minute...We have the wrong theory of the presidency."

As for the rise of the right, Jones said, "I'm not mad at the Tea Party. I'm not mad at them for being so loud. I'm mad at us for having been so quiet the past two years."

With Monday's speech, Jones set out to sell the idea of a more diffuse and locally directed progressive movement to a gathering of progressives who are more used to being part of organizing campaigns launched from organization or union headquarters. What Jones is offering instead, though his Rebuild the Dream hub (launched in partnership with MoveOn.org), is an open-source brand for the left, complete with a logo in the form of a red "A" (for "American Dream") with a white star at its center, underlined by a blue stripe. It's a graphic turn on the American flag, part of Jones' call to the left to reclaim the mantle of patriotism.

Rebuild the Dream has already facilitated some 1,600 house meetings of like-minded people who aim to build a grassroots movement on a par with the Tea Party. Rebuild the Dream has also issued a "Contract For the American Dream," built on the model of past right-wing contracts, which politicians are being asked to sign in order to signify their willingness to support movement goals in their political and legislative work. At Monday's event, Jones brought to the stage members and leaders of some 25 organizations, representing issues ranging from workers' rights, LGBT rights, corporate accountability, financial reform -- many from the longstanding l organizations of the progressive and liberal movement, including labor unions.

Today, the more institutional wing of the left will be represented among the less-affiliated protesters of Occupy Wall Street, as union members, artists, hactivists and students join in the mass expression of outrage at the impunity with which big banks and traders have turned the economy against everyday Amercans for the benefit of the 1 percent of Americans who own 42 percent of the nation's wealth. A number of New York union locals are marching in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street from City Hall to Zuccotti Park, the protesters' base camp.

Van Jones sat down yesterday with AlterNet executive editor Don Hazen and Washington bureau chief Adele Stan to share his hopes for the rebirth of a liberal people's movement.

AlterNet: When you talk about Rebuilding the Dream being a resource hub for progressives, how do you envision that?

Van Jones: We want to be a support center like FreedomWorks is a support center [for the Tea Party]. Everybody focuses on the money from the Koch brothers; they focus on Fox News TV. But they don't focus so much on infrastructure, and the relationship between the institutions. So we've tried to focus in on that.

AlterNet: One of the things FreedomWorks did was to create the Tea Party Patriots, which is a network, as you noted in your speech, and one that created its own social media infrastructure. Progressives tend to use Twitter and Facebook, which means our calls to action are out there on public platforms. Is that just who we are, or do you foresee building an American Dream movement social-media network, just as Tea Party Patriots did for their people? They build communities that way -- communities that are locally and regionally based, but which are then tied to the national Tea Party Patriots network, which is in turn tied to FreedomWorks. But they also bring in new people who may not have been politically active before, because there's a level of the social media network that's local. One of the reasons some people are saying that Occupy Wall Street is more like the Tea Party than the folks at this conference is that nobody is directly affiliated with a top-down, long established organization.

Van Jones: People can take too literally the [Tea Party comparison] -- like what is the one effort that is going to be the [progressive version of] the Tea Party. Then people can start having a tug of war over it. But, really, I don't think of it like that. I think we're going into a real period of serious experimentation and innovation, and even improvisation -- certainly through the [2012 presidential] election, and probably a couple of years beyond as a couple of things happen. One, as the economic crisis gets worse -- it ain't gonna get better -- the formal economy is going to continue to contract. That means you're going to have a lot of people suffering due to the economy. That's going to create a need for a response. What are we going to do? How can we address the ways in which people are hurting -- immediate needs? That's going to be a driver of innovation, the economic crisis. People have to eat. People have to live indoors. People aren't going to just lay down and die because Wall Street wants to hold up the economic recovery.

But the other driver will be the other process -- which is a global phenomenon -- of the business model for social change changing, moving away from the hierarchical and more toward the horizontal. And you'll see different efforts that reflect different aspects of that. Getting all these grassroots leaders to align ourselves differently as we begin to function differently, more in partnership, and also a lot more open-source efforts.

For example, November 17 is going to be a major protest date. And we're just letting people take that and run with it. There's no central group people are going to do this. We're just throwing the date out there -- November 17th, "Jobs Not Cuts." That's different from the kinds of coalitional tables that have been set up before where [groups] try to dictate exactly the messaging, exactly this and exactly that. So you're seeing urgency because of the economic crisis, and the opportunity to do things differently, because of the technology, to create all kinds of new forums. And so it could be, in some ways, Occupy Wall Street will reflect some of the success model from the Tea Party. We're talking about the Tea Party because that's what gets the attention. But we're also studying the Arab Spring.

There's a way that we, as Westerners look at things: What is the one right answer? Is it the American Dream Movement, or is it Occupy Wall Street? Which is it? When, actually, we're just glad that the volcano is starting to erupt. We just want to fight. And there are some pre-existing grassroots assets that need to be re-aligned or redeployed; we're trying to do that here. Then there's all this new energy out there. And what you're going to see happening is that new explosion of energy will capture and inspire some existing stuff; some of these new organizations that are started will capture and inspire some new stuff, and you'll see all kinds of interpenetrations and that kind of thing.

AlterNet: So, you as a brand may still say, we're going to build our own social networking infrastructure.

