Occupy Wall Street: Why So Many Demands for Demands?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163762/occupy-wall-street-why-so-many-demands-demands

Everybody has a piece of advice for the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. They should put their clothes on. They should stop raising their fists. They should fact-check their handwritten signs. They should appoint leaders who can give pithy quotes to reporters. They should get with an electoral program. Nicholas Kristof even offered to help them out with a neat list of demands, in case those holding signs saying “We Are the 99%” just needed to have the unfairness of the carried interest rule explained to them.

Indeed, their failure to present demands is the most frequently heard criticism of the OWS protesters, not just in the mainstream press but from veteran leftists as well. What do these wan, angry young people want, anyway?

If you spend an hour or two down at Liberty Plaza, as I did with my 8-year-old daughter this past weekend, it’s clear enough. She got the point, at least: especially from the signs that read, “You should teach your kids to share,” and, “Give my mom her money back!! A single working mom…not fair!”

It’s not that the demands being suggested by OWS’s volunteer policy advisors in the blogosphere are not worthy ideas. At a time when we desperately need to rein in financial speculation and change the incentives on Wall Street, a financial transactions tax is a terrific policy proposal. Dean Baker has been talking about it for years. The thing is, we on the left don’t have a scarcity of policy ideas. We are positively bursting with them. Create a housing trust fund! A national infrastructure bank! And, yes, sure, eliminate the carried interest loophole so fat cats don’t get a bigger tax break than working people. (Some even have more radical ideas, which are quite sensible too.) But at best, we get a polite hearing for these ideas, which then fade away or are hopelessly watered down. We simply lack the power to put them into practice.

And in the recent past, even the most smoothly organized, expertly messaged mass demonstrations have not made a whit of difference in this regard. Consider the last big march on Wall Street this past May 12. The coalition behind it was admirably diverse, including unions like the teachers and SEIU’s 1199, as well as local community organizations such as Citizen Action NY, Coalition for the Homeless and Community Voices Heard. The “May 12 Coalition,” which turned out thousands of protesters on the appointed day, presented the Bloomberg administration with a proposal that exhibited great thoughtfulness in its rigor and detail, asking banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley to take a 20 percent cut in their contracts to handle functions like child support disbursements or income tax remittances for the city. This would have saved $120 million, part of $1.5 billion that could have been extracted from the banking sector to prevent the city from having to slash education and social services, according to the coalition.

[Avalux]

1. I think it's self-explanatory..... "We are the 99%"

What else needs to be said?

[TBF]

2. We are trying to push it to the next level,

and granted we will have to be patient and let that happen in due course.

The protestors are saying "You're not nice - share!". And Wall Street (with their armed police force) is saying "ha ha ha ha ha".

That is not to say we shouldn't do this - I am in solidarity and will try to make an appearance at Occupy Houston this week. But it is going to take a lot more than demands for sharing and justice to get anything done. They are criminals and are not going to part with their ill-gotten gains easily.

[phantom power]

3. A country that throws money at banksters and endless war while its people slip into poverty...

is broken.

[DonCoquixote]

4. Because

the "intellectual" class on both left and right wants to make this something they can analyze to death, which is one of the ways political action in this country is bled out. We cannot simply be angry enough to force people to sit down and hack a solution out, right?

[Proud Public Servant]

5. I'll play devil's advocate

because I'm in the messaging business. I think there are two motives in the call for a clear message, one lazy and one smart.

The lazy motive is that of the media and pundits, who don't want to do the work of understanding the movement. They can and should be ignored.

But the smarter motive, I think, is calling for a clear message because it is a better avenue to success. Loathe as I am to say it, the Tea Party offers an example here. While the movement embraced a variety of wingnut beliefs and demands, they always came back to "Lower Taxes, Smaller Government." That was very effective. There is a similar message in OWS -- the nation should be governed for the benefit of the people, not the wealthy and the corporations -- but I'm not sure "We are the 99%" gets us all the way there."

I think of this as "my mom" messaging. My lifelong-liberal mother would totally support a movement to take power away from the wealthy and corporations and give it back to the people. But she doesn't understand what OWS is about. You can blame the media for that, but the media is ultimately the conduit to people like here -- you have to play their game at least to some extent if you want to build the movement.

(That raises a second issue: Occupying Wall Street leads to the question: what do you want from Wall St? And the answers seem to be that the protesters don't want something from Wall St.; they want the government to do something about Wall St. Which leads in turn to the question: why, if the changes demanded all require government intervention, the occupation is of Wall St. instead of Capitol Hill? And I think that's also part of the confusion about message.)

