Nathan Schneider didn't read our endorsement before he wrote this article in Truthout about the origins of Occupy Wall Street. The article mentions myself and US Day of Rage.
This is his second version, he corrected some errors, and I am actually grateful, because while my original purpose was one amongst many, the GA experience near Sept 17 was actually ridiculously horrible, due to the (guess what!) egos and hypocrisy of some members.
I am writing this entry more for my own sake than anything else. I mean my God, we were getting death threats from misinformation prior to #Sept17, no one gets everything right.
US Day of Rage has a mission for electoral reform, but we endorse the call to establish an "independent assembly" on Wall Street.
Why? We knew in early March, and long before that, that there was no getting near electoral reform when one of the institutions of society, the civic space or square, was a spectacle and fiscaliz-ed. And that is what Occupy is to us, the civic square:
Back in March we wrote:
The nation's institutions, meant to underpin the principles of our democratic republic, do not function effectively in the 21st century.
Their failure leaves us prey to rampant corruption, unprincipled and abusive government action, and a demoralized populace.
In our original endorsement of the call to Occupy Wall Street, we wrote:
We, at US Day of Rage, support our partner's call to http://www.occupywallstreet.com and we support a free and independent NYC Assembly to #occupywallstreet.We were and have always been fierce advocates and protectors of the independence of the assembly.
It's just the way I roll. Maybe because I am Myers-Briggs, INFJ, or maybe because I have studied the Federalist Papers and the History of Political Philosophy.
I have an wicked instinct for the polis, and human beings.
As we strategized from early April:
- Social media and WikiLeaks were establishing a new mode of reformation of the press.
- We knew we had to take back civic space, and then finally approach elections.
Excerpt from Nathan Schneider's article:
Further, US Day of Rage did not endorse the occupation of what was considered commercial property in the run up to Sept17.Some reporters come to Liberