What revolution?

[Nuclear Unicorn]

I keep hearing (seeing?) this.

There will still be an election next year and the candidate with the most electoral votes wins. They will still oversee laws passed by congress which will convene as it always does and the Supreme Court will still hear cases. The military will still obey the president and the cops their local mayors.

OWS can either insinuate itself into the political process to choose candidates more to its liking and recommend policies that can be codified or it can sit on the sidelines, with or without tents, and watch as life goes on around it.

[badtoworse]

1. Camping in a public park and crapping in the street ? Some revolution!

You're correct. 2012 will be a critical election and the way OWS is going, they'll be irrelevant and will have no one to blame but themselves.

[WillyT]

4. Or... Enough Of Us Can Just Stay Home And Speed Up The Critical Fight Me All Must Deal With...

Because this cowardly chipping away at America is becoming Fascistly Intolerable!

BTW - Nice RW meme ya got there.

:wtf:

[Fire Walk With Me]

7. ...

:thumbsup:

[SammyWinstonJack]

13. plus++++

I swear the negativity toward #OWS is so frustrating!


:wtf: is that about, anyway?

:banghead:


Are any of these people actually out on the front lines? Getting arrested, maced, tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets and beat down with night sticks until their eyes roll back in their heads?





Yeah sure. :eyes:

[Cid_B]

23. Warm fuzzy feelings never changed a law or provided a paycheck...

Reality bites...

[badtoworse]

18. Engaging in our political process is RW?

Maybe you're right - the Tea Baggers engaged and whether you like it or not, they made a pretty good showing. I believe in tactics that have a chance of accomplishing something and OWS is not doing that. There is still enough time to be relevant in 2012, but OWS will need to radically change their approach.

Zuccotti Park had become disgusting. There are limits to what the 1st Amendment protects and what was going on there was way over the line. The neighbors have rights too.

[JanMichael]

11. This may get deleted but your attitude kinda sucks. nt.

[marmar]

28. Par for the course, sadly

[SammyWinstonJack]

14. -1

:eyes:

[Zorra]

26. Jealous? We are the real thing. Get used to it. Better yet,

join us.

We, the 99%, are the genuine hope for change.

[TheWraith]

2. Some people seem to want to play out fantasies of change, rather than do the work.

I can understand why: fantasies that there's going to be some kind of epic revolution are more fun than the hard work of actually electing candidates to change how the country is run. But fantasies never passed anything through Congress.

[leftstreet]

6. You mean like Obama? Evidently campaigning on change was easier than bringing it n/t

[Nuclear Unicorn]

9. Not our fault if we were lied to.

There's a reason fraud is a crime in the private sector.

[TomClash]

21. Here's a flash

It's a crime in the public sector too.

[JanMichael]

12. See post #11. nt.

[PoliticAverse]

3. There are 60 members of the Tea Party Caucus in the House...

How many members of the Occupy Wallstreet Caucus will there be in 2 years ?

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Tell me... is there an equivalent right wing

group controlling and making sure they do that? As in you realize they were astroturf why nobody went off kilter about them openly carrying AR-15s

tell me how many raids did we see on Tea Party Rallies?

[Nuclear Unicorn]

10. At this rate

zero

The General Assembly it has chosen to form seems based on the idea of rejecting the established political system.

[Fire Walk With Me]

5. At it's apogee, #Occupy utterly obsoletes US politics. In the meantime, it forces US politics

to take a new direction. It is US, voting NOW for a better world. If US politics cannot be made to fit this better world, no worries, something better will have already replaced it.

US. You and I. With a real, genuine voice in things.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

15. What?

That's just sloganeering. I'm not being mean but seriously.

You want the 1% to relinquish power. OK, but how? They aren't going to pay more taxes voluntarily (they can already, if they want to). So you need laws. You don't get to make law unless people use the political system to elect legislators to do it. Those laws don't get enforced unless a president is elected to oversee it. The cases against the offenders requires courts.

The choices are --

* Politics

* Impotence

* Violence...which just gets people hurt before it becomes impotent

[Fire Walk With Me]

27. The choice is the increasingly extreme pressure of public opinion, which they continue

to turn against themselves. The ACLU and another legal union are suing the Oakland for multiple counts of brutality and abrogation of civil rights. Bloomberg and the NYPD blew it last night by arresting reporters, blocking the media, etc. etc. etc. The overall conversation has changed to income inequality. More than 650,000 people last month moved their money into credit unions and small banks. More and more and more people are awakening to the difficulties in from of us, and want them to change. We are witnessing the dawn of something new, note the trends. The overall power of public opinion will create the change denied us through our vote.

