[spoiler]
Panel 1
Large lettering says “The Ten Stupidest Objections to the Occupy Wall Street Movement”
In the lower right-hand corner of the panel, a self-portrait of the cartoonist, a fat guy with long dark hair, says: I’ve heard or read all these myself!
Panel 2
Furious-looking yelling man in polo shirt: Folks in third-world countries are EVEN POORER, so poor people in AMERICA should be GRATEFUL and SHUT UP!
Panel 3
Balding man at laptop: If they don’t have an official media spokesperson, how can we take them seriously?
Panel 4
Angry yelling woman: They criticize corporations, but use SMART PHONES made by CORPORATIONS! HYPOCRITES!
Same woman, added as an afterthought: And they wear clothes!
Panel 5
Person with long hair in a ponytail, shrugging and looking confused: Shouldn’t they protest in WASHINGTON instead? That’s where the people in CHARGE are, right?
Panel 6
Angry man with giant head and a necktie: THEY’RE HIPPIES! HIPPIES SUCK! I HATE GODDAMNED HIPPIES!
Panel 7
Concerned looking woman with long wavy hair that I was happy with how the drawing came out: Why aren’t they wearing NECKTIES, like civil rights marchers fifty years ago?
Panel 8
Angry, strict-looking man wearing a vest and with his shirt buttoned all the way up: There was a bad statistic on a hand-lettered sign! That’s PROOF these people are liars!
Panel 9
Smiling woman in striped shirt who looks as if she thinks she’s making a really telling point: Why aren’t these people at JOBS instead of protesting? HUH? Why not? Huh?
Panel 10
Paranoid man in a trenchcoat with the collar turned up, standing against a brick wall, whispering something confidential: “Occupy Wall Street” is OBAMA setting up the country for riots!
Panel 11
A yelling man with a huge open mouth, whose face fills up virtually all of the panel: A movement that FAILS to compress its entire meaning into a simple SOUNDBITE is DOOMED! DOOOOOMED![/spoiler]
The fourth one isn’t stupid at all. Specifically, where is Obama – the best friend the bankers have ever had, and (now that Bush is gone) the president who has handed the most public money to the financial sector in history – in the Occupy list of demons?
For Occupiers Obama is just another politician who takes wads of money from Wall St. and returns favors in kind. To the movement it’s not the person that matters but rather the sysytem that not only allows corruption and disparity to happen but ensures that it will.
As for the fourth panel (and I assume you mean the one about why they aren’t protesting in Washington) it is stupid because there is an Occupy in Washington DC. They even have a website at http://occupydc.org/ And currently protestors are making their way towards Washington.
The Occupy movement is a symptom of problems in the US, but I think that they are setting themselves up for failure. While some occupy people have made a list of realistic, well-thought-out goals and demands, most of them have not. The movement has attracted an eclectic lot, and while that’s not a bad thing in and of itself, being…. directionless…. is a bad thing.
I’m all for regulating capitalism – even harshly regulating it. I don’t want increases on taxes for poor people and cuts to services to occur when taxes on corporations can be raised (especially when they are so goddamn profitable).
But I have a hard time understanding what the end game is. The Abolishment of Capitalism? Good luck with that, you’ll need it. Capitalism is a ruthless system, and far from perfect, but I have no idea what you’d replace it with. You can’t just say “socialism” – WHICH type of socialism? A lot of occupy people want the type of socialism seen in Scandinavian countries (and to a lesser extent, my country Australia). But that’s not even really socialism – that’s a welfare state (which isn’t a bad thing). I’ll remind you that those Scandinavian countries are still fairly capitalist in nature – people in Sweden or Denmark or Finland can still own and create businesses, invest and accrue capital and property. They have investment banks and stock-exchanges and big corporations like Ericsson and UBS. If that’s not Capitalism, what is?
The protests haven’t failed yet. They are still gaining momentum and there is still time for it to take a direction, which will result in change. Are the protests designed to bolster Democratic candidates? Or what about other legislative candidates? Are they designed to force political leaders to change laws? Which leaders, and which laws?