[CrispyQ]

6. Another DUer came up with this:

"It's the corporations, Stupid."

Concise & to the point.

[Proud Public Servant]

8. I love it; as an alternative, I'd suggest

We are the 99% -- and this is OUR country.

[starroute]

11. The problem is that it's all interlocked

And some of the mechanisms at work are very complex and full of negative feedback loops.

The most obvious part of the problem is the recent orgy of speculation, with Wall Street and the major banks at its center.

But that orgy of speculation doesn't exist simply because of greed. It exists for two main reasons. One is that too much money has been picked out of the pockets of ordinary workers -- who would have spent it in useful ways -- and handed over to the already-wealthy, who have nothing to do with it except invest. And the other is that there are simply not enough productive ventures to invest it in, so the excess goes into empty speculation.

And the other big part of the problem is that the more wealth the already-wealthy pile up, the more control they have over the government. And the more our GNP comes to depend on speculation and not on providing useful goods and services, the more the speculative sector becomes too-big-to-fail.

Now, how do you unravel all that? There are theoretically ways to go about it, but they involve taxation, redistribution of wealth, and everything else that the right has been systematically demonizing for decades.

The only way out of that mindset and the overly facile metaphors that reinforce it is to instill a fundamentally different understanding of how the system works -- and particularly the idea that money is the lifeblood of the economy and needs to be flowing as freely as possible rather than being allowed to pool up and stagnate.

But that's neither a demand nor a policy position. So what the OWS movement comes down to may be simply drawing attention to itself until people start asking, "What do they really want?" and then offering a new model of society in which the goal is not the accumulation of obscene and increasingly useless "profits" but a healthy flow of cash in all directions and through all organs of the body politic.

At that point, whatever furthers that model will strike people as "good" and whatever impedes it will strike people as "bad" -- and the policies will grow out of that. But until such a shift in consciousness takes hold, we will still be in a situation where even nominally liberal politicians like Obama are working out of a basically Reaganite model with minor progressive trappings.

[Proud Public Servant]

14. I think a simple message is possible though

And it's along the lines of "A government of the people would be powerful enough to stop corporate greed."

The nexus you point to is indeed complex, but all of it has been enabled by bad, corporate-serving government regulation, from tax breaks for exporting jobs to lowering the capital gains tax to the repeal of Glass-Steagall to teh bank bail-outs. I really do think that much of what's happening at OWS can be boiled down to a call for a government that stands up to Wall Street instead of serving it. What "standing up" means we can get to later; the first order of business is to drill that notion into the heads of ordinary Americans who's interests are served by OWS, but who don't see that yet.

[rug]

7. Because, following demands comes compromise.

That's the modus operandi.

[Blue Meany]

9. The political establishment *always* wants leader to talk to

and specific demands. That way, they can negotiate and compromise with the leader(s) and co-opt the movement. Yet the very existence of the "occupy" movement is evidence the politics as usual is broken. If it weren't, they would be working within the system to acheive reforms. The point is that the mass of the population has no voice in the political/economic system and the change that is required cannot be boiled down to a couple of demands.

[Odin2005]

12. You win the thread!

[SomethingFishy]

18. What you said....

The movement has come because people feel powerless. Carlin said: "They are defunding the education system because they don't want an educated populace.They don't want people capable of critical thinking. They want people smart enough to run the machines but dumb enough not to know they are getting royally fucked over" (ok I paraphrased)

What I think happened is "they" (the powers that be) jumped the gun a bit. They needed to wait another 20 years before trying to steal us blind. Right now we still have enough educated people who can see the injustice and get angry about it.

They realized they fucked up and now the game is on. Their media is working overtime to discredit the movement. The race to the bottom has been delayed while the runners stop and change direction.

It's only gong to get more intense in the coming weeks. Even my mom who just turned 70 is e-mailing me updates on #occupywallstreet.

What I really like is in the weeks I perused here before signing up there were a number threads making fun of the protesters, calling this protest useless, saying a couple hundred people can't get anything done, using the talking points that are now prevalent in the media. Oops. A couple hundred has turned into thousands. One place has turned into many. There is even a virtual occupy Wall Street movement for those who can't get out to an actual protest.

This is Democracy in action.

[democrat_patriot]

10. So they can start spinning. Right now they don't know what to attack.

"We want the rich to be taxed more": Nooo, you're killing the job creators.

"Jail the bankers": They didn't actually break the law you hippies!

"Stop busting unions": But unions are the reason for everything baaaaad.

"Healthcare for all": Oh - just a bunch of communist/socialists.

As of now 'they' have no idea where to focus their rage.