[BOG PERSON]

16. for all of OWS' naivete and utopian thinking,

everybody should give them credit for fully understanding that getting lured into electoral politics would be self-sabotage.

[sabrina 1]

17. Don't worry, they will have an effect on the election. You just might

not like the effect, nor will any Candidate who takes money from Wall Street.

The election is a year away, right now the movement is building, and the bigger it gets (thanks Mayors and Cops for the promotions) the more power they will have to influence elections.

Btw, in what way do you think they should influence the elections?

[badtoworse]

19. By participating in them, by getting signatures and putting people on the ballot.

They've made a concious decision not to do that and consequently, they will accomplish little or nothing.

[sabrina 1]

20. What would that accomplish? We've done that for eternity and

nothing changed. We need new strategies that are outside this broken political system. And they will be involved in the process, but not by signing petitions and the same old 'business as usual' tactics. We want real change and you don't get that by doing the same things over and over again and getting the same results, which is, the people keep getting screwed.

We don't want Wall Street funded candidates. The way to facilitate unfunded candidates is to make this a huge issue, as it should be, in this election. Once people are informed about who their candidates are being paid by, then the people can decide, 'who do I want, a guy who works for Wall Street, or a guy who refuses their money and will be more likely to work for me'.

That will take work and research, informing constituents of who is funding their candidates. But with the people available now to do the work, that is a far better use of time than signing petitions or donating to candidates who don't need our money, (donate to the ACLU instead eg, as they are fighting for the people's rights). Otoh, any genuine candidate who is not Wall Street funded, can get the support of this movement.

Nothing will change in this country until the money is removed from our political system.

[badtoworse]

22. I think you will find the process is more complicated than that

There are plenty of candidates on both sides that take Wall Street money. I suspect finding ones that don't may be like looking for a needle in a haystack. In many cases, an existing candidate may need to be primaried to force him not to take Wall Street money. Failing that, it might make sense to run an OWS Caucus candidate. It will take money to get the message out - that means fundraising. It will take a positive public image to get people to believe the message - that means not doing a lot of the things I hear being planned for NYC tomorrow. I don't share your disdain for the system we have, but I wish you well.

I agree with a lot of OWS' objectives, but I don't like the tactics so far. I have a different view view of why we are in this mess - a big part of the problem has been Wall Street, but they are far from the only culprits.

[sabrina 1]

24. Well, I like the tactics of our government far less than anything

I've seen from this movement so far. I do not like torture, which they all seem on board with, or the illegal invasions and occupations of other people's countries, the slaughters of their civilians and the theft of their resources. The support for Dictators, like Karamov of UZbekistan, the hypocrisy then of claiming someone else is a dictator, as if they cared, when it suits them. They are deceivers, most of them, they are liars, they lied us into several wars and killed untold numbers of innocent people.

And that's just the beginning of what I don't like about the tactics of our government. And to ask people to vote for anyone who has gone along with these criminal activities is not something I would ever do. It has reached a point now where we cannot pretend any longer that by voting for people who look the other way from war crimes, or who actually supported or still supports these crimes and votes for the continuation of them, we are not also complicit.

Just because my team is now engaged in the crimes we screamed about when it was the other team, doesn't make them any less wrong. I find it extremely disturbing the way some Americans can just dismiss all these things, as if the innocents who have and still are and will suffer as a result of our complicity, are not human somehow.

'History will not absolve us.' In the same way that some soldiers remove themselves from the battlefield as conscientious objectors, many people who once thought that by participating in the old system, they could change things, from the way they were under Bush, and now realize they were wrong, must in conscience, IF they objected to these crimes under Bush, remove themselves from the process that makes them complicit also. I cannot vote for someone who is willing to kill children and call them 'collateral damage'. It's why I am a Democrat and not a Republican. But as we have seen, it doesn't seem to matter anymore.

So, I wish you well also with the same old system. For me, I will try to change it, and I do know how hard it will be. Nothing good every came easily when it comes to major changes, and that is required here, very major changes.

[Modern_Matthew]

25. You just described the problem, which is also your solution. How's that working out for ya? nt