Protests, in and of themselves, don’t do anything. Protests are means to an END. Otherwise, they just become…. carnivals and “feel-good” gatherings. I get the impression that a lot of the people are there more for themselves and their egos than for any real sense of change. You know, it’s a youthful bravado thing. A chance to make yourself feel like a real “FREEDOM FIGHTER! FIGHTER FOR FREEDOM! AND JUSTICE! LOOK AT ME! I’M SO NOBLE! AND I’M MAKING A DIFFERENCE!” Really. By standing around waving a sign? It’s a chance to make yourself FEEL like you’re making a difference….. without really making a difference, if you know what I mean.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that there are many things wrong with the world. And that the system needs major tweaking or even a complete overhaul. Capitalism is, by its very nature, designed for continuous growth and not sustainability. The direction of the developed nations or of “The West” is an important topic and we need to discuss things. As awareness raisers, the Occupy Protests are useful.
But it can’t just end with them. They have to move on. There HAS to be another plan, otherwise, mark my words, in a year from now they’ll be old news and the protests will dwindle down to a few die-hard marxists trudging about making a fuss. There is a real momentum behind these protests, but it could all fizzle out. For starters, the 99% people need to realize that 99% of the country is not on-board with them. I doubt even 30% of the USA supports them. It’s probably more like 10% of the population supports them, and maybe, what 40% of the nation is sympathetic to some extent (but sympathy is cheap and not real support). A lot of rural poor folks, people who SHOULD be natural allies of the OWS movement, are turned away because frankly, they think you’re all Communists. They do. And the Che-Guevara T-Shirts ain’t helping folks. Neither are waving signs like “CAPITALISM HAS FAILED”. You need to reach these people, otherwise they’ll continue to vote for Republicans who they feel reflect their cultural values and beliefs. A lot of these people grew up in the 50’s and the 60’s, and all this talk of “Changing The System”, to them, feels really shady and threatening. You can’t just say “OH THOSE RURAL HICKS AND THEIR BIGOTED WAYS!”. Those “Rural Hicks” vote and often vote in bigger numbers than the college youth.
Protests with definite, tangible goals often meet with success. Civil Rights Marchers, for instance. Protests without tangible goals, don’t meet with success. Look at the Hippie Protests in the 60’s. They didn’t really get anywhere, or achieve much of anything. No, they didn’t end the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war ended because The Pentagon realized that South Vietnam was not worth saving and they make rapport with China to serve as a counter balance to the Soviet Union and their Vietnamese Allies (during this time China and Russia HATED each other and China actually sabotaged shipments of weapons that the Russians asked them to deliver to the Vietnamese).
As motivators go, Protests are good. I hope these protests really change things up. Perhaps wipe out college loans and help increase funding for new homes for the poor.
But it can’t end here. You might think that holding a sign in the cold is hard… but it’s not. It’s an excuse to avoid real, hard work. Protests are EXCITING and full of YOUTHFUL BRAVADO! And ENERGY! And it’s so COOL! And EDGY! But the real hard work of running for office, of going door-to-door, of setting up meetings, of writing important, awareness raising literature, of entering the establishment with the intent of changing it, of drafting new laws that you want politicians to enact, of ACTUALLY USING THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES YOU HAVE TO EFFECT CHANGE…. is boring. It’s hard. It’s tiresome. It takes years of your life.
Real change takes time. It takes incredible amounts of hard work. Believe it or not, you Americans are freer than many people. You actually do have democratic systems. They’re not perfect, but you DO have legal ways to effect change through the political system. You do. You just don’t use it. Most of the OWS people…. they don’t vote. Most of the young don’t vote even when they could. You can’t complain that “The System has failed”, when many of you have written off the system entirely and refuse to use it.
The only way for change is THROUGH that system. What other way? Protests BY THEMSELVES CHANGE NOTHING. You can hold a sign all day and night, but unless it convinces voters to vote for good candidates, THEN IT’S ALL FOR NOTHING.
50% of the country hates OWS, even when they shouldn’t. You have to try to get them on board, otherwise nothing will change. You currently don’t represent 99% of the people – if you did, your protests would be a million times larger.
Unless you are planning on building up your numbers to stage a violent revolution (which would be interesting, but it wouldn’t work), you need to start thinking about WHAT you want and HOW to get it. Being directionless will ensure that you will fail.
The appearance claims are stupid in part because they are not reflecting reality. Most of the occupiers aren’t hippies (some were possibly hippies a long time ago, and Portland probably has more hippies than most occupations, but even here hippy dress and mannerisms are a distinct minority), and while the clothing style seems mostly to be generic casual, but there are occasional formal clothes. On Saturday, there was a veteran in full dress uniform who was very well received.
