Michael Moore is right.
Michael Moore Warns: OWS Is Not Concerned With Candidates Or Voting To Make Change
“This movement is so beyond just, hey, let’s get behind this candidate, get them elected to office. Those days are over. You know, we’ve all worked for candidates. We’ve all voted. We’ve all participated. And what have we gotten out of it? We’ve all written to our Congressmen and women, please pass House bill number 3428. What did we get? Where are we? We’re in the worst shape we have been in this country that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. And, and so, this movement is not right now concerned with candidates or specific bills in Congress.”
I’m going to now expand on Michael Moore's salient point and address some concerns that electoral politics are supposedly supposed to be the “next step” of the OWS movement as we have heard from some prominent FPers and posters. Although well meaning, I think these assertions are deeply flawed. Democracy is messy and what we like to think of of the past movements that brought the reforms we benefit from, some that were torn down by both parties in the 90s leaving us in the ditch, as always organized and highly efficient, but that simply is not the case.
This is untrue whether we’re talking about the civil rights movement(competing methodology by MLK, Malcom X, and Bobby Seale etc.), or the organized labor movement(Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs, the IWW and the AFL) among many others. In fact many of them were quite disorganized and had competing ideologies which were their downfall. This is similar to what happened to the original Populist Party that formed at the Farmer's Alliance in Lampasas, TX who had an alliance with black farmers via the Colored Farmers Alliance or the People's Party; they accomplished a lot.
However some of their reforms were adopted by the then racist Democratic party in order to coopt the successes they had and draw them into the party apparatus that pretty much destroyed the populist movement as it turned racist when it was coopted:
“The Colored Alliance became involved in the development of an independent party to challenge the political stranglehold of the Democratic Party in the South./ In 1891, the organization sent national delegates to the founding convention of the People's Party in Cincinnati, Ohio. With the break-up of the cotton pickers' strike that year, the independent electoral road became the clear path to pursue -- but not without a fight. The Colored Alliance had taken a strong stance in the direction of electoral politics when it voted unanimously to endorse the controversial Lodge Bill. The bill, which was finally defeated in the Senate in 1892, proposed federal supervision of elections, which would consequently ensure greater electoral participation of Afro-Americans. Soon thereafter, the rural networks carefully cultivated by Colored Alliance lecturers and organizers since the late 1880s would serve in the recruitment and development of black populists in the People's Party (also known as the Populist Party) in the 1890s.
The People's Party made electoral inroads in the 1892 and the 1894 elections, winning offices across the South and enacting legislative reforms that benefitted both black and white farmers. However, in a catastrophic set of decisions in 1896, the party gave up its greatest asset – its political independence as a national entity – and endorsed the divisive and openly racist Democratic Party. Black populists were pushed out of the organization and soon the role of Afro-Americans, at least from the vantage point of the white leadership of the People's Party, became that of obstacle and no longer partner in the advancement of the broader movement. Some of the most vocal white advocates for the inclusion and participation of Afro-Americans in Southern electoral politics, such as Georgia Populist Tom Watson, would later become leading members in the Southern-wide campaign to disenfranchise black people. The demise of Populism was only a matter of time. The white constituency of the Populist movement had been effectively disorganized out of a class politic and into a politic of race superiority. The Populist-Democratic ticket's loss in the presidential election of 1896 foreshadowed the collapse of the movement.”
So really, I don’t think I or many who support this movement are going to be lectured about a “next step” (Adopting the corporate media meme to break this movement up and put it in a little box like their demands meme) to support a fully bought Democratic party. The Democrats that aren't bought are not able to buck party leadership and are pressured all the time to excuse the failures so to not upset Harry Reid. They are also pressured to raise funds more than work for their constituents and have quotas to make.
They are also not to speak ill of the Majority leader because he runs the legislative schedule and agenda. We see this with Sherrod Brown and even Bernie Sanders whose work was watered down or destroyed via their health care reforms (health centers on the chopping block) and especially their Wall Street reforms (Brown kaufman actively opposed by the WH and Geithner which would have ended TBTF).
To learn from the past and past movements we must recognize what was similar, how the Democratic party at the time copted movements (which wasn’t always bad as with the New Deal coalition adopting many of the populists, socialists, and Union ticket’s proposals in a lesser way via Dr. Townsend’s national pensions to SS and Huey Long’s share the wealth platform but still) and getting them signed into law. The Neoliberal Democratic party is nothing like the New Deal Democratic party and the system is completely different. The system is completely broken.
