Month: October 2011

Record-breaking OWS demo hits NYC

EXTRACT:

[Note:  this was recorded at 1015 EST well before the reports about eight hours later that Anarchists had penetrated the groups in Europe and were responsible for the violence.]

Former US intelligence officer Robert David Steele says that the violence in Rome was not instigated by the protesters themselves.

“I think they were penetrated by provocateurs,” he argued. “Remember that in Italy the Red Band was actually a CIA/NATO operation to fabricate terrorism in order to push Italy toward fascism. I don’t believe that the violence is coming from the demonstrators; they are being provoked.”

Steele pointed to an incident this past week in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg called off a planned eviction of the protesters from a downtown park, nominally to clean up the public site.

“By basically keeping the place cleaner and more orderly than the government itself was able to,” he said, the protesters effectively – and peacefully – outmaneuvered the government. “They cannot be violent. They must demonstrate that the governments have failed and that they are superior.”

See two other video clips and full report.

There are two major differences between the Tea Party and OWS:

1) The Tea Party is affiliated with the Republican party, and not replicated elsewhere in the world.

2) OWS rejects both parties and all forms of institutionalized corruption, and has been replicated all over the world.

Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence

by G. William Domhoff<

March 2005

One of the distinctive features of left activists is their willingness to go to the streets to win people to their causes and create the political pressures necessary for the social changes they advocate. Studies in social psychology and sociology support this strategy by showing there has to be a non-routine dimension to any effort toward change. It doesn't make any sense to people to say that things are terrible, but they just should vote and write letters to their elected representatives. If things are going to change, then people have to get out of their routines one way or another. There has to be social disruption. There has to be a “getting in the way of power” as one author-activist puts it. There has to be a social movement that has a shared political identity.

But case studies also show that these movements go nowhere without an electoral component, as seen with the women's suffrage movement, the industrial union movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement. Changes in government were the end result in every case. They usually don't go far enough, but that just means the next cycle of movement activism is necessary.

Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This may be where OWS derails.  They have ONE CHANCE to demand Electoral Reform in time to impact on 2012.  That chance slips away by the end of November.  The Constitutional Amendment is a pipe dream in the absence of Electoral Reform first, first Congress has to be cleansed of corruption, then a Constitutional Amendment can be sought.