VJ: We're going to continue to innovate and improvise, and nothing would make us happier than for this to result in something that's incredibly useful, and for other things to show up that create incredible utility. There's not going to be one thing that progressives do to fix this; we're going to be in a period of improvisation. Now people are going are, rightly, using your work -- Dangerous Brew and other stuff -- to get insight and a window into the Tea Party phenomenon, but there are other things.

AlterNet: So, you're saying, that even structurally you're not looking to mirror that movement.

VJ: Not primarily. We wanted to see that if we went through the steps they went through, with their Contract from America, with the house meetings, could we do it? You know, they had 800 house meetings; we had 1,597 -- almost double.

AlterNet: And are those people going to meet again to build the grassroots?

VJ: Yes. Look at the three things we're committed to coming out of here. One, November 17th -- that's a big deal. That's going to be all over the country. So, if you look from September 17th, when the young people took over Wall Street, to November 17th. That's the American Autumn. You had the Arab Spring; that's the American Autumn...That process is ongoing, on the theme, Jobs, Not Cuts. Now, the difference is, there's not all kinds of coalitions zipping around, trying to dictate all the signs and messaging. We're inviting all kinds of people, individuals as well as organizations, to jump on board.

Number two -- we're saying protests must lead to participation. We had those house meetings -- we had, I think, 31,000 people, online and in person. We're going to be launching a new online platform...where people will be able to continue that effort. We're also going to be developing teach-ins, because one of the things we learned from all those house meetings was that there's a need for some experience. Because if you go to [a house meeting] that's great, that's great. But if you go to one that's not so great, it's not so great. So if you have a teach-in, there's a way to get the best of all possible worlds. You get a lot of people together, you have some videos or a some main speakers -- we're going to try that out.

AlterNet: So you start a national conversation and get people talking.

VJ: We're going to try to get a million leaders in America online and talking with each other. And that's going to be a major piece.

And then there's a third piece, and it's new -- and it seems to have escaped people's notice -- and that's that we've said we're going to run 2012 people for office in 2012. Now, that's a big deal.

AlterNet: That's a lot of people.

VJ: And the reason we're able to do is not because Mike (Lux) have 2,000 people in their back pockets. It's because we have groups like Progressive Majority and the New Organizing Institute.

AlterNet: Then you're talking about local folks, too -- people running for school board and town council.

VJ: Everybody, up and down. We're talking about U.S. senators who want to run as American Dream candidates -- soon to be announced. We've reached out to the House Democratic Caucus; there are House members who want to run as American Dream candidates. One of the things that's been missing is, you have Tea Party Republicans: you may not like the product, but you know what the product is. Right now, you say Democrat, and you don't know if you're getting Larry Summers or Dennis Kucinich. So you can imagine at some point that there will be American Dream Democrats -- or American Dream Republicans, if they want to act right, or even American Dream independents. They just have to agree with our Contract For the American Dream -- those 10 things (the contract contains "10 Critical Steps to Get Our Economy Back on Track"), and including the preamble that says "liberty and justice for all," not for some, but for all. So you've got more corners where you can have a lot of activity happening.

Look, the Occupy Wall Street stuff is a huge, big deal; this is a huge, big deal; there will be other huge, big deals. There is a big thaw happening. People have gone through their grieving process, and people want to fight. Look, if the economy gets worse, there may be a whole section of Latinos that jump off [and into the movement] -- people nobody expected, because of the horrible things that are being dropped on Latino communities in the Southeast and Southwest.

I just want to say one last thing, and this is important. A lot of the people in the leadership of the American Dream Movement just love Occupy Wall Street. We're in awe of them and we want them to do well. And what we're struggling with is how do we support it without looking like we're trying to take it over. Because we couldn't've thunk this up, therefore we want it to be able to have its independence. At the same time, [it's important to determine] where they might need a little bit of support, so you don't jump in and wind up killing something that is an organic thing.

AlterNet: It's going to be interesting to see what happens when Dan Cantor, executive director of the labor-aligned Working Families Party, and other union members join with Occupy Wall Street for the solidarity march this week.

VJ: Exactly! This is thrilling stuff! This is an epic battle [with] the dream-killers on Wall Street -- who are so disgusting and so despicable; they are ingrates who are sitting up there laughing at us. I mean, every other bloc of capital that has this much weight, they try to do something to make you like them. Even the polluters, they say, "We'll get clean coal." They try to do something. But these people on Wall Street -- they just don't care. So it's just going to be an epic battle now between the worst people in America, the most selfish people in America, and the most selfless. And that's going to be amazing.

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/addiestan. Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

Vox News

'Occupy Wall Street': Why this revolution isn't made for TV

Supporters complain the mainstream media aren't keeping pace with 'Occupy Wall Street' protests. But the movement's complexity makes big-picture coverage difficult.

By Gloria Goodale, Staff writer / October 5, 2011

• 

A large group of protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement attempt to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, effectively shutting parts of it down, Saturday, in New York. Police arrested dozens while trying to clear the road and reopen for traffic. Will Stevens/AP

Los Angeles

As the “Occupy Wall Street” movement catches fire, spreading copycat protests to towns and regions all over the globe, organizers and supporters say the mainstream media are not keeping pace.

Current TV’s Keith Olbermann lashed out at what he called a “media blackout” more than a week ago, and activist Michael Moore joined him two days later to rail against traditional media’s scant spotlight on the nascent protest movement.