Sunday best clothing was significant in the Civil Rights Movement for its own particular reasons. It is certainly not the case that successful protest movements usually wear formal dress and we are being foolish not to.
Korolev, it must be nice to have such long, detailed, back-and-forth dialogs with yourself. Saves you the trouble of listening to or responding to anything anyone else says.
Not to derail the discussion or anything, but I really like the figures in this set of cartoons. ;)
They are wonderfully exaggerated, intense and silly. Thanks for bringing them out for the world to see.
The Occupy reality isn’t the public perception reality.
You’re presumably not stupid (boy, that word is getting used a lot here these days) so I fail to see why you continue to ignore the discussion about perception. Perception is extraordinarily important in politics; we’ve known that for ages. That’s reality!
It’s not just that the civil rights folks wore their Sunday best. It’s that they understood, and managed, and used, the issues of perception to their benefit. Folks who are referencing the suit-wearing civil rights era aren’t necessarily demanding that the Occupy folks wear black suits and white shirts; they’re really talking about the lack of a cohesive presentation designed to reach the folks who AREN’T in the movement.
That folks would support Occupy makes sense. I support Occupy, too, at least most of it. But putting on the pretend “this isn’t a problem and people who say it is are stupid” hat isn’t working.
Korolev:
I think you’re being optimistic. They’re already becoming old news. The American attention span is pretty damn short. The violence and filth isn’t helping, either.
All:
I wouldn’t say that the protestors should go to Washington instead. But I would say that Washington is just as important, if not more important, than Wall Street. As I’ve said elsewhere, transactions take both a buyer and a seller. Emphasizing Wall Street without equally emphasizing Washington, D.C. is like busting the hookers and not the johns.
Eva:
G&B is right when he says that perception is very important. Discussion of how a political cartoon looks and how it visually conveys information is very much on topic.
Well, let’s not romanticize the civil rights movement too much.
I was around then, and an adult, and I can assure you that not everyone in the movement wore a suit, the movement as a whole, especially at the beginning, was more than a little unfocused, and certainly not everyone fighting for civil rights was well behaved or non-violent. (!!) Anyone remember Eldridge Cleaver or the Black Panthers?
Even in the matter of leadership there was quite a struggle before Martin Luther King emerged as a (not “the”) foremost leader, and he had to fight a lot of folks to get non-violence declared the ideal of the action. And MLK wasn’t canonized until after his death: while he was still alive he had plenty of opposition within the movement itself.
Occupy is in its early stages. If it runs true to form, a charismatic leader or leaders will emerge; if it’s more than one, after a power struggle one will rise more or less (but not unopposed) to the top.
Sadly, history teaches us that this leader may not end up being a good guy. Adolf Hitler was a leader who arose out of just such a period of economic disturbance and injustice. Let us hope and work for the best.
Perception is in large part formed by your media sources. I suppose it’s Occupy’s fault that the media most people access to get their info focus on its fringe elements.
The difference between the online live feed and the network news broadcasts of this past weekend’s events concerning Occupy Portland was stunning and disconcerting.
What’s with the PO-d whiny tone?
Do you understand that I am pro-Occupy? That I’m NOT on the side of corporate government control, police beating up whoever they feel like, and so on?
If you can’t manage to be non-snarky when we’re discussing this sort of thing, and if folks think your opponents aren’t worth anything other than the “stupid” label, then you have almost zero chance of successfully getting shit done.
I understand that Occupy contains some radicalism and liberalism. I understand that lots of radical and liberal spaces are preach-to-the-choir sort of things (they can be just as intolerant of dissent, if not more so, than conservatives) but sheeit, how the heck are you supposed to gain support for a movement when non-approved discussion about it is shut down?
The standard political movement says “How can we persuade Non-Members to join us?” You seem to be saying “Who cares what Non-Members think?”
It’s simply a ridiculous way to perform political action. You need to make rational choices about how to best get to your political goals (“Is it better to have the support of the ______? Or is it better to have the support of the folks who won’t stick around if there’s ______? Or can we find a middle ground?”) Part of that rationality includes discussion about whether or not the existing processes are working to that end.
