Occupy Wall Street has moved far beyond Wall Street. It's in the public spaces - the parks and plaza - from New York City to Portland, Oregon, to Dallas to Oakland and more, cities and towns across the country.
The sight of actual occupiers camping in the actual physical public spaces has its benefits - visuals on the news, coverage in the newspapers, and a forceful intrusion into the consciousness of the citizenry. But there is also a disadvantage to occupying actual physical space: law enforcement at all levels knows how to break up such public demonstrations. Police units all across the country, from the smallest of local forces to large cities such as Los Angeles and New York, have been collecting the most technologically advanced riot gear manufactured, all funded by grants from Homeland Security. They are prepared to deal with the actual bodies of political protestors: breaking heads, gassing, handcuffing, detention for days without arraignments, and legal charges of potential felonies that can strip the voting rights from a convicted citizen for life. Bloomberg and Quan think they can get rid of the OWS movement by moving the people out of the actual public spaces. They cite their laws unfairly; they pass dead-of-night, secret resolutions; they send in black-helmeted, armored storm troopers with batons, gas grenades, and sound bombs.
What the law-and-order forces don't understand is that they can't control public space with actual riot squads. They can't stop the OWS message "We are the 99%" from reaching the public. That's because "public space," which has has been defined as physical space by the city governments, is now also virtual space. The public square now exists wherever there is a public debate happening on newspaper comments boards or blog spaces. These forms of public space reach hundreds of thousands of readers. The drumbeats are much louder in virtual space. These are the hundreds of virtual public parks and squares that we must now occupy, and thousands and thousands of our fellow citizens pass through them every day. By standing up and bullhorning our messages in these spaces, we testify to the entire community that, yes, we are here, where they live. We are their neighbors. We believe that the 99% deserve to have power in this country, not the 1%. We want them too know that they, too, are in the 99%, and that we have mutual interests.
How do we create an "Occupy Wall Street - Virtual Public Spaces" wing? We do it by flooding the comments and LTE pages of every on-line version of our state and local newspapers, new virtual publication, every internet magazine, and every blog in the country. By broadcasting our message into virtual public space, we can even begin to get the message into the ultimate "space" of the public: the space in their heads, the space in their consciousnesses.
There is a tremendous opportunity to educate the general public here. Most of them still remain confused about the purpose of the OWS movement itself. Yesterday, I read a question in the comments section of a Huffington Post piece,
"Who the heck are the one percenters? I've asked on various threads and no one can give me an answer, or wants to. Where is the cutoff point for the 99 percent? If you look at the U.S. having a population of 311 million, then one percent would be 3,110,000 people in the one percent group. That's quite a bit. But, at what point, and where does that group come into play?"
We know who the 1%ers are:
- They are the oligarchs who control 42% of the wealth in this nation;
- They collect 24% of the income;
- They are wealthy enough to buy politicians on both sides of the aisle
- They are wealthy enough to have bought a whole political party, which only represents their interests now;
- They have paid for tax laws and public programs to be passed that only benefit them, even if it means the rest of the country suffers;
- They own their own propaganda wing, composed of cable news, newspapers, magazines, and think tanks;
- They benefit by making the 99% blame and fight each other, rather than fighting to spread the wealth they have sequestered from the rest of the nation;
- They have written credit laws so that the bottom 99% has 73% of the debt, in spite of controlling so little of the assets;
They are so powerful that they are cannot even be prosecuted or punished for their misdeeds.
There are plenty of other explanations. Joseph Stiglitz has an excellent article defining the 1% here.
We need to get the message of "The 99% vs the 1%"onto every comments page of every economic or political news article posted on every newspaper, popular magazine, or blog. It is up to explain exactly who the "1%ers"are, how they got that way, and how dangerous they are to democracy and our nation. We must drive these facts home by repeating them, consistently, day after day, so that they become the resounding drumbeat that fills our public square.
There are consistent themes expressed in the OWS demonstrations across the country. The site "Occupy Wall Street!" featured a post by "wouldstronglypreferjustice" three days ago, in which the poster detailed what he/she saw at OWS occupations in five different cities.
Since my visits have been spread out over 6 weeks or so, I have found an increasing specificity to the issues that drive the movement. By far, the most common are 1. The corrupting influence of big money in our elections. Everywhere, this was the #1 issue raised. 2. The lack of accountability for the financial sector's contribution to the financial crisis. I would also add that there is very little talk about scrapping our capitalist system. On the contrary, I met many professional, educated people who want compete as individuals on a fair playing field. It's not capitalism, it's crony capitalism that drives the anger.