But, polemics aside, is it really true that this revolution is not being televised? It turns out there are objective reasons the decentralized movement, which is protesting what it says is the undue political influence of major financial firms, has not generated more and better coverage.

IN PICTURES: Wall Street (and beyond) protests

According to the New York Observer, which has been keeping tabs on the media coverage of the Occupy actions, both broadcast and print media have been present from the inception, with ABC posting a blog and the local CBS affiliate airing a short clip on Sept. 17, the first day the group encamped around New York’s financial center.

Fox News, too, aired a bit about the anti-Wall Street activists on Day 1.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) at the Pew Research Center, notes that coverage of the events involving the Occupy protests represented 12 percent of the economic stories, or about 2 percent of all the news studied in PEJ’s News Coverage Index last week.

“It is complicated and probably fraught to compare different news events that occur years apart,” he says via e-mail, “but that is more than the tea party received initially when it held its first rallies in February 2009.”

However, the Observer points out, coverage is missing the bigger picture in favor of the simple narrative, noting, “when the shows started interviewing protesters, they were more focused on the actions of the police than what the protesters were fighting about.” This includes the YouTube video of a New York policeman pepper-spraying young women and the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge over this past weekend.

No surprises there, says Mark Naison, a history professor at Fordham University in New York, who argues that broadcast media favor simple visual narratives. If the imagery does not lend itself to a quick explanation, and the subjects themselves intentionally represent many points of view, as is the case with the Occupy movements, then the journalist’s task becomes complicated.

“The media has focused on the pepper spray incidents and the arrests on the bridge because these are familiar to them,” he says, noting that there were issues of police mishandling of protesters in New York City when the Republican National Convention was held there in 2004.

But, he notes, the protesters themselves are not familiar.

“Middle-class, educated young people, many of them clearly countercultural in appearance – dreadlocks, tattoos, multicolored hair, etc., – all camping out in the heart of a city’s financial district, is not something anyone expected to see in the US,” he says. This is more familiar in Europe and Latin America, he notes, “but not in the USA.”

There is confusion, he says, adding that people are wondering, “Where did they come from? Why are they doing this?”

What reporters for the print and broadcast media are only now starting to grasp as this spreads nationwide, says Professor Naison, is how many middle-class college-age kids in the US can’t find jobs that secure middle-class status.

“In fact, there are enough of them to fuel a pretty big protest movement,” he says.

If the Occupy groups desire better mainstream media attention, they need to polish their communication skills, says Richard Goedkoop, a communications professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

“Part of its initial problem in gaining media coverage was its lack of a charismatic and quotable leader, which would allow news outlets to cover more than groups of (mostly) young people in centers of commerce,” he says via e-mail.

“Another problem is that the message behind these demonstrations have not been very quotable and precise,” he says. “What are they about? What do they specifically want?”

While news coverage is building, there could be more, he notes. “Supporters cynically might choose to blame it on the conglomerates that own these media organizations: Comcast, News Corp., Disney, etc.”

Because the brunt of the message is actually about them, he asks, “Is it in their best corporate interest to inform the public about their own failings?”

But if coverage is in fact skimpy, the reasons are likely more prosaic, says Mark Tatge, Pulliam distinguished professor of journalism at DePauw University in Indiana.

“The media that would normally cover this – mainstream media – is under severe economic pressure,” he says, pointing out that upwards of 30 percent of the reporters and editors who used to work for newspapers, TV stations, and magazines have been laid off.

“Ironically,” he adds, “some of these layoffs come at the hands of Wall Street investors who wanted fatter profit margins from media companies.”

If this says anything about media it is this, says Professor Tatge: “We are getting less coverage about events that predict or foreshadow what is yet to come.”

IN PICTURES: Wall Street (and beyond) protests

Why My Generation Should Care About Occupy Wall St

Editor’s Pick

OCTOBER 3, 2011 9:02PM

Why My Generation Should Care About Occupy Wall St

Juan Ruiz

Years from now historians will point to 2011 as the year of the street protests, and now that citizens have expressed disapproval of their governments everywhere from Cairo to Santiago, Chile, the eyes of the world turn to Liberty Square, deep in the heart of New York’s Financial District.

Mainstream media’s depiction of the protesters has, up to now, generally been negative. At first, major news channels and newspapers were completely ignoring the protests. After protesters made it clear that they were going to continue fighting, despite mass arrests and widespread claims of police harassment, editors nationwide cannot help to report on it.

The same publications that ignored the movement at first now tend to repeatedly emphasize the protests’ apparent lack of purpose. Even when they give protesters the benefit of the doubt – CNN, MSNBC, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, have done that, if sparingly – they often still claim that for the protests to be successful they need to have a clearer message.

And this is because the message of the protests, due to the nature of its participants’ grievances, is not as blatantly obvious at first glance as others that have already taken place this year.

Activists have not congregated at Liberty Square to overthrow a dictator, like they did in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. Nor do they aim to violently overthrow the government, like protesters did against Moammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya. And Occupy Wall St. protesters cannot point to a particular event that set them off, like Tunisian citizens did to overthrow Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after Mohamed Bouazizi sacrificed his life to protest the Tunisian government’s oppression.

The United States has a democratically elected government and the government generally does not infringe upon its citizens’ freedom of speech. Critics of the Occupy Wall St. movement point to this as proof that protesters and activists, in the absence of a clear message, are motivated by nihilism.