So keep asking for everything.

[Odin2005]

13. Also it lets the MSM co-opt the protest into the Red-Blue framing box.

This is why we need to let the Libertarian nuts into the protest even though we hate them.

[Jim Warren]

15. A problem with the left today

is how easily the seeds of doubt can be slipped into their drink like a mickey.

[raging_moderate]

16. I would like them to clarify their goals a bit....

I do support the effort (if you do also send $$ or help somehow), but wonder if it is time to clarify the goals a bit. I would start with the following in no particular order:

ending "corporate personhood" (and reversing the Citizen United decision)

reinvigorating the FCC and the fairness doctrine to disallow paid for propaganda masquerading as news. (Lying on the news is against the law in Canada for example)

ending all of the recent (and successful) attempts at manipulating our elections (electronic systems with no paper trail, gerrymandering, Jim Crow laws, etc..)

ending ALL corruption (aka "lobbying") that gives anything of value to politicians in return for favors. No more hidden PAC money, no more campaign contributions, golfing junkets, fancy dinners, no more "I'll give your son-in-law a board seat at Exxon which just happens to pay $500K a year".

I think we're likely toast if we don't accomplish those things.

[robdogbucky]

17. Update....

Live Blog for #OccupyWallStreet: Day Eighteen, ‘A Beautiful Democracy in All This’

By: Kevin Gosztola Tuesday October 4, 2011 8:59 am


Since the weekend, the amount of media coverage has increased substantially. The discussion of it all seems to be evolving among the commentators, hacks and pundits in the establishment media. It used to be that the occupiers were disorganized. That has had little effect on the ability of the movement to grow.

Then the issue of disorganization became an issue about a lack of demands. Members of the media requested demands as if the occupiers somehow are holding the economy or US politics hostage and they must produce so something can be done and people can move on. And now, the media is deconstructing the launching of occupations in communities across the country by asking whether what is forming is the “liberal Tea Party” or not.

Nothing captures how the media just doesn’t get it like this question from CNN anchor Susanne Malveaux to CNN Business Correspondent Alison Kosik,



“I understand this is a group that’s kind of a bit disorganized, to say the least. It’s not clear who is actually participating. But tell us who is behind these protests. And really, what are they protesting? What’s the main point here, if there is one?”



The question is garbled amalgamation of all the talking points critics have had toward the occupation. Casting doubt as to whether the occupiers have a point or not is a clear sign of ignorance. The main point could not be more obvious. I’ll give Malveaux a hint. It has to do with Wall Street...


http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/10/04/live-blog-for-occupywallstreet-day-eighteen-a-beautiful-democracy-in-all-this/

[robdogbucky]

19. More, including Moore.....

...Some in the media do get it. “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann gets it. Two quotes from last night’s program, which was a special “Occupy Wall Street” edition, deserve particular attention. Economist Jeff Madrick of The Roosevelt Institute was on the show. Olbermann asked if there is anything wrong with a movement not sitting there ready with a set of demands. Madrick responded:



"There’s a kind of beautiful democracy in all this. And it’s very noticeable. There are people called facilitators. Everybody’s very kind to each other. There’s not a hierarchy and yet there’s an efficient system. Let’s do the teach-in over here. They shout out. There are these shout outs, this echo chamber you’ve talked about. Let’s determine who is going to speak in what order for the General Assembly, as they call it. But there are people with a variety of their own agendas, a variety of their interests. I think in time an agenda will evolve for some of these people. I think there will be splinter groups that follow one piece of the agenda and another piece of the agenda. So, frankly, I think at some point there should be an agenda but I must say I was taken by the kind of beauty of the lack of hierarchy and yet the efficiency and the caring."



Michael Moore also was on the program. Asked if he would have any advice for the occupiers on messaging, this is what Moore said:



"I think that what they’re doing—And, actually, I’d rather listen to them. I’d rather take their advice because I’ve been down at their assemblies and I’ve heard some incredible things. They are concerned about the short-term goals: tax the rich, jail the bankers, a moratorium on foreclosures so no one is thrown out of their home, reintroducing real health care bill that covers everyone, truly covers everyone. These are what should be the short-term goals. But the larger long-term goal is these people, especially the young people, do not want to grow up, do not want to live in a society where the upper 1 percent owns everything, including our political system, and the other 99% are supposed to scramble for the crumbs. They reject that system outright and I think what’s going to come out of this is not that a new political party is going to form but a movement that says we are the 99%."



http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/10/04/live-blog-for-occupywallstreet-day-eighteen-a-beautiful-democracy-in-all-this/