Skip to content

Category: Occupy Wall Street

Published on Leave a comment on Occupy 2.0

I participated in a panel yesterday on "Occupy Dartmouth: Voices Crying in the Wilderness?" sponsored by the United Campus Ministries.  My contribution to the panel was similar to my newsletter column from earlier in the week.  Here are some quick reactions:

  1. If you ever want to be impressed by the thoughtfulness of the next generation of leaders, you need look no further than Stewart Towle ’12 and Nathan Gusdorf ’12, the two student participants in the panel and two of the most heavily involved members of the Occupy Dartmouth movement.  I don't think we would agree on two many political or policy challenges
  2. They are in no hurry to organize a political movement.  I think they are still experimenting with the cultural process of allowing their individual worldviews to be influenced by direct communication with other sympathetic individuals.  They shared an interesting observation -- that the movement is what democracy "feels like."
  3. I don't think the members of the Occupy movement fully understand how little change they will see in our government's actions through nonviolent means unless the movement fields its own candidates.  I went a step further in my remarks to suggest that effecting change through the political process was a nice alternative to martyring yourself for the cause.

In a moment of reflection, I offered that the Occupy movement is appealing to me based on the contradiction that it exposes in policy rather than individual policy positions.  Specifically:

  1. You could tell me a story in which it is very important to move heaven and earth politically to step in and rescue financial firms that are about to implode.  You could even tell me a story in which, unfortunately, those who broke the law or exercised poor judgment were not held accountable in the process, because we had to move quickly to intervene.
  2. You could tell me a story in which fiscal considerations prevent the government from transferring more public resources to those in need – be they unemployed, uninsured, undereducated, or merely unfortunate.

You cannot tell me both of those stories at the same time without revealing that your priorities are screwed up.  That these two stories have played out in sequence is our national contradiction, and I applaud the members of the Occupy movement for refusing to ignore it and for mobilizing to help change it.

Published on Leave a comment on How Will Occupy Wall Street Become a Political Movement?

In my latest Direct Line column for the Rockefeller Center, I draw some parallels between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and then consider the question posed in the title of this post.

As it transitions from a popular movement to a political movement, I will be most interested in how true the Occupy Wall Street movement can stay to its founding principles articulated above.  I see two particular challenges.  First, given the prominence of the “major banks and multinational corporations” that wield the “corrosive power over the democratic process” in our political system, I am curious to see what candidates the movement can draft.  Few incumbents have the purity demanded – look for challengers and outsiders to carry the Occupy Wall Street movement’s message into the political realm.  Second, the Occupy Wall Street movement has defined itself in part based on inequality – the 99% versus the 1% -- and in part based on injustice – the use of one’s current elite position to distort the political system into maintaining that elite position at the expense of those who don’t have it.  Not all inequality is due to injustice, and not all injustice is the result of the most fortunate 1% exerting undue influence.  Making those distinctions clear to the American public will be important if the Occupy Wall Street movement is to build a coalition large enough to gain control of political institutions.

Read the whole thing.