But you say there’s no message in these protests? Hold on. Anyone who pays attention to current events knows that this movement is fundamentally grounded in a very clear rejection of the status quo and the inequalities it continues to engender.

Even President Obama, in an interview with ABC on October 3, pointed to the high unemployment rate as a sign that Americans are no better off than they were four years ago. Republicans will point to this as proof that there needs to be a change in the White House, but this is not a problem with the administration; for decades, our government has bent to the will of Wall Street, deregulating and letting financial institutions run amok in the quest for a higher profit margin. In 2008, the system crashed and now the rest of society has to carry the burden. After all, many of the financial institutions that were at risk in October 2008 have since posted record margins.

As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread all over the country, and as a clearer picture of protesters begins to emerge – young, educated, disillusioned – the purpose of the movement should be obvious to anyone who pays attention to the news. While the base of the movement has since diversified, the average protester remains the same (for now).

The national unemployment rate hovers at around 9%. For people under the age of 24, who, presumably, cannot be blamed for Washington’s acquiescence to Wall Street? The figure is over 18%. Our generation did not lead our country’s military into Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or Yemen, but the country’s youth has done a disproportionate amount of the fighting. We are the most vulnerable to Washington’s decisions, yet we have too few politicians that represent or protect our interests.

Occupy Wall Street (and the other protests that it has inspired) is not a nihilist movement. This is our generation’s mass political awakening, similar to what our parents experienced in the late 1960s, when they decided that the government had lost touch with public will. We, too, have decided that enough is enough.

For critics who deride the movement’s significance by pointing to the relatively low number of activists, the symbolic value of the protests should not be ignored. After all, didn’t our generation propel Senator Obama to the White House? Generation Y came out in record numbers, volunteering our time and energy to electing someone we thought better represented our values.

On that note, a message to President Obama: Hope and change may have been your campaign slogan, but we adopted it as our mantra. As these movements spread across the country and as more young people come to identify with the cause, you have to decide whether those words meant anything more than empty rhetoric. Our generation believes in this country and its people, but we fundamentally reject the inequalities that have become clear as our financial system falls apart.

David Weigel, writing for Slate Magazine, points out that, although anarchists and minarchists in the crowd may disagree, “Occupy Wall Street is post-Obama left-wing populism.” As the movement goes beyond its early leaders’ political views and comes to embody a more general dissatisfaction with the current system, we must begin to reinterpret how we label it.

As more people, including myself, but also unions, retirees, and the country’s masses of unemployed citizens, come to sympathize with the movement’s ideals, we can no longer label it a minor protest led by the radical Left; as it continues to grow, this has the potential to become a full-fledged social movement.

As this emerging movement begins to gain traction, our society should celebrate it as a refutation of our current market-oriented society and a defense of the citizen-oriented society that this country and its people deserve. The market should bend to the will of the people; politicians should not rush to protect the market at the expense of the interests of the citizenry. And this is not empty rhetoric: when four in five Americans disapprove of the current political system, politicians should take note.

Many protesters hold views more radical than mine; like Nicholas Kristof, I too acknowledge that the market can raise living standards when functioning properly. But our market is clearly not functioning properly, and our generation is going to bear the brunt of the effects of its actions. So if young people decide that enough is enough and take to the streets, the media should not ask, “Why are you doing this?” It should ask, instead, “What took you so long?”

And to the people of our generation, whether you’re currently enrolled in college or not: the pioneers of this movement have proven that our generation can demand to be heard if it so chooses. We should not let that power go to waste. Instead of cynically deriding the protesters, or closing the browser page after reading the news article and going on with our day, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to future generations to get involved.Washington may think that it can ignore the thousands of activists camped out at Liberty Park. Can it ignore millions?

Author tags:

2011, 1968, college, youth, social conscience, direct action, social movement, democracy, inequality, occupy wall street

The origins of Occupy Wall Street explained

Topic

Occupy Wall Street

Tuesday, Oct 4, 2011 2:50 PM EDT

The origins of Occupy Wall Street explained

Salon talks to the editor of Adbusters about the practical and philosophical roots of the movement

By Justin Elliott

(Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid)

Topics:Occupy Wall Street

In July Adbusters, a Vancouver-based publication known for its incisive critiques of capitalism, included a poster in that month’s magazine that read simply:

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

September 17th. Bring tent.

www.occupywallst.org

In response to the call, several loose-knit groups of organizers got involved and hundreds of people showed up on Wall Street on Sept. 17. A few weeks later, Occupy Wall Street is now spreading around the country and attracting intense interest from the media.

I spoke to Adbusters co-founder and editor in chief Kalle Lasn about the practical and ideological origins of the movement and about the continuing debate over its demands. The following transcript of our conversation has been edited for length.

You issued the original call to occupy Wall Street back in July. How did that come about and what was the thinking behind it?

It was a poster that we put in the middle of the July edition of Adbusters magazine and a listserv that we sent out to our 90,000-strong culture-jammers network around the world. It was also a blog post on our website. For the last 20 years, our network has been interested in cultural revolution and just the whole idea of radical transformations.

After Tunisia and Egypt, we were mightily inspired by the fact that a few smart people using Facebook and Twitter can put out calls and suddenly get huge numbers of people to get out into the streets and start giving vent to their anger. And then we keep on looking at the sorry state of the political left in the United States and how the Tea Party is passionately strutting their stuff while the left is sort of hiding somewhere. We felt that there was a real potential for a Tahrir moment in America because a) the political left needs it and b) because people are losing their jobs, people are losing their houses, and young people cannot find a job. We felt that the people who gave us this mess — the financial fraudsters on Wall Street — haven’t even been brought to justice yet. We felt this was the right moment to instigate something.

