This culls the Coalition Cabinet posts at Huffington Post out from the many other posts for ease of reference by Occupy Wall Street and others interested in changing the game.
There is only ONE candidate for President who offers the public a commitment to Electoral Reform, a Coalition Cabinet convened in advance of Election Day, and a Balanced Budget presented before Election Day. I am that candidate. Learn more!
The Transnational Institute (TNI) carries out cutting-edge analysis on critical global issues, builds alliances with grassroots social movements, develops proposals for a more sustainable and just world.
Below is an excellent interview with Anthony DiMaggio in Counterpunch. DiMaggio author ofThe Rise of the Tea Party, due out in November 2011. He uses the “propaganda model” developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their bookManufacturing Consent to document and explain the Tea Party’s organizational dynamics for manufacturing dissent, and he compares these dynamics to those of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Before reading the interview, consider please the following: The forces powering the rage of the Tea Party — the stagnation of incomes and the increasingly unequal distribution of income — were around long before the Tea Party erupted on the national scene.
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That the distribution of income had shifted in a very fundamental way toward the wealthy and especially the super-wealthy at the expense of the bottom 80% of the working population was clearly demonstrated in a classic study by Emanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2003, updated in 2009), and subsequently confirmed by many other others, including just last week, on 25 October 2011, by the Congressional Budget Office.
It has also clear for years that inflation-adjusted wage growth that underpinned the improved living standards of great American dream machine sputtered out during the 1970s (see chart below).
So, it is simply beyond dispute that a fundamental change in the income distribution has taken place since the late late 1970s. That change is also correlated with the wave of deregulation, tax cutting, defense spending increases (with a slight interregnum following the Soviet Union’s collapse), and deindustrialization/globalization that took off after 1980 during the Reagan Administration and accelerated during the Clinton and Bush II Administrations.
Phi Beta Iota: Keep an open mind. This is deeply serious and directly relevant to understanding the convergence of the honest right, the honest left, and OccupyWallStreet.
What Lenin meant to convey was that the Soviets were not the ordinary class organisation, whose purpose, according to the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionists, was to fight only for the economic demands of the working class within the framework of bourgeois society. In his opinion such Soviets would be doomed in advance. In fact, no Soviets were needed for such a purpose. In his view, the Soviets were organisations for the seizure of state power, and for transforming the workers into the ruling class. That is why he again and again told the Petrograd workers in the course of 1916: ‘Ask yourselves a thousand times whether you are prepared, whether you are strong enough; measure your cloth nine times before you cut. To organise Soviets means to declare a war to a finish, to declare civil war upon the bourgeoisie, to begin the proletarian revolution.’
The OWS formations carry such potential, albeit (likewise) in an embryonic state. Their internal democratic structures are the key to this, and that is the part that should be replicated. As assemblies of people are constituted among more and more communities (and the accomplishment of this is extremely important to insuring that the internal democracy of each group is replicated in the aggregation of all such groups, in whatever form that ultimately takes, should it develop that far), both the possibility of coordinate mass action and the potentiality of an alternative political structure that represents all segments of the population emerges. The lesson from Lenin as applied to OWS is to recognize both the positive and negative potential that it represents and to both engage it and shape it to fit the needs of all communities. In the United States in particular, given the historically dominant role of racism in the social order, that means ensuring that the construct that is springing into existence before our eyes is made to become responsive to the direction of the traditionally oppressed communities, particularly communities of color.
Assuming that the most important task is to address the racist nature of this society and to prevent this from being replicated in whatever emerges from the present activities, it would seem that, as the best defense is a good offense, the oppressed communities here (and elsewhere, as this is becoming a global phenomenon) must organize as never before, and in a way that is compatible – in form and substance – with the present model, and which will thus insure that the voices and self-determined interests of these communities will find full expression.
More from Dan DeBar: My thinking on this is not fully developed, but, if you can spare 58 minutes and suffer some of the fits-and-starts of my thought process in the process, I did go into some depth in this video – – which starts off a bit slow, but eventually gets across a good picture of my thinking on the matter. As I felt I got deflected somewhat by the host from my main point – that of the centrality of the issue of racism to any solution of the problems being articulated by, or serving as the catalyst for, the OWS “movement” – I fleshed that out a bit more in this video.
Phi Beta Iota: We agree with the Duke historian. Occupy Oakland is making a strategic mistake in going for a General Strike. While we hope for a positive outcome, we believe the Occupy movement should be more focused on its strategy for making a singular demand after a winter of conferencing, and on refocusing its occupations toward the specific Senators and Representatives in each state who need to understand that if they do not pass the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, they will be hounded from office beginning immediately following their failure to promise to vote for the Act. The Statement of Demand date has been moved out to 5 January 2012. In our view, small General Strikes should be practiced in each state, focused on the homecoming of the legislators, but a nation-wide General Strike should be reserved for 16 February–with all appropriate planning–should Congress be stupid enough to ignore this once in a lifetime opportunity to get right with God, right with the Republic, and right with We the People.
