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The occupy movement is critical for America's future.
The path we are on is disastrous; endless wars, torture, targeted killings (even of Americans), severe unemployment, loss of jobs, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, homelessness, wide disparity of income between the rich 1% and the 99%, no health insurance for 50 million, severe college debt and diminished job prospects for graduates, teacher lay-offs, union busting through the curtailment of collective bargaining, severe environmental degradation, infrastructure deterioration along with austerity measures and the cutting back of the safety net being placed on the backs of the most vulnerable by the mania of deficit hawks in the House of Representatives and some state houses (both underwritten and funded by ultra right moneyed special interest PACS) not to mention the dysfunctional political theatre and corrupted machinations in Washington that is incapable of any real problem solving as it serves the plutocracy of oligarchs that reign supreme for their benefit only while destroying the middle class and making for a society increasingly becoming one of masters and serfs.
That system must be uprooted and discarded. That won't happen in some violent overthrow or coup. That would be tantamount to disaster. No it has to be non-violent and bloodless while at the same time be unrelenting in demanding because the current system is so flawed, dysfunctional and incapable of being of, by and for the people.
King George III before our revolution had greater support of the people than our Congress has (11%) today.
Our current president, who initially held such great promise, has become no better than his predecessor in fact as well as deed. Brilliance and eloquence can not replace an innate connection to the plight of the people who are (and have been) at the mercy of the plutocratic forces that have usurped our representative democracy to use for their sole benefit.
So what is the occupy movement really all about? It is restoring the voice of the people, removing the chains of powerlessness, inertia and passivity to ultimately challenge and peacefully demand our current dysfunctional non representative leaders accede to its legitimate demands.
There are times in history that movements emerge when conditions are such that nothing less than a complete overhaul of the existing system is justified and necessary.
Of course that can happen in a violent revolution and civil war or as we have seen recently with the demise of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe; regime change was essentially bloodless. Even the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were essentially bloodless and instructive even though the aim for each country was the removal of a repressive dictator and his regime.
In the U.S. we do not have a dictatorship despite the recently assumed powers of the executive (under at best, questionable Constitutional legality underpinning executive authority i.e. torture, targeted assassinations of Americans, indefinite detention, warrantless wire tapping et al) that could be interpreted as dictatorial rule. Even the Congress, though hardly representative of the peoples interests could be functioning in that capacity as the peoples real representatives if they were selected to run and were elected in a fair, publicly financed electoral process where private money was removed from the process that now thoroughly corrupts that process.
We are past the point where minor reform, tinkering and tweaking of the current electoral system in America will suffice. The corporate, oligarchic plutocracy that has resulted must not be allowed stand.
The occupy movement is the catalyst that can make that happen. It must continue to persevere until its demands are met.