One Adbusters editor was quoted saying the role of the magazine in this is “philosophical.” Can you define the philosophy behind this?

We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote “The Society of the Spectacle.” The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.

1968 was more of a cultural kind of revolution. This time I think it’s much more serious. We’re in an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, living in a sort of apocalyptic world, and the young people realize they don’t really have a viable future to look forward to. This movement that’s beginning now could well be the second global revolution that we’ve been dreaming about for the last half a century.

In the original call to action, Adbusters asked that 20,000 flood into lower Manhattan and set up tents. The piece also said:

Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices. Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

I sat in on discussions down in Zuccoti Park where this very issue was being discussed. But obviously there is no single demand yet. Do you think it has developed differently than the vision outlined in Adbusters?

Originally we thought that the idea of one demand was very important. There’s been a debate going on between the one-demand vision and this other vision that is playing itself out right now on Wall Street. I think it’s a wonderful debate and there are good pointers on both sides. Currently this leaderless, demandless movement — that is still growing in leaps and bounds — I think it is fine the way it is. After these assemblies have been conducted and debates have been had in cities all around America, demands will emerge. These demands will be specific things like reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a 1 percent tax on financial transactions or the banning of high-frequency trading. We will get into specifics, just give us time.

I think this whole thing will stay fairly amorphous through the next big event on Oct. 6 in Washington. Then it will gain global momentum on Oct. 15 when the Europeans have their big moment in the sun. I think the big global catalytic moment may well happen on Nov. 3 or Nov. 4 when the G-20 is meeting in France. In the month following that these demands of ours will emerge and we may well find millions of people marching around the world.

Can you speculate about how these demands will emerge? Do you see leaders or spokespeople emerging? How do you see it playing out as a process?

The political left has always had problems with this. All my life I’ve been sitting in meetings where loony guys get up and talk, and eventually very little happens. This is the kind of weight that is dragging the political left down. We don’t seem to have the clarity of vision that for example the Tea Party has. This may be our undoing again. This whole movement may fizzle out in a bunch of loony lefty kind of bullshit.

Then again, at the same time, I’ve been in daily touch with dozens and dozens of people in cities all around the world who are involved in this. And I have a feeling that because of the Internet and a different kind of mentality that young people have, a horizontal way of thinking about things, this movement may not just come up with some really good demands and put incredible people pressure on our politicians, but a more beautiful thing may come out of this movement: a new model of democracy, a new model of how activism can work, of how the people can have a radical democracy and have some of their demands met. This new model may well be a new kind of a horizontal thing that in some strange way works like the Internet works.

David Graeber, an anthropologist and Adbusters contributor as well as one of the original organizers of the protest, told the Washington Post the other day:

You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.

Isn’t that a fundamentally different model than making one single demand?

This is the deeper level of the debate that is going on within this movement. I think that as this movement grows, it will have room for different things. I think it’s wonderful that people are doing exactly what Graeber describes and providing an example of how a democracy can work, sort of creating a mini-democracy within Zuccoti Park. But that doesn’t stop other people from actually starting to make demands. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have some people who really want a 1 percent Tobin tax and why those people can’t be putting pressure on the G-20 in November while at the same time the people in Zuccoti Park and other cities are providing this inspiring example of real democracy. I don’t think that the two are mutually exclusive.

Close

Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

October 4, 2011 at 00:12:45

Rebuild the Dream in the Streets

By David Swanson (about the author)

Remarks at Take Back the Dream conference, October 3, 2011.

For videos of this speech and of remarks by Derrick Crowe and Jo Comerford click here: http://warisacrime.org/content/rebuild-dream-streets

Back around May or June a bunch of us announced plans for this coming Thursday, October 6th, to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., not for a march or a rally, and not for a day or a weekend, but to create a central space for an ongoing occupation from which we would engage in nonviolent resistance.

We were inspired by the Arab Spring and Wisconsin and working for a U.S. Autumn. Now of course we are also inspired by the Occupation of Wall Street. It's been wonderful to see more and more people and organizations compelled to join in that action, and to see militarism and plutocracy opposed together by a movement that refuses to be dumbed down into a sound bite.

Over 150 organizations are part of the planning for Freedom Plaza at October2011.org and all are encouraged to join. Wall Street's servants on K Street, in the Pentagon, and in our government may be feeling comfortably distant from Wall Street right about now. But I don't see any reason to support protests of the wealth that corrupts our government and not protests of the government corrupted by that wealth. Choosing to be corrupted is an active choice. Corruption is not something imposed on helpless victims.

We chose October 6th because the Afghanistan War was due to begin its second decade. Over 4,000 people have taken this pledge:

"I pledge that if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan on Thursday, October 6, 2011, as that occupation goes into its 11th year, I will commit to being in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., with others on that day with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo, our Madison, Wisconsin, where we will NONVIOLENTLY resist the corporate machine to demand that our resources are invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation. We can do this together. We will be the beginning ."