Faulting people for reading the NYT or WaPo or whatever, instead of going to the video feed? Probably not a good process. Failing to account for the fact that people would stick with their existing news sources, and failing to try to make a presentation there? Probably not a good decision. Blaming the public (potential members!) for stupidly failing to understand the importance of the things that weren’t explained to them in a manner that they would accept? Definitely not a good decision.
I have said this only in the sense that I said nothing of the sort. What I am saying is that you’re blaming the Occupy movement for the perception created by the corporate media.
The rest of your comment is based on similar misinterpretation of what I wrote. That includes your assumption of a, “PO-d whiny tone,” where none, so far as I’m aware, exists.
Whether you’re pro-Occupy or anti-Occupy is completely irrelevant to my comment. Almost all of your comment has nothing to do with what I actually wrote. You’ve created a straw man out of two pretty straightforward sentences.
I’d appreciate it if, when you respond to my comments, that you would address the content and not some tone that you’ve imagined.
Timothy Burke argues that the Occupy folks don’t trust specific policy changes because they expect anything specific to get circumvented. This isn’t unreasonable, but I’m not sure that a protest based on “well, you figure out how to make things better” is going to work.
A group of us did a teach in at an educational fair b/c we were asked and have done them with other groups. Met people young, and old, different walks of life, liberal, libertarian, republican. All participated in our discussion of navigating these more difficult, arduous mechanisms associated with municipal governments. All were fired up on the issues of governmental finance (including misuse of funds), public participation at meetings, public document requests and Redevelopment (a huge issue currently at the State Supreme Court in my state). Many people told of losing jobs, housing not surprising given that my city’s 3rd in the nation in foreclosures and depressed housing values and has an unofficial unemployment rate of 15%.
When over 3,000 show up for a temp job for the Halloween season that’s minimum wage and P/T and seasonal, that tells you that there’s a need for more jobs. They think things might improve a bit here by 2016 or 2017.
Didn’t see too many hippies in the vicinity. No Che shirts or any communist symbols, though they’ve been accused of being communists by a local blogger. I had conservative Republicans and liberal democrats in my group and they realized their political differences but they found common ground too.
Yes occupying might be and should not be long-term but the issues aren’t going away, certainly not in my neck of the woods. When the city goes broke, there will be more people maybe living on the streets because they have to. Who’s dealing with the issues in D.C.? The Republicans, the Democrats? Don’t make me laugh. Both parties are too busy buried in their egos and comparing caliber sizes to even begin having meaningful thoughts on the issues impacting those of us who don’t have six figured jobs and one of those evil socialist one payer, government tax payer subsidized health plans like they do in Congress.
I had a hearty laugh when my Congressman told me why he voted against the health plan but continues to enjoy his own very generous health plan in Congress that’s life-long that’s paid for by us. Yet someone when it’s Congress that enjoys that kind of health care, it’s neither evil nor socialist .
I haven’t seen Occupy footage (or media coverage, I don’t really watch the news) so the only visual images I have of Occupy folk is the visual presentation of the protesters in Colorado Springs, who I have driven and walked past many times and conversed with a couple of times.
I wouldn’t call those people hippies. Hippies are cleaner. But it isn’t their appearance that’s bringing them down, it’s the constant infighting and crime.
This is just a puzzling objection to me. Aside from the policy aspects of it (Obama is definitely a friend of bankers, but claiming that he’s “the best friend,” as if Obama was above and beyond what President Bush would have done in the same situation, just seems like a way of dodging responsibility for how much the GOP is also owned by the bankers), Obama is widely despised by Occupy folks, as far as I can tell. The Occupy groups are actively resistant to the idea of being co-opted by the Democrats.
I think that conservatives imagine that Occupy is the Democratic Tea Party. But it’s really not. The Tea Party never would have happened under President McCain (and didn’t happen under Bush) because the Tea Party is the right wing of the GOP, rather than being opposed to the system as a whole. Occupy — perhaps unfortunately, from a “ability to wield power and influence” perspective – isn’t like that.
Yes; the Occupy folks are partly to blame.
The Occupy people can’t blame the media for something that the Occupy people have a fair bit of control over.
I’m sure you’ve seen that in the right wing context. If you’ve got 100 people holding “illegal immigration is causing problems with our economy” and there’s 1 person standing out front with a “kill the Mexicans” sign, then the 100 normal folks need to deal with that ASAP or their message is going to be hidden behind the controversy. Is it their fault? no. Is it their problem to deal with, nonetheless? yup.
