Today is the first day of the Take Back the Capital for the People on the National Mall. This is the effort of groups like OUR DC, SEIU and MoveOn.org to bring the issue of Congresses failure to pass a single jobs bill in a time of economic crisis to the fore.
The protest is an interesting hybrid since there is a right to exercise your 1st Amendment rights on the National Mall 24 hours a day, but there is no camping or sleeping on the Mall. That is going to make for an interesting push-me-pull-you with the Park Police who are in charge of public safety there.
The protest will be holding vigils, and there might be a sleeper or two, but it will be a bit of shell game to keep the police who will also be there overnight from rousting folks who just nodded off.
There were people setting up private tents, which the Park Police had said they would take down any private tents at 9pm this evening. It looks as though they are trying to get around that by putting some of the tents in the bigger event tents. I don’t know how that is going to go down but it is a smart idea.
They are really well organized as you can see. When I went down today they were in the process of setting up, with the lawyers group having an impromptu open air lunch as unemployed protestors from all over the nation arrived.
Tomorrow they will be visiting Congress, and a little bird tells me, that there are 99 targeted Representatives, Democrats and Republicans (mostly Republicans) who will be targeted to get a visit from this group.
While this has the possibility of getting a little tense, the organizers are really looking for what the big money folks have, which is the ear of the Members of Congress. The fact is that more than half of all members of the 112th Congress are millionaires, so there is a natural barrier for them to understand what it is like for the rest of us out here in the nation in terms of jobs.
There will be other actions, going to K Street so the lobbyists can see who they are hurting by their efforts to make sure that companies like GE and Wells Fargo and others pay no taxes and keep getting support from the Federal government, even though they are seeing large profits once again.
But that is not the whole story of this event. While the visiting Congress and the K Street and maybe the Speaker of the House are the big visibility issue focus of this event is going to be something else.
The folks I talked to on the ground this afternoon have no illusions that what they are doing is going to have an immediate affect on the plight of the 14 million unemployed or under-employed in the United States. If they manage to get an extension of unemployment benefits for the 2.1 million of them who will lose those benefits at the end of the year that will be a big win, but this is a longer term fight than that and this event is part of the long term fight.
There is going to be a lot of education going on at this event. The point of this education is to activate these folks, train them and then send them back home to their communities to get going on the ground game that will be required for long term change.
In that respect it is the logical next step for a lot of the Occupy movement, even though this event is not actually an Occupation (it will be over and done on Friday).
By training activists, by letting them share their stories with each other the folks organizing this protest are not just brining the issue up, they are putting some heat behind it in the future.
I even talked to some folks I know from McPherson Square (the site of Occupy DC) about how they felt about this action. I wondered if they would be chapped about these big labor and activist groups coming in and maybe big-footing their work of the last 8 weeks.
What I was told was it was not a problem at all. The idea of Occupy is to make the point of the plight of the 99% and there is no set group that can make that issue. But they also made the point that this was planned well in advance of the Occupy DC encampment and is piggybacking on Martin Luther King’s idea of a Redemption City.
I was really happy to hear this, as all of us in the 99% have a hell of a lot more in common than in difference and one of the great problems of the Left is that we are all passionate but we tend to run in all directions at once. In this instance we are not doing that.
So I will be going back tomorrow to see what is going on and report to all you folks who support this effort but can’t be there.
Below are a few pictures of the people and the tents at the event this afternoon.
The floor is yours!
A delegation from Huston arrives with their luggage
The Dream Wall, where folks will share their stories of getting to DC and what they need and want.
The “Imagination Station” tent where folks can make their own signs