Just a thought. The organic “Occupy Wall Street” movement has been a perfect messaging/activism storm in many ways. From a messaging standpoint, it’s ideal. Protesters represent “the 99%” against the wealthiest 1% for whom Wall Street is the center of the universe. The notion of an “occupation” is perfect, in that it’s we, the great unwashed knocking on the doors of the rich and powerful and refusing to leave.
But “Occupy Vermont?” That’s a dramatically different message. “Occupying” any place but Wall Street sends a different signal- and in fact waters down the OWS message, potentially.
Because who’s “occupying” here? Aren’t the Main Streets of the states and cities the very homes of “the 99%?” An occupation is the act of an outside force. Protesters represent the outside force on Wall Street, but on Main Street? In that case, any “occupation” rhetorical construction draws up mental images of taking those Main Streets away from the regular folk who live there.
And if, at the more local level, these protests are seen to be done by outsiders and not the collective “us,” then that could blow-back and reflect on the OWS demonstrations, de-powering them dramatically.
I’m just sayin…
But I don’t think you’re on the right track. We’ve seen hundreds of Occupy X rallies spring up spontaneously all over the country, and it’s all clearly tied with the problems on Wall Street and in solidarity with the original protest. The implication is that our locations have been taken over by corporate bankers and we’re taking it back by occupying space–physical, psychological, economic–that ought to be reserved to the people.
You’re overthinking this one.
To see a merry band of 99%rs marching quietly up Church St. today in BTV. The place was packed, and I think the Zeitgeist 911 crazy fake Afro pinwheel bike guy got more looks than the Occupy protest.
Yeah, symbolically these protests in other cities continue to garner some atttention, but until we start packing buses and trains and march on Wall St. or Washington… I don’t see them as anything more than a sideshow.
Boots on the ground sort of thing….
that ended with the end of Viet Nam ?? and did it suffer a diminished impact in that it was coopted by SDS/ Panthers or Weathermen?? Was the initial event diminished by Chicago or Kent State??
Maybe a more global name for the movement would be great, but I am not sure the movement has congealed into a defined movement yet… sorta like the liberal tea party…. lots of things to be angry about, just some difficulty picking the best one…..
Personally I think all evils are cured by campaign finance reform which needs to have corporate personhood vanquished…… but that is just me
In case anyone here has not been checking the visuals:
http://wearethe99percent.tumbl…
Plenty powerful, no other brand needed. Similar photos and captions could easily be displayed here in Vermont, although now some of them would be post-Irene.
Oh, and btw, Joe Biden’s typically inaccurate take on the origins of the TEA Party were nicely refuted by Rachel Maddow in an interview with Andrea Mitchell:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Biden said the Tea P’s were mad about the TAARP bailout, but Maddow corrects the record: floor traders were pissed that regular Americans underwater on their mortgages would be bailed out. Wall streeters were ‘delighted’ that banks got bailed out.
NanuqFC
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods. ~ John Maynard Keynes (1933)
Bank Transfer Day:
http://www.facebook.com/event….
Remember, remember…we can set the banking world on fire without a match.
To me this thought seems to miss the point of #OWS, and comes dangerously close to sounding like the same old legacy media/institutional (mis)understanding of what’s going on in this country right now.
#OccupyWallStreet is the rallying cry; the symbolic space. #OccupyEverything (including Vermont) is the dissemination of that initial seed, the “thing” with life breathed into it, having first been articulated and brought forth by #OWS. The “occupation” isn’t against Main Street (or any other street for that matter)- it’s an uprising against the status quo, against massive personal indebtedness, joblessness, voicelessness, powerlessness, and the hopelessness all these things breed in all of us, the “99%”. It’s an “occupation” (a “reclamation”- of our lives, our economic fortunes, our streets both physical and symbolic) fighting against greed and inequality and injustice- in all and every of their forms.
Unless you mean to suggest that Vermont has no wealthy elite, no power-mangers wielding a voice louder than the average Vermonter, no banking and financial and other institutionalized power centers- which I’m assuming you don’t. Sure, in VT (and Wall Street, and everywhere else there’s an “occupation” happening as part of this) you have the “usual suspects” of the activist left; but that has grown to include more and more “regular” folks, fed up with everything articulated above (or maybe just fed up with one thing, or just their own personal situation), and now organized labor and the lefty-celebrety class… and more, and more people keep getting on board and joining in. I fail to see how more and more people, in more and more locals, standing up and saying “Enough!” is going to hurt a grassroots, populist uprising.