The system is different so advocating the same behaviors are not always applicable even though some examples are prescient. The Women’s Suffrage Movement also had to react against a fake Wilsonian doctrine progressive party that coopted Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party platform to finally pass the 19th amendment but they were told to wait for Woodrow Wilson and that just electing him would help in that endeavor.
As I said in the past the system had at least the levers you could pull to make it respond economically as the inequality levels close to now in 1928 were brought back down in time for the Golden Keynesian age of Capitalism in the prosperous post WWII era. But now one legislative chamber controls everything and fake progressive Democrats like Amy Klobuchar like it that way and voted to keep the filibuster despite David Waldman of Congress Matters tireless work on the issue. Democrats like excuses. They know too many people buy them and repeat them. 60 votes! 60 votes!
Forget that Lieberman was let back into our caucus and the damage of legislative moral hazard that ensued giving away the sole power we had over the obstruction he caused enabling others like Ben Nelson to do the same. And let’s remember that the sole reason #OWS is tired of the whole system Democrats and Republicans alike is because neither party really represents the voters and both were complicit in the wealth gap x 3 now confirmed by the CBO you have seen.
I know….“NADER!” Just stop. I am NOT advocating a third party because that would be swimming in the broken winner take all system that has failed the 99% which would waste even more resources. That is also a deflection that is very very tired and should be put away for awhile. I can validate precisely what I said with quantifiable data. This isn’t just what I am saying in the heat of the moment, you heard about this UNDENIABLE FACT in Kevin Drum’s milestone piece:
Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich
Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
Now, tell me again about how we that are only excited about #OWS need to “wake up and start thinking about the bought and sold game of electoral politics?” It has been suggested that we need to learn about the past, because past movements eventually adopted electoral reforms and enacted successful legislation. There were enough qualitative aspects of the New Deal to embrace the New Deal Democratic Party that defined what we think of the Democratic Party Platform today. There were enough Quantitative aspects of the legislation that made up the Great Society.
Quantity is not quality. Not only that, the suggestion that #OWS needs to wake up and support the broken electoral system that qualitatively doesn’t represent voters at all in time for the 2012 campaign system. This is said to us by the same people we know agree with us that the electoral system is broken. Well if the system is broken NOW then why do we need absolute adherence to THEN?
As Markos has shown by creating this place, in a way, technology has crashed the gate and changed politics to a certain extent and we see this in relation with #OWS which is operating with the old school approach out on the street, but I don’t think the Occupy Everywhere expansion of this movement would be the same or able to happen as well without the Internet spreading it like wildfire. #OWS is truly Crashing the Gate in more ways than one pushing through the corporate owned media filter despite the gatekeepers of the 1% wanting to hold us back. WE need to keep pushing for years and years and never stop.
Why? Citizen’s United. It changes the game and adds shame. It hurts that the ACLU thinks this is a good decision. “Even the liberal ACLU agrees!” as RW corporatists in Congress put it.
There is no easy legislative fix to this problem. Law professor Lawrence Lessig is taking the long haul approach like #OWS advocating bypassing Congress and having an Article V Constitutional Convention to bypass Citizen’s United by getting 2/3rds of the states to ratify it. It won’t be easy but real change is not easy, it’s messy, it is hard, and it takes a long time an we’ll see what happens as #OWS keeps on going into 2012 and beyond.
As I have mentioned in my last diary with the facts to back this up, just the fact that we are not talking about the deficit anymore already is a better accomplishment than most Democrats in a way going back to Carter who had a fatal economic view that caused the Reagan revolution to happen by following a fatal deficit fetishist third way path. This is because of #OWS and anyone who denies this should learn a bit more about Peter Peterson and his influence. It's everywhere.
This is an ongoing conversation and outcry to get people to pay attention to America becoming third world status and the sellout Democratic Party and its ringers and the system will have to change before harking back to what past movements did in a system that was more responsive however bad it was. There is really no system anymore.
And we shouldn’t be afraid of what happens because of this movement. We should be afraid of what doesn’t happen.
So Occupy Together wherever you are and don't stop!