And if you’ve got 100 people holding “crack down on tax-evasion schemes by large corporation” signs, and there’s 1 person with a “Disband the U.S. government and put Obama to work cleaning streets!” sign, then you need to deal with that as well.
And if there are 20 different groups, then you need to deal with that, too.
If you run a movement with no image/position filtering (like Occupy) then you don’t have much of a case to complain if the media picks on topics that you don’t want. It’s especially true if you’re not even making much of an effort to filter topics.
Do you not want the media to use pictures of tattooed drummers as representative of Occupy? Someone needs to tell the drummers to stand down. Do you want the media to use pictures of the uniformed vet? Someone needs to focus attention on the vet. And so on.
Media control and image control is about suppressing bad positions as much as it is about including good positions.
It’s no surprise that folks would preferentially associate Occupy with radicalism: folks see what they’re expecting to see. If Occupy wants to avoid that association it takes work.
The parties in power have many things that make them worse than the Occupy movement. They have one thing that arguably makes them better, which is that they actually have some positions on the table.
I’d argue that it’s most profitable to try to figure out who the Occupy movement would want to be elected, and to support them. The Tea Party basically took over the Repubs, to a degree. leveraging the existing political structure is a lot more efficient than forming a competing one.
I appreciate the relevancy of your comment, g&w. Thanks.
“The Tea Party never would have happened under President McCain (and didn’t happen under Bush…”
Only because he was out of office before his policies went into effect. The second Tea Party protest (February 27, 2009) was specifically a protest against Bush’s TARP bailout.
As a Tea Partier, I can assure you that President McCain would have seen the same movement, if he had advanced the same government-fix-it-all policies that Bush and Obama did.
Susan:
Occupy is staggering into a ragged end game. There might yet be a populist left-wing equivalent to the Tea Party, but it’s going to run away from the “Occupy” brand as fast as it can.
Amp:
I disagree. The Tea Party uses the GOP because electoral laws disfavor 3rd parties (e.g., here in Illinois you need 5000 signatures to get on a Dem or GOP primary ballot but 25,000 signatures to put yourself up as a 3rd party). But they don’t identify their primary political allegiance as to the GOP. And they very much are against things like the various bailouts – they were as angry about Pres. Bush’s actions as they were about Pres. Obama’s.
G&W is quite right about the perception issue. The left happily cooperated with clubbing the Tea Party folks over the head with a few nutbags claiming to represent them. So now the cries that rioters smashing windows and rapists in their camps don’t represent them ring hollow. I have a friend who opposed the Tea Party because “look at the people they attract.” What do you think she thinks of Occupy now? The Tea Party was tagged as violent when there was no actual violence committed. What then does that make Occupy with property damage and assaults?
You wanted to get people to define a movement by it’s fringes? Great. Own it.
Ronf, re: comment #8.
Um, yeah, I appreciate the opprobrium. However, my ‘apology’ for derailing the discussion was meant to be perceived as sarcastic, thus the winky-smily face. I mean, the discussion about OWS is relevant, but discussion about the cartoon as art is equally relevant. No one, other than me, has said boo about the art content of the post, and here we are 20 comments later and it’s still true.
These are some of Barry’s more interesting figures to date (outside of Mirka, et al) and I think he should be getting more props for it!
I understand though – politics can be very distracting. (Read: smug smile of satisfaction).
Eva, thanks! I appreciated the compliment. :-)
See that’s what’s both funny and interesting is that some of the members of Occupy in my city are Tea Party people.
Personally when it comes to the one person versus the 100, I wish some of the progressive movements would also take responsibility and better control the sexists in these movements rather than simply label them as aberrations. But at this point, that’s a pipe dream. But if Occupy Movement or the Tea Party are expected to it…why not the other movements? I’m not trying to be difficult, I’d really like to know.
And I pick sexism in part because most of these movements claim to be against it.
The second Tea Party protest (February 27, 2009) was specifically a protest against Bush’s TARP bailout.
Then they’re idiots.
Speaking of the Federal Reserve: if you take the decrease in yearly demand that we’re dealing with as a result of the crash, and divide it by the most recent u5 measure of unemployment, you get more than $37,700.
If for some reason you use the official “unemployment” stat instead, that gives you more than $85,000.
