Dear Occupy: Forget the camps, push amendments
Dear Occupy/Anonymous/other departments of the upcoming revolution:
Forget the camps. We don’t need them anymore. They worked, they got the world’s attention, and income inequality is now a central issue of the presidential campaign, and the national conversation as a whole. Occupy 1, oligarchy 0. Well, oligarchy 24,024, but still…
But the effort put into sustaining the camps, when they are constantly broken down and the protestors beaten and jailed, is not a particularly attractive return on investment. The energy of the protestors is spent figuring out how to survive, how to deal with the authorities, and how to run the camp. That’s a huge amount of work for exposure we already have. This may sound like a “let’s give up” cry, but far from it. We never needed to “occupy” anything literally, except the fact the word is in the title of the movement. But we can do more.
The goals of the Occupy movement are embraced by 2/3 of the country, a supermajority. That means any push for legislative change to achieve those goals will be supported by 200 million Americans. Let’s embrace that.
Let’s take a look at the fact that only 17% of Americans support unlimited corporate political contributions. Well, great. But that also means that if Occupy pushes to overturn this ruling, perhaps with a Constitutional Amendment to do so, we’d have 83% of the country backing us up. Let’s fucking go for it!
Now there are several ways to do this; however, I think that overturning Citizens United (the ruling giving unlimited spending privileges) won’t be enough. We had money influence in politics beforehand, remember? So how about doing more?
We can declare that corporations aren’t people, and I think that’s fine, but also push for things like public financing (if someone gets X number of signatures, he/she gets $10 million or whatever to campaign with), or human-only contributions (no organization of any kind can give), limiting quantities (people can only give $200 per year, no matter what), and so on.
I have my personal favorites, but I’d rather stay open to analysis. The point is that we can make this happen. We can push for a Constitutional Amendment to take money out of politics. Certain lawmakers have already pushed for this, particularly the “OCCUPIED” bill, named affectionately after the movement that inspired it. We need to push this issue to the forefront of the national conversation, and if every camp in ever city and state did it, 83% of the country would cheer us on.
Let’s. Fucking. Go. For. It.
