heywood on 4/10/2011 at 09:38
So Occupy Wall Street released their draft declaration on Friday, and I finally got around to reading it today. I guess this is meant to show they have some common cause, in response to a lot of media criticism.
Link here:
(
http://www.scribd.com/doc/66968871/NYCGA-Declaration) http://www.scribd.com/doc/66968871/NYCGA-Declaration
It enumerates 12 grievances. I can get behind maybe half of them, some others are OK in sentiment but also somewhat misguided, and a few are nonsense. The grievances are followed by a single demand (for now). They demand the removal from office and prosecution of the 5 US Supreme Court justices who ruled for the majority in the Citizens United case.
Say what? *That* is the one demand they could agree on?
june gloom on 4/10/2011 at 10:00
Did they seriously call the prison system 21st century slave plantations? Wow.
Rug Burn Junky on 4/10/2011 at 13:09
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Did they seriously call the prison system 21st century slave plantations? Wow.
Well, it veers into ridiculous hyperbole which unfortunately undermines the real criticism, but there's a grain of truth to it. When you have people arrested on a pretense, as many would consider the drug war as a whole to be, and you have an entire industry of prison officials lobbying to increase the number and sentencing of these pretense "crimes," you have a whole lot of people heavily invested in keeping people locked up for no real reason.
Couple that with the fact that the disparate effects fall largely on one group, with a lot of rhetoric about how preventing drug use is protecting people from themselves, it bears more than a superficial similarity to the "white man's burden."
----------------------------------------
That sort of fits with everything they're saying, a grain of substance hidden under a lot of overstated hyperbole. I agree with the assessment of Joe Stiglitz and Jeff Madrick, who
went down for a teach-in this weekend. A lot of their complaints are the right ones, and at least they are grasping the symptoms, in spite of the fact that these "kids" lack the fundamental understanding of the underlying policies and institutions that cause them.
So even if it is overstated, this is an important dialogue - it's signalling the issues that are resonating, and where reform is needed. I'm not counting on the protesters to come up with the actual policy proscriptions - that's for the wonks and technicians(Like Stiglitz, like Van Jones, etc). The key is to get the politicians to listen, and to that end it's yet to be determined, but I'm optimistic that it will eventually be effective. If nothing else, it shows an undercurrent that can be tapped and hopefully open up an enthusiasm gap in favor of the left this year. Read these complaints and listen to someone like Elizabeth Warren, and you can see the same strains in the message - just a difference of the precision with which they're being presented.
Where I think this differs from the Tea Party (besides my previously-mentioned accuracy of their complaints) is that the left doesn't have the natural distrust of academia, and that filtering process - from incoherent populist rage through to concrete policy proposals - is more likely to result in an actionable agenda. But that takes time, and this is a first draft reflecting the populist rage, so I take it with a grain of salt.
Tocky: I was in (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119480&p=1701372&viewfull=1#post1701372) Mardi Gras for the Super Bowl that year, I was shocked at how many of the locals with whom I hung out were not just rooting for the Giants, but actively invested in the outcome. One of my (now) friends reminded me of the Eli connection, and it all made sense. Also reminded me of how much I missed out on that sort of sentiment by not having a strong college football tradition myself (either growing up, or at my alma mater).
Aerothorn on 4/10/2011 at 20:30
I found it really interesting that animal rights crept in to the agenda. I was certainly not expecting that from this protest. It's probably not the right forum for it, and I fear that it's such a hot topic that it will delegitamize their more palatable positions, but part of me is sort of happy - this is the first time that's been thrown into the national forum in a big way in...I dunno how many years. Ever?
And yeah, the idea that the prison system is INTENDED to be a replacement for slave plantations is pure hyperbole, the way it in which it disproportionate removes the liberties from blacks is not at all exaggerated, as RBJ mentioned. And it's been getting worse. From Washington Post:
"An August 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis shows that 32 percent of black males born in 2001 can expect to spend time in prison over the course of their lifetime. That is up from 13.4 percent in 1974 and 29.4 percent in 1991. By contrast, 17.2 percent of Hispanics and 5.9 percent of whites born in 2001 are likely to end up in prison."
It's a problem.
june gloom on 5/10/2011 at 01:35
I'm not saying it isn't. Of course it is. The justice system is very broken.
But dammit, shit like the line in question is a fast track to Nobody Takes You Seriously Town.
Speaking of which: (
http://www.reddit.com/r/occupywallstreet/comments/kyjo2/an_open_letter_and_warning_from_a_former_tea/) Open letter from a former Tea Partier.
It's an eye-opener, somewhat, but there's a fundamental flaw in it. Nobody will take it seriously because most of the people this is directed at won't believe the bit about the Tea Party being relatively sane before the brain perverts got involved. As far as they're concerned, the Tea Party has
always been insane, racist, pro-corporate religious whackos out to get rid of anyone who isn't white and heterosexual.
Which just proves the letter-writer's point, actually- that the attempts to discredit the Tea Party movement were successful. And now it's happening to OWS. That manifesto of theirs, riddled with hyperbole and slogans as it is, is NOT helping. It needs some serious cleaning up.
Aerothorn on 5/10/2011 at 01:59
The writer of that letter also seems to believe that the media is far more coordinated than it actually is (Fox News and MSNBC aren't consulting with each other). But a lot of the advice is good. Doubt it will be listened to, though.
Rug Burn Junky on 5/10/2011 at 13:01
Quote Posted by Open letter from a former Tea Partier
the
pre-Presidential election tea party movement
???????????
This calls into question the entire piece, since he's already distorting verifiable facts and using selective memory.
You don't need to rely on media narratives to pick up on a heavy strain of paranoia in the text itself, and it's hard to take seriously.
Besides: "insane, racist, pro-corporate religious whackos out to get rid of anyone who isn't white and heterosexual" is a great over-the-top description of the GOP itself, but I would never describe the Tea-Party that way. The problem is that all of the energy of the Tea Party is focused on electing people who enable that (or portions of that) agenda, regardless of the stated goals of the movement. It was never a movement entirely independent from the Republican party, so the only effect was to add a particularly virulent strain of ant-government, anti-tax rhetoric to an already misguided national platform, at a time when such rhetoric was particularly damaging.
CCCToad on 5/10/2011 at 21:06
Quote Posted by Aerothorn
The writer of that letter also seems to believe that the media is far more coordinated than it actually is (Fox News and MSNBC aren't consulting with each other). But a lot of the advice is good. Doubt it will be listened to, though.
Easy to get that impression though. You have to keep in mind that much of what passes for "journalism" these days consists of simply reading an AP, Reuters, or Government press release and then regurgitating it with your own partisan spin put on it. They're also not immune to groupthink: look up one of those montages where they show a dozen different reporters all using the same buzzwords.