Yes, but they’re not anti-sexism movements per se and they’re definitely not anti-sexist movements if you use the definition of “sexism” and privilege theory that stems from liberal academia. Same thing with racism.
Because in addition to what I said above, they’re moderate movements, designed to be more inclusive. Which pretty much means that they have to limit their ultimate goals. The more inclusive you are, the less that you end up doing (as the Occupy folks seem to be realizing.) There is no single group which can simultaneously be completely representative of everyone’s goals and also accommodate everyone’s needs. It’s an inherent conflict.
Occupy is also hampered by its noble–but incredibly difficult–goal of accepting minority interests as primary. There is no single political system which can simultaneously protect the voting interests of minorities (which generally requires giving minority-status people extra power per person) and also treat everyone equally (which requires the reverse.) Also it’s MUCH harder to agree on things with a coalition government than it is to agree on things when the government is a single party.
G&W:
Interestingly enough, Illinois once had a system that came a lot closer than many. The State was divided up into 59 districts. Each district elected one State Senator. But each district also each elected 3 representatives, all on an at-large basis from the entire district, on a “cumulative voting” basis.
The way that worked was that you would see (presuming no minor party participation) up to six candidates on the ballot, 3 from each party. You could vote for one, two, or 3 of them. If you voted for 3 they got one vote each. If you voted for two they got 1.5 votes each. If you voted for one (called a “bullet vote”) they got 3 votes. In a district with a majority of one party but a sizable minority, what usually happened was that the dominant party would elect two candidates but the minority party voters would all vote a bullet for one particular candidate of their party, and they would be elected. So both the majority and the minority in the district would feel that they were represented. It also minimized the advantages and effects of gerrymandering.
I actually voted in a few such elections. But Pat Quinn, then a self-appointed guardian of the public interest and now the first governor we’ve elected in 13 years who might not get convicted of a felony, decided in the 1970’s that the State would save money if it got rid of a 1/3 of the House members. So we ended up going to a system where each of those 59 Senate districts was divided in half to form 118 single-member House districts. I’d love to go back to the old system, myself.
Re: the Tea Party/OWS overlap:
http://southernmanblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-tea-party-and-ows-have-in-common.html
(I just Googled for the Venn diagram, I have no knowledge of the blog on which this image appears, it was just the first hit.)
In other words, we’ve got to wait our turn…gotcha. Well, maybe yet another branch of the feminism tree will take root and grow from yet another progressive movement that looks at women that way.
Of course you don’t have to wait your turn. You can form a party with whatever goal you want, including the goal of promoting feminism.
Not incidentally, the U.S. voting %age is only about 30% I think–if you assume that half of those are women then there are only about 15% of men in the country who vote. Since the country is 50% women there is absolutely no theoretical bar to a successful feminist party.
Of course, that’s a theoretically-perfect, nonexistent, party. While “Feminism” is at least a bit better defined than “liberalism,” it is still so incredibly broad as to encompass a lot of competing interests. If you consider that even avowed feminists are generally unable to agree on a precise definition of feminism, then it would be surprising for a party to have really good common goals.
So just like any other party, your “feminist” hypothetical party is going to have to make choices. And just like any other party, it’s also going to be constrained by the political need to limit the number of overall goals. If you spend your lobbying budget on fighting sexism, you can’t spend it on green issues or NAFTA issues or antiracism issues. But if you start expanding your issues beyond sexism, then–hey, this sounds familiar!–you’ll run the risk of folks saying that you aren’t focusing enough on sexism.
The Occupy movement claims to be anti-sexist–and perhaps it is, in an ancillary sense. But it’s not an “anti-sexism” movement any more than a feminism party would be an “anti-corporate” movement.
First of all I’ve seen as much sexism in the Occupy movement as I have most progressive movement who give that issue lip service. I guess what I mean is not so much addressing it as an issue but working damn hard in the interest of being inclusive to not let its practice permeate your movement. That’s just as important.
I’ve yet to see a Occupy movement in my state where there’s women leading it, in charge of any of the committees. In fact in most of them including this one the only thing women run is the kitchen. Not that the kitchen’s not critical because when the police tried to dismantle, it was the women who defended it through CD and the male cops who focused on removing them believing them to be the “weakest” link in the chain.
And in many places it’s far from a leaderless movement.
