Ows. Clarifying the demands and sharpening the focus and cutting edge.

I enclose below a piece from an article by Naomi Klein. I think it is very instructive in how it shows the dominant issues in the minds of the OWS activists whom the employers media lie and say do not know what they want. It also shows how how these ideas coincide with the issues which are so prevalent in peoples minds. Also it shows how the capitalist class have been coordinating and centralizing their attacks on the movement. As we have said on this blog, US capitalism knows that it cannot keep funding its wars abroad, the living standards for its working class at home and so it has been on the offensive against its own working class at home. Its idea is to take back all that was won in the 1930's and the 1960's.

We have argued on this blog for a united front of struggle of all the OWS forces and the working class which is finding itself more and more under attack all the time. We have argued for an increased orientation towards the direct attacks on working people such as foreclosures, firings, wage cuts, benefit cuts, education and health cuts, against the wars, etc and to use the tactic of mass direct action to pursue these struggles. We still think is the correct approach.

Let us develop some demands such as raised by the OWS people in the interviews with Naomi Klein. For example she says the top demands was take the money out of politics. Should we raise that all lobbying be made illegal. Is this something that we can fight for, or perhaps fight for that any contribution more than 25$ to any political cause or campaign by any one individual would be a felony.

I believe we should fight for an end to the gerrymandering of the political system where there are two Senators for every state irregardless of the size of the state and where there is an electoral college to elect the President as opposed to a direct vote and where elections are staggered so that a mass change in consciousness cannot sweep in a new congress and presidency all in the one elections.

I do not believe that society will be changed by elections, the ruling elite will seek to stop this by force, but people believe in the electoral process and as they get mobilized will try and use it to change their lives. We have to have something to say about this.

I watched my local TV coverage of the small city where I live in Illinois last night. Their were 18 elected officials and three bureaucrats and four member of the public present. The public was outnumbered around five to one. There was no opposition, this forum was not being used for struggle and a platform for an alternative, it was being used by the local business people and their politicians to get their way. This is a mistake of the left. These fora should be used as platforms to get our ideas out and launch struggles. Of course the main launching pads has to be on the ground where the attacks are taking place, that is where people are being foreclosed on, fired, having their wages and benefits cut, having their education and health care cut, being sent to war to get an education etc.

Some ideas for taking the OWS movement forward. See the piece from the Naomi Klein article below.

Sean.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.