I hope you'll go and pledge the same at October2011.org

It has been three years now since a Russian ambassador to Afghanistan said the United States had repeated all of the Soviet Union's mistakes in Afghanistan and had moved on to new ones. Mistakes is a common euphemism for crimes and other words that we would be applying were ours the country violently occupied, were ours the bulk of the deaths and misery, were our doors being kicked in and our loved ones disappeared, were the missiles hitting our homes.

Every year, of course, as British Member of Parliament Rory Stewart recently pointed out, top western officials have claimed that whatever year it was would be the decisive one. And each year it has not been. This past week, the United Nations reported an increase in violence in Afghanistan of about 40 percent over last year. NATO deemed that story inappropriate and announced its own findings the very next day. It turns out that, if you believe violence isn't violence when it's committed by the United States and allies, then you can look at certain types of violence initiated purely by Afghans and identify a dramatic decrease of . . . wait for it . . . 2 percent.

But don't book that Afghan vacation just yet.

Migratory birds have been avoiding Afghanistan for some years now. Afghans with higher educations have been leaving for decades. War profiteers, and occupation profiteers, and so-called reconstruction profiteers seem to know their way out. But imperial rulers, whether British or Soviet or U.S., Nobel Peace Prize winners or otherwise, seem utterly incapable of withdrawing other people's kids from Afghan wars until no other option remains.

And why this inability to leave? Why stay? It's not to track down Osama bin Laden on the off chance he wasn't really given that proper Muslim sea burial. It's not to find the number 8 regional leader in al Qaeda, and certainly not to oppose the Taliban which feeds off the occupation. It may be for politics, but U.S. opinion polls could hardly scream "Get out!" more clearly. It is almost certainly for profits and pipelines and permanent bases. A U.S. executive, er excuse me "job creator," told NPR this summer that if the occupation of Afghanistan were scaled back he really hoped there could be a big occupation of Libya.

But there's apparently another reason why armed U.S. citizens and their foreign workers are still in Afghanistan, and it's not to keep us safe. The 2006 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, among other studies, made clear that these wars make us less safe, not more. Almost four years ago, at a conference in Washington, D.C., on al Qaeda, former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin listed ways to reduce the threat of terrorism. Afterwards, journalist Gareth Porter asked him whether ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should have been on his list.
"You're right," he answered. And then he added, "But we can't do that."
"Why not," Porter asked.
"Because," he said, "we would have to tell the families of the soldiers who have died in those wars that their loved ones died in vain."

Since then, of course, a lot more people have died in vain.

This is what it comes to, and why nonviolent occupations of our own back in Der "Homeland" are required. Our government has gone insane. It is killing people purely because it has already killed people.

War was banned by the nations of the world in 1928 and an 85-1 vote in the U.S. Senate in 1929 following a decade of work by a peace movement that refused to give up. And now we accept war as the air we breathe. In 2008 we may not have voted in "four more years," but we did get four more wars: Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, added to Iraq and Afghanistan, with routine murders of particular human beings and those standing too close to them now openly inclusive of U.S. citizens.

To a growing extent, we see through this just as we see through austerity, environmental destruction, corporate welfare, and political corruption. But merely waiting for another money-soaked, gerrymandered, cable-tv-controlled election on unverifiable voting machines is not going to be sufficient. We're not against elections. This is not either-or. We're not against elections: we're demanding reforms that would allow us to have meaningful elections. But redirecting OccupyWallStreet energy into elections, as was done to Wisconsin, would be an act of betrayal.

Super Congress Member John Kerry's home state is fifth in the nation in military spending, employing lots of registered voters building machines of death for Raytheon, the former head of which company was brought in by the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Defense and who told the Washington Times in June, "The wars of the future will be longer, deadlier and waged against a more diverse variety of enemies than ever before."

Super Congress Co-Chair Patty Murray, Democrat from Boeing, since 2007 has taken $276,000 from war industries, Max Baucus $139,000, Dave Camp $130,000, John Kerry $73,000, and so on. The President who must sign or veto whatever comes out of the Super Congress and the Less Than Super Congress took over $1 million from war industries just in the 2008 election, not to mention $39 million from finance, insurance, and real estate. Targeting our social safety net is a goal that Wall Street and the military industrial complex have shared for many years. And of course the general corporate exploitation of foreign resources and workers depends on the threat of military force. Military spending has increased at the President's request each year since 2008 as well as since 2001.

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, a conversation has been launched about the damage the wealthiest one percent is doing to the rest of us. California just pulled out of a mortgage fraud settlement deal that is expected to let the crooks off easy. Who's to say Occupy Wall Street didn't influence that decision.

The Super Congressional crusade to slash spending can only be carried through without causing massive misery and death in one of two ways, neither of which the U.S. Congress or President wants to touch, but both of which are central demands of the Occupation movement. The first is to significantly raise taxes on the super wealthy. The second is to significantly cut spending on the military. A progressive demand right now is not "Jobs Not Cuts" but "Jobs Not Wars."

Seventy members of Congress have pointed out that ending the two biggest current wars in fiscal year 2012 would save $1.8 trillion over the following decade, above planned savings from promised reductions in troops. But war spending is pocket change in comparison with the overall military and security budget. Economists have studied the impact on job creation of various types of government spending. It turns out that we could have full employment in the United States purely by redirecting a fraction of the Pentagon's budget. We could create 29 million jobs above and beyond reemployment for workers displaced in a conversion, just by moving funds from the Pentagon into education, healthcare, clean energy, and tax cuts. This calculation, if not my ideal plan, would leave military spending in several departments including Homeland Security untouched and leave the Department of So Called Defense more money than it had 10 years ago.

