Everybody has a piece of advice for the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. They should put their clothes on. They should stop raising their fists. They should fact-check their handwritten signs. They should appoint leaders who can give pithy quotes to reporters. They should get with an electoral program. Nicholas Kristof even offered to help them out with a neat list of demands, in case those holding signs saying “We Are the 99%” just needed to have the unfairness of the carried interest rule explained to them. [...]
It’s not that the demands being suggested by OWS’s volunteer policy advisors in the blogosphere are not worthy ideas. At a time when we desperately need to rein in financial speculation and change the incentives on Wall Street, a financial transactions tax is a terrific policy proposal. Dean Baker has been talking about it for years. The thing is, we on the left don’t have a scarcity of policy ideas. We are positively bursting with them. Create a housing trust fund! A national infrastructure bank! And, yes, sure, eliminate the carried interest loophole so fat cats don’t get a bigger tax break than working people. (Some even have more radical ideas, which are quite sensible too.) But at best, we get a polite hearing for these ideas, which then fade away or are hopelessly watered down. We simply lack the power to put them into practice.
What do the powerless have left to do when the powerful have taken everything else away from them? Protest.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy
Yes, the revolution is coming. And as you have long been told, it won't be seen on your television (due primarily to corporate media corruption, greed, and fear). It WILL however be Facebooked, Tweeted, blogged, streamed, uploaded, shared, and experienced live in Houston and many cities across the country and even around the world, in the streets by the other 99%, unfiltered by the powers that be.
No television coverage that makes any sense whatsoever to those who mostly watch Dancing With the Stars and/or Fox News ... unless the police again try to provoke civil disobedience into violent confrontation, like they did in New York and like they have done in Houston previously.
Violence always gets televised. Let's not let that happen.