I’m not a feminist really (though I strongly believe in and advocate for women’s liberation and against discrimination that women face of different kinds) so what feminists do in their movements, that’s their business but you’re right, they do tend to be broad and have diverse opinions but I got discouraged with them after years of involvement because too often they too mirror the same institutional discrimination that they at least for the most part put somewhere on their platforms to address. I guess what I do is work with women who don’t feel that any branch of feminism is truly inclusive unless they need us for numbers.
Incidentally while feminism as a party might not be anti-corporate, many movements including those around the world advocating for women’s rights do tend to be somewhat “anti-corporate” particularly in countries where women or their families. are exploited by corporations.
This statement deserves its own blog posting and I don’t mean to be disrespectful but sexism and violence against women and girls is so tied into anti-racism and NAFTA in particular. Many women and girls have been raped, murdered and dumped on the other side of the U.S. border in part because of what NAFTA has brought to Mexico. If NAFTA in what it has done to women and girls in Mexico alone isn’t at least heavily tied into any attempts to address anti-racism and sexism “issues” (and I don’t consider either racism or sexism an “issue” and admittedly that’s my problems) but there are women’s movements in Mexico that address these issues.
I guess for some of us sexism isn’t a stand alone issue anyway, to be “addressed”. It’s an institutional form of behavior that kind of along with racism which it’s difficult to separate from and other forms of institutional discrimination kind of is what drives many of these other “issues” that are the ones that women so often have to wait to be patient while they’re addressed first.
You may want to check your logic… And your data is shaky as well. Gin-and-whiskey, shape up!
Apart from Clinton’s second term, more than 50% of eligible Americans have voted in every Presidential election since at least the fifties, and if you assume that half of these votes come from women, the percentage of men who vote is still more than 50%.
If you like the 15% number, here’s a true, totally useless statement: “Only slightly more than 15% of the votes theoretically possible in a midterm election end up being cast by men”.
The reason they are occupying Wall Street as opposed to DC is the rulers are on Wall Street, not the figureheads in DC.
radfem,
Here in Portland, women have been particularly strong in the facilitation team. Peace and safety also has important women members (the person who lately has been speaking publicly for peace and safety most often is a woman). The faith team is also dominated by women (the main UU minister is a woman, as is the main Rabbi) as far as I can tell. The head of the unaffiliated unrepresented dispossessed (the unhoused faction who don’t belong to a street family) at at least one spokes council was a woman. One of the leads of kitchen is a woman.
There is a recently formed women’s caucus in Occupy Portland, who are working on both women’s issues within OP and within the larger community.
Occupy Portland is definitely majority male, and by my count men disproportionately speak at GA and at spokes council, but probably only by a factor of ~20% (I only did a formal count at one early GA, but the ratio seems fairly stable to me. Next spokes council I attend, I’ll try doing a count again).
As far as I can tell g&w is not actually involved in any Occupy groups, so he speaks for the movement even less than I do.
The occupy movement is still really young, so I think there is still potential to be effective in actively work on fixing its gender and race problems.
Radfem, your observations of the alleged male-centric leadership of the Occupy movement and the committees is confusing for a few reasons. I’m very involved in Occupy Minneapolis, where there is no such thing as a “committee leader.” We, too, are majority male for the most part (at least these days), but our GA facilitation is often female-led, and there are always active efforts on everyone’s part to be inclusive to all historically marginalized groups. Honestly, if few women are speaking up, then, well, more women need to speak up. The gender disparity isn’t solely the problem of the dudes at the various Occupy locations. We ladies need to crawl out of our internalized-sexism shell sooner or later, and not rely on anyone else to break it apart for us, because that ain’t happening anytime soon, and it would be foolish to expect such a thing.
To the Occupy naysayers, I just have to wonder if you’ve been actively involved in your local occupations? Because the people who are criticizing the movement sound as though they’ve heard a clip or two about it from Fox, at most. Seriously, educate yourselves, people. You sound idiotic when you say we’re Democrats or Obama supporters or a bunch of unshowered hippie Marxists. You quite literally have no idea what you’re talking about, and it would be hilarious if it weren’t so damn depressing.
Also, we have a lot — a lot — of conservative- and libertarian-identified folks in our local movement, as well as outspoken capitalists. We learn a lot from each other. That’s the most important part– to break down the fictional Democrat/Republican divide among “the 99%.”