The OWS protestors are not socialists, trying to scrap capitalism. They are not anti-American; there are American flags everywhere. This love of country, of fairness and of justice, so prevalent in the actual OWS movement, is what we must expound on the comments pages across the country. If we don't express our goals and values, the plutocrat-owned press will do it for us. (We have already seen the dogs' breakfast of the movement's message that Fox News is spewing.) Already we can see that they are trying to portray the inclusive OWS movement as a group of crazies, wastrels and destructive anarchists. The pre-dawn violent raids that tear down the encampments are sold as "protective measures" for the good of the people. Bloomberg explains this morning's attack as a necessity due to "fire and health regulations." By occupying the online news sites, we can carry our message over that of the oligarch billionaires like the Mayor of New York.
What is most important is that we adjust this message to our audience, and that is why we must make our comments locally, in areas with which we are familiar.. We all - whether Liberal, Conservative, Democrat, Republic, Left, Right and Center - are in the 99%. But we've all been taught to hate and distrust "the other side" so much that it may be impossible for some readers to get past those walls of separation. The 1%ers have used the same "divide an conquer" tactics" since the Vietnam War to make citizens each others' antagonists, instead of each others' compatriots. The message "We are the 99%" must always be inclusive, one that emphasizes how the great mass of us have been used, abused, and swindled of our Commonwealth by the 1ers - and especially the Top 0.1%, whose wealth and power most Americans cannot even begin to imagine.
Not all of us can sleep in tents in Zuccotti Park, or stand with the gassed and beaten OWSers in Oakland. We are all part of the movement, however. We can all work to Occupy the Public Spaces, however, because we all have computers, we all can read and write, and we all know what we want the people who hate the idea of "hippies banging on drums in the park" to actually know the ideas that those "hippies" are banging on about. I have several online "public squares" as my regular posting sites: Huffington Post, and Talking Points Memo, for instance. But there are already many OWS supporters and Progressives posting to those sites, so I also hold up the OWS message in other forums that are often hostile to "liberals": my state and newspapers, the New Jersey Star Ledger and the New Brunswick Home News Tribune. I have been posting for a decade on Free Republic - never as a face-slapping Liberal (which would get you instantly "zotted") but as a fact-checking skeptic. Fact-checking and skepticism is often enough to educate people on a a thread that would otherwise remain just one more toxic mix of superstition, bigotry, and passed-along half-truths and downright lies.
You may already be chiming in on your local, state or national message boards. What I am proposing that we at DKos undertake a program where those of us who are interested adopt a number of boards, reviewing them once a day, and getting the message about "the 99% vs. the 1%" onto them. By organizing, we can make sure that comment pages all across the country get the OWS view. We should pay attention to delivering the good word to primary states especially.
Find your local newspaper or state newspaper's comment board, sign up, and make posting there daily as much a part of your day as brushing your teeth or reading dKos.
For a list of all the newspapers published by state, hereâs Refdeskâs comprehensive list.RefDesk also has links to all national papers, as well.
USNPL.com has lists of all the local newspaper websites by town, broken down by state. USNPL also has the addresses of major news Twitter feeds, in addition to the snail mail addresses.
If you're want to go directly to a national political or cultural blog, etalkinghead, "an online polall political blogs a list of all political blogs broken down by position on the political spectrum:Conservative, Independent, Liberal, Libertarian, Moderate, and even Humor, Religious and Group. There are also "News Only" blogs The Fixon the Washington Posts site. After combing through hundreds of reader submissions, he narrowed down selections from anywhere to one (Utah, Vermont, West Virginia) to as many as eight (Minnesota.) This list was put together in 2009, before the installation of the Unholy Terror Republican Governors such as Kasich, Scott, and Walker. So there many be even more vital state political blogs that are not listed here. Please be sure to note them in comments.
By creating a group for OWS- Virtual Public Space, we can keep track of what blogs and newspapers are being visited with the "99%, not 1%" message. Of course, the more testimony shows up in each public space, the better. In addition, it would be extraordinarily helpful to everyone who decides to participate in this endeavor if we could have a "message of the day," supported by figures and statistics, to advance new fronts against the Oligarchs, or fight back against the lies of the Right. Using such messages, of course, would be completely at the behest of the poster. But a Diary of Message of the Day could turn into a valuable resource for anyone wishing to chime in to their local newspaper.
Not all of us can get to the parks and the downtowns. But we can all still stand with our brothers and sisters in OWS. We can use our virtual personae to testify. We can make our communities aware of just how big, and how encompassing, this movement is.