Leon Panetta, who holds the position that we used to more usefully call "Secretary of War," considers $350 billion over 10 years, or $35 billion per year, to be serious cuts to the national security budget. But he's discussing cuts to dreamed of future budgets. The current budget would still increase under those so-called cuts. But imagine really taking $35 billion from a budget of well over a trillion. (According to Chris Hellman of National Priorities Project, the security budget is $1.2 trillion, including the spy agencies and various other departments.) That would be a cut of less than 3.5 percent.

China spends about $114 billion per year on its military. Let's generously assume there are enough hidden costs in China's budget to double it to $228 billion. And let's assume that we must spend twice as much as they do, because . . . well, just because. Now we're at $456 billion. How do we get from there to Panetta describing a U.S. security budget of $965 billion as the lowest we can safely go, and a budget of $950 billion as "doomsday"? Is the danger here to us or to the profits of the weapons makers who are also demanding that any cuts made be made to troops' benefits rather than to weaponry?

"Every gun that's made," said Dwight David Eisenhower, "every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed." It also signifies death and injury to those on the receiving end, almost all of whom are non-Americans. But we cannot have a movement in this country demanding funding for anything decent or humane without having a movement to restrain the machine that is sucking down over 63 percent of discretionary spending (including care of veterans but not including Homeland Security or interest payments on war debt), serving as our biggest polluter of the natural environment, and providing the leading justification for eroding our civil liberties.

These are the demands we will bring to Freedom Plaza beginning Thursday:
Tax the rich and corporations
End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending
Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all
End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests
Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation
Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages
Get money out of politics

There's a widespread belief that such a list of demands must be reduced to one bumper sticker. But is what I just read really too many words for people who pass 10,000-word laws meant to govern us? There are 100s of times as many words as in this list of demands in the instruction booklet for a blueray player, something your average American seems able to handle. Nobody insisted that Thomas Jefferson reduce the Declaration of Independence to an eight-second sound bite. We aren't going to win this by getting pithier, and let me let you in on a little secret: Corporate television doesn't dislike resistance to corporate power because its advocates are unskilled at framing and messaging. We aren't going to win this by kicking ourselves. We aren't going to win this by dividing ourselves: we need to be willing to stand in uncomfortably large coalitions, side by side with people who like different parties or candidates or who hold what we think are bizarre views of the world. In Freedom Plaza there will be no promotion of any party or any candidate. We will be speaking as we the people to them our government.

And we will have a lot more fun than can be had sitting home and griping or even engaging in all variety of other useful activities, from phone calling to emailing to tweeting to sitting in conferences listening to me. I mean way more fun, the kind of fun in solidarity with others that medical science says is good for our health, the kind of fun that can take young people buried in student debt and joblessness away from enormous signing bonuses offered by the war machine. Young people will be reached in Freedom Plaza through seminars, libraries, outdoor films, and the experience of democratic decision making and risk taking. And the price is right. Compared with $259 per night here in the Hilton, the accommodations in Freedom Plaza will be priceless.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," said Frederick Douglass. "It never did and it never will."

http://davidswanson.org

David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

#Occupy Movement a Turning Point?

Published on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 by YES! Magazine

Can the #Occupy Movement Be a Turning Point?

As the Wall Street occupation continues, Boston residents are sitting in to save their homes—and providing a lesson in how to sustain the powerful spark of the #Occupy movement.

by Doyle Canning

Presley Obasohan is fighting foreclosure on his home by Bank of America. Mr. Obasohan lives in Dorchester, Mass.—the most diverse neighborhood in Boston—where building values have sunk to half or less of mortgage loan debt. Presley is trying to save his home for his daughters. He has petitioned; he has pled. He has waited on hold and stood in line. But on Friday, Presely decided enough was enough and he joined the Right to the City Alliance in a mass action of civil disobedience.

Along with 23 other Boston residents, he was proudly arrested for siting in at the Boston headquarters of Bank of America.

“I blocked the doors at Bank of America so that my neighbors, and me, can stay in our homes,” Presely told the press. “So many people have been thrown out of their homes or lost their jobs needlessly because of mistakes made by Wall Street banks. Yet it’s the banks who are now rewarded with billions in tax refunds. It's time to fight back!”

Why Bank of America?

As of March 2011, Bank of America had more homes in foreclosure than any other bank in Boston, with two-thirds of these in “majority minority” neighborhoods. Sixty-one percent of Bank of America’s subprime mortgages were concentrated in these same neighborhoods, revealing a pattern of pushing bad loans on people of color and the poor.

On Friday, Bank of America announced that it would begin charging customers $5 per month to use their debit cards. This comes after receiving a $4.2 billion dollar tax refund and ramping up foreclosures on distressed homeowners in recent weeks, according to new data from the foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. August 2011 saw the largest monthly increase in foreclosures since August 2007, right after the housing bubble burst.

“Across the country, we are seeing the same story: the mortgage bubble created by Wall Street pushed predatory lending on urban communities, and since the bubble burst the fallout has been catastrophic," said Rachel LaForest, executive director of the Right to the City Alliance, which led the protests. Unemployment and foreclosure have hit communities of color first and worst. But it is urban communities who are at the forefront of the movement to fight back. We are took this direct action to demand payback from Bank of America.”

Building an Alliance

This confrontation with B of A came at the end of a raucous march of over 3,000 people carrying colorful banners and banging drums to confront the nation’s largest lender over its role in the economic crisis. The march was led by members of City Life/Vida Urbana, who carried signs that told their stories of predatory lending and foreclosure in Boston. As the rowdy procession snaked through downtown, they were joined by members of UNITE/HERE picketing at the Hyatt Hotel, and CWA picketing at Verizon Wireless.

When the march arrived at the Massachusetts headquarters of Bank of America, the crowd chanted “The banks got bailed out, we got sold out” and “Bank of America, Bad for America” as nervous bank employees peered through the glass. The civil disobedience team managed to block the entrances to the building, and to occupy the lobby of the bank itself. As they were arrested one by one, they were led through rows of cheering demonstrators shouting, “We stand with you!”

The Right to the City Alliance is a national movement of urban economic and racial justice organizations, deeply rooted in the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by the implosion of the economy, and where centuries of economic and racial oppression compound the crisis. Right to the City built an impressive coalition of over 50 organizations including the SEIU-inspired umbrella MASSUNITING, with progressive organized labor, the Green Justice Coalition, the Youth Jobs Coalition, the Immigrant Rights movement, and a diverse array of progressive groups.

Take Back The Block, #Occupy the Hood

On Saturday, Right to the City took their message into the neighborhood. The Four Corners area of Dorchester has been ravaged by foreclosures. Led by the community organizing powerhouse City Life/Vida Urbana, the group staged an occupation of a wrongly foreclosed home, hoping to return it from the hands of Deutsche Bank to its rightful owners—a family that was evicted and has left the area.

The action team cleaned the home, brought in donated furniture, hung art on the walls and a banner off the porch. Hundreds toured the house and cheered from the street, while music played and children danced.

Meanwhile the youth of Roxbury’s Alternatives for Community & Environment took over an abandoned lot and created a community garden. They asked people to stand with them for a blessing ceremony of the garden, and asked for food to grow strong and the land and community to heal and be healthy. They told the story of their journey to the 2010 US Social Forum, and how they had toured a community garden created by young people in Detroit, and been inspired to create a similar project in Boston. Right to the City supported their vision and tied it to a movement building action about the banks and the political moment. It was indeed a powerful occupation.

Movement Momentum: Harnessing The Psychic Break

These bold actions in Boston unfolded in concert with the #OccupyWallStreet protests and the launch of #OccupyBoston, an offshoot inspired by the now famous encampment in Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan. The growing popular sentiment against Wall Street was an inspiring backdrop for the action, and indicates a growing frustration with the economic status quo by people from all walks of life.

But what was different about this action was that it was organized and led by community-based organizations, led by people of color, and rooted in communities of color. This leadership shaped the message, the coalition building strategy, and the demands on Bank of America and other corporate targets. The march was organized long before the occupation of Wall Street or the hastily planned takeover of Dewey Square next to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The community organizations that planned it are deeply rooted, with long experience uniting people around similar issues. After this action, they'll continue that work.

So what is the role of community organizers and progressive leaders in this moment of #occupy momentum? After the dramatic mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday, the #occupy meme is spreading like wildfire and progressive forces are rapidly aligning around the protests.

As #OccupyWallStreet enters its third week MoveOn.org, Van Jones and his new organization Rebuild the Dream, organized labor, and community organizations have vowed to march downtown in solidarity with the protests this Wednesday.

On Sunday night, the Greater Boston Labor Council appeared at the General Assembly of #OccupyBoston. They pledged their solidarity and invited the group to meet with them to discuss how to build together.

At smartMeme, we have always been interested in “Psychic Breaks:” moments when the dominant narrative unravels and there is an opening for a new story to take hold on a massive scale. We saw this opportunity come and go in 2008 when the stock market collapsed and $700 billion was given to financial giants. Underprepared and shell-shocked progressives mostly stayed home and kept quiet while the Tea Partiers harnessed common sense opposition to bailing out the rich into a movement that was cynically designed to support the status quo.

But we believe that #OccupyWallStreet is re-opening that window and provoking another such psychic break moment, one that can amplify common sense progressive demands for structural change. At least we hope so.

We have an opportunity to offer a narrative explaining what has happened, how we got here, and how we can move forward together. We are faced with the potential of rooting this insurrectional energy into a strong social movement that can rival the Tea Party and change the story about our economic system—a movement that could unite behind real solutions to the economic and democratic crises we face. The actions by Right to the City this past weekend in Boston offer us an instructive model on the kind of analysis and organizing strategy that is necessary now.

But we must be agile and graceful and bold enough—like the ballerina on the bull of the #OccupyWallStreet poster. We must be visionary and courageous and tenacious enough—like the youth of Roxbury blessing their occupied garden. And we must be brave enough, like Presley Obasohan, to put our bodies on the line and commit civil disobedience against the banks and for the people and planet that we love.

If we can do this, and build in good faith together to harness this moment and channel the momentum towards fundamental, structural change in how our economy and political system function, we just might be witnessing the stirrings of the new world that beats in our hearts. Let us dance to that beat, sing to the beat and march together to the beat, all the way down to Wall Street. #OccupyTogether!

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Doyle Canning wrote this op-ed for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Doyle is co-director of the narrative strategy center smartMeme, and is co-author of Re: Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World. She lives in Boston.