According to occupywallst.org, “Occupy Wall Street is [a] leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.”
The Occupy Wall Street movement suffers from an image problem. Though it has managed to incorporate the average American’s current misgivings about the state of the economy into its general message, most people observing the movement from the outside cannot ascertain a central focus. To its credit, the movement has been able to garner national attention from media outlets, if for nothing else than for the diversity of its protesters and their run-ins with pepper spray and expiring protest permits. People who believe in the movement for its ability to call attention to the state of this country’s economic woes desperately need those participating in the movement to elect a national spokesperson and adopt a simplified protest message. Occupiers would do much for their cause if they organized into a respectable movement that Congress could not ignore. As it is, protesters have done little to dissuade most Americans from writing them off as “lazy hippies” who “expect something for nothing.”
Occupy Wall Street has called attention to the dishonesty of the relationship between politicians and big corporations. Merely protesting big corporations will not alter this relationship because you have to cut the ties at the root of the problem: the politicians. It is the politicians who are elected on the taxpayers’ dime and are corrupted into accepting gifts and other financial incentives to do the bidding of large corporations when they should resist them. These corporations then benefit financially from the legislation passed by the politicians they have influenced. Bribery of a politician or elected official should be a prosecutable federal offense. Occupy Wall Street should aim to take corporate money out of politics and reform our election system into one that is funded by public monies. This should be their central message and one they should be promoting nationally.
Instead of protesting aimlessly in front of large corporate headquarters, Occupiers should do so in front of political offices. They should also inundate these politicians with written complaints and telephone calls. Daily. Call for campaign finance reform and take corporate money out of politics!
Currently, Occupy Wall Street is planning a mass demonstration on Washington, D.C., called Occupy Congress on January 17, 2012. Good. This should have been the aim of the movement in the first place. In the interim, organize yourselves into a cohesive intellectual consortium and pound this central message home.