Demands of Occupy Wall Street Movement Protesters

Part 2: Dignity, respect, autonomy, living standards in line with what technology of second decade of the 21st century allows (or at the very least as good as those of an average Swede).







With the parabolic expansion of the OWS across the country (as of today, occupations in over 70 cities and hundreds of small towns), the powers that be are now attempting to co-opt the energy of OWS for Obama's re-election. The spike in media attention and sudden friendly non-condescending tone of rich man's mouthpieces like NYT and CNN is an indicator of this. Co-option appears to be the stage between ridicule and fight you stages. This may prove more difficult than was co-opting Ron Paul's people via building a corporate sponsored "tea party" (elderly obese peasant crypto-fascists on scooters) around them. Part of this process will be Obama proxies within the media, intelligence, and think tanks trying to channel the energy towards electing a gaggle of corporate democrats in the next election cycle. This means trying to entangle the protesters within a broken, draining, futile, and illegitimate political process and pitting them against an ocean of corporate advertising money.

The protesters need to understand that voting is used by the ruling oligarchic American regime (whether democratic or republican wing of finance capital) to bring itself legitimacy. In fellow oligarchic "democracies for the rich" like Russia, ruling parties always try to mobilize youth to vote for this reason. It is sign of rapidly increasing third worldification of the US when political parties feel compelled to also have artificially propped popular movements behind them. Perhaps Obama is jealous he doesn't have Putin's NASHI equivalent. As Latin America moves north, the protesters need to adopt tactics used by their comrades in the rest of the so called "developing world" (who exactly is developing around this planet?).

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Upon visiting the occupied park, the demands become crystal clear and in a pleasant surprise, they appear rather compatible with what The Pragmatist has been proposing. These demands fall into two categories of punishment and socioeconomic rebuilding which could be categorized as follows:




A) Stopping the looting on Titanic's upper deck.

1) Punishing and deconstructing ruling transnational financial cartels via Glass-Steagall, grand investigation, prosecution and arrest of thousands of banksters, and a Tobin tax on financial transactions to throw a wrench in the high frequency trading casino floor of Wall Street.

2) Bringing back 1950s style 90% tax on the ultra rich and steeply raising capital gains taxes to begin redistributing the wealth down across the ridiculously steep caste based pyramid.

3) Stripping corporations of legal personhood and nationalizing as needed. Reversing the process of privatization and corrupt public-private "partnerships" (a.k.a. peasant stompingships)

4) Creating a permanent awakening and class consciousness and thus the process of neverending push back against the desires of the ruling class, no longer venerating the oligarchs (or venerating abstract myths like "The Market"). In other words no longer licking the boots of the rich and kowtowing at every opportunity.

B) Slowing down the sinking of the Titanic and creating mechanisms to rescue the poorer passengers in the bottom decks. 

5)  W.P.A. 2.0 to engage in large scale infrastructure projects, technological modernization, and infrastructure development.

6) Providing cutting edge education to the largely illiterate peasant mass  (definition of illiteracy in the 21st century goes well beyond not being able to read or write). This will make it increasingly harder to swindle bottom castes out of their resources.

Eventually, as the OWS crowd socially polarizes, they will understand that the only language rich people understand is the language of the general strike and mass scale disobedience. That is, when business as usual and quarterly profits are interrupted. That is when the oligarchs start calling their butler/personal lawyer/puppy dog in congress to demand that business resume and they do something. When and if the radicalization reaches the level of mass desire for the general strike, a new set of better demands will emerge (better since they will present a lot more "radical" break from the rotten status quo and thus a halfway compromise will result resembling what's listed above).

The most hopeful thing one discovers is the increasing desire for a grand alliance between Ron Paul's people and the OWS umbrella for numerous other dissident groups. This will make it harder for a faction of ruling elites to make an alliance with OWS crowd first and will thus isolate the 1% further (put them under sudden siege which they aren't prepared for unlike elites in say, Latin America). An example of this fusionistic tendency is the federal reserve system increasingly becoming the target amongst many non-Ron Paul people in Liberty Plaza. Many countries around the world had to resort to a "popular front" of groups which normally hate each other but which have discovered a common enemy at the very top of the pyramid.

More to come as this develops.