10/05/2011

An Inarticulate Articulation of Why Occupy Wall Street Doesn't Need to Articulate a Damn Thing:
Oh, shut the fuck up, mainstream media. You know exactly what the Occupy Wall Street (and dozens of other places) protests are demanding. Everybody knows, even dunderheads who pretend not to. They are demanding what every truly great social movement has ever demanded: the right to have a say, to have power in a nation where the majority of people are disempowered. Yeah, you can narrow those into a list of specific goals, as the General Assembly at Zuccotti Park are attempting or as others from the protests or even some in the media have laid out, but so what?

They all come down to the same thing, the same thing: power, specifically of the economic sort. The United States government has allowed corporations, whether its oil companies, banks, pharmaceuticals, or whatever, to have the power in the nation under the lie that their rising profits are the key to economic salvation. Now, after decades of corporate-friendly policies, mostly to the detriment of the individual worker, the lie has been made plain. If the Tea Party had not been racist and gun-toting and stupid and easily manipulated from the start, it would have had the same message.

That message can be distilled to a simple, plaintive, two-word cry to our elected representatives: "Do something." We have watched as program after program has been watered down or blocked by the Republicans (and some of their Democratic lapdogs) in Congress. The hope of the Obama administration was that he would do those things that need to get done. Seeing him have to kowtow to special interests (by his own doing) or bow to thuggish GOP demands has been devastating to the movement he started, especially when he was so fucking clear in his 2008 campaign about what needed to happen in America. Perhaps, then, to make it more clear, the message can be: Do the obvious shit that you know has to be done.

All but the most deluded believers in the bullshit chimera of voodoo economics (as we called it back in the day) know that taxes must go up. They know that the government must spend more on infrastructure and education here. They know that health insurance must be nationalized. They know that the wars must end. They know that criminals must be prosecuted. They know that Wall Street needs to be regulated. They know it and either won't do it because it'll cut into corporate profits or they can't do it because it's being blocked by the maniacs.

These are not revolutionary concepts. It's not a call for the overthrow of the Congress or the President. It's not a call for all the bullshit constitutional amendments that the Tea Party has tossed into the trash heap of rhetorical history. It's a call to abide by the notion that we are a group of united states, not a bunch of demographics awaiting exploitation. Our division is what gives power to the corporations. Our division is what they demand so that we don't actually think about and discuss what's wrong and how it can be solved. They need our division. Our unity is a threat.

Perhaps one way to put this (for, indeed, there are and should be many) is "We love our country. Why don't you?"

In the simplest Marxist terms, capital must be taught a lesson that labor is its superior in the power structure. You want a real revolution, with unemployed, hungry masses demanding your heads? Then ignore this anger.

A banking CEO contacted the New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin to ask if he should be worried about the uprising.

Yes, dear criminal. You should be very worried. Not about your life. But about your grip on the throat of Americans.