Occupy Wall Street
US protesters lack concrete demand
- The Protests, The Awakening, The Revolution!
- Saturday, 22 October 2011 04:34
- voxnews
The Occupy Wall Street protests are continuing with increasing intensity, whose participants say that 99 percent of the people are unhappy with the current situation.
The Occupy Wall Street protests are continuing with increasing intensity, whose participants say that 99 percent of the people are unhappy with the current situation in the country.
People are unhappy with the Wall Street and the bank bailouts, unemployment and the money spend on wars abroad.
This movement has become so popular that has reached to European countries as well.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian, to further open up the issue.
The following is a rush transcription of the interview:
Press TV: Mr. Tarpley, the Occupy Wall Street has hit down under and it is growing at a staggering rate. What do you expect next and how do you agree with Mr. Wilayta's assessments of things?
Tarpley: Well I certainly think that the lack of demands, the lack of any program is a serious, possibly fatal flaw. My reports from the New York demonstration are that there is a deep dissatisfaction among some of the people who have been here from the very beginning that after 35 days approximately, there is still not one single concrete demand. There is not a demand for example for a student loan amnesty, cancel one trillion of student loans. There is no demand for a Wall Street sale tax, of one percent tax on all derivatives and other transactions.
We do not have a demand yet to stop foreclosures, to stop bank of America from stealing people's homes. We do not have a demand for Medicare for all. We do not have a number of other important points. We do not have a demand for no cuts in the social safety net where the Republican candidates are going wild in their death cult, the Republican party demanding Draconian, savage, brutal austerity to make the American people pay for this depression. When Joe Sixpack, the average American working stiff looks at this he says well, these are, they look like privilege youth, they seem to be concerned with themselves, they want to tell me about this General Assembly where they talk all the time, do not decide anything, do not get anything done. If you want a filibuster, you are already paying for the US senate, you do not need this.
Now within that, I would say there are two principle dangers. One is something called the Direct Action Committee and this is where the density of anarchists black block types is the greatest in Occupy Wall Street. The idea is that the Direct Action Committee sends people on wild goose chases. Let's go and march to the Brooklyn Bridge, what in God's name for, let's go and march to somebody's house. How about the fact that the New York Federal Reserve is very close by in Maiden Lane? How about the other financial institutions City Bank, is in Midtown and so far? I think the Direct Action Committee is trying to provoke some violence with the police and get it into that kind of a descending spiral.
The other one is the finance committee. The finance committee in Occupy Wall Street is sitting on three hundred thousand dollars and the word is that these people are hoarding that money and they want to take it home. The bottom line is that the autumn is coming here. The temperatures are dipping into 40's at nights and pretty soon is going to be freezing, maybe around November first. This particular phase cannot last forever. When it is over what has remained? The Tea Party had one big idea. Cut federal spending and that is for me a genocidal, suicidal idea. What is the one big idea of action coming out of the Wall Street occupation? So far nothing. I talked to a nurse here at Washington Freedom Plaza. She said she wanted Medicare for all. And she went in front of the General Assembly and they said oh no, we cannot do that. There is no leader. The Tea Party got 75 seats in the Congress out of what they did. So far from this it does not look you are going to get any and the Tea Party had an idea. So compared to the Tea Party this is inferior. And you see people like Michael Moore trying to perpetuate that.
Press TV: Mr. Tarpley, I do not know if you heard, but the guest that our correspondent had, said we need to clarify our demands, and Mr. Wilayta said a few minutes ago, that there is no specific demands have been made, so my question is if a demand has been set by the people, can the current administration do anything about it, especially with the Presidential election right around the corner?
Tarpley: There is fundamental ambiguity in what the guy from Egypt is saying. On the one hand he is spotting the rhetoric of the colorful revolution; it's the rhetoric of Gene Sharp and Albert Einstein Institute, which has been endorsed by some of the leaders here at the Washington demonstration.
If we have a dictatorship, does that mean Obama is the dictator? I'd like to hear “Dump Obama” that would be a very specific demand that would clear the air. “US get out of Libya” after this disgusting spectacle this week.
What I heard from your Egyptian guest there, or essentially some demands that could be coming from the center wing of the Democratic Party, nothing radical at all, nothing that would solve the world economic depression, nothing that would stop unemployment, and foreclosures, and inability to get healthcare, here in the US. People don't need a movement to share anxiety, the goal of these movements is not to get together and act out anxiety or anything else.
It is to provide [programmatic] solution. So the working people see a powerful new social force that is fighting for something specific that is going to help them. And it can't be this generic leftism that we just have heard. And in particular the idea that we should make this into a color revolution in the US is a recipe for failure. Because that is essentially what the Democratic Party and the foundation operatives, the people from Adbusters and so forth want, is to make this into the left-wing of the re-elect Obama Campaign.
That would be I think absolutely suicidal, and again what you got to do, is as long as you do not have demands, you are going to be used by somebody. The only way you can avoid being used is to have leaders that they are going to come up through organic process, not facilitators, not people that are expert in this Byzantine rigmarole of consensuses building and all the rest of this stuff, but actual politically qualified leaders, who prove themselves in the mass strike. And you got to have some demands that address what the problems of working people are.
And so far there is a void of this. The mass strike does not wait. These moments don't last forever. Every one of them has a task that is got to be fulfilled. And if you don't fulfill the task, the winter comes, people go home, and you left them in demoralization.
I think from certain point of view, the whole apparatus of the General Assembly is precisely a way to tire people out and to eat up the clock, and eventually they get demoralized, they get disoriented, and they go home. That is what the Democratic Party would like, that is what the foundation and counter- insurgency apparatus is looking for, so break out of that, kick out the facilitators, demand majority vote right now on a program. Why should it take so long? 35 days, no programs, something is rotten.
Press TV: Mr. Tarpley, the biggest situation, I think the people are setting out their demands. They want the unemployment to stop, they want the unemployment of over 9 percent to be reduced, and pretty much the government stop spending money on wars abroad, would you agree with that?
Tarpley: It is fine, but it is got to be made specific, in other words, what you need is policies. You got to show a force that can govern, the Tea Party did it, they got with basically noting more than what we got now, 75 members of Congress.
The other speaker in Richmond says, “the purpose of this is to get together to express anxiety and discuss an alienation,” nobody needs any movement to do that, and if you find that the students are being crushed by students loans, have a movement to wipe out the student loans.
And I don't share the fatalism that the US is doomed to a future of poverty. If you think it is doomed to a future of poverty, what is the point of this whole thing? Racism, yes, let's deal with racism within the frame work of economic recovery that would give us the material basis to solve the problem of the black community, the high unemployment in the black community.
If you had a trillion dollars on infrastructure you'd be hiring black construction workers that is the best thing you can do to solve problems in that area. In other words, social movement that bring answers, not just whining and complaining which Americans don't like.
MH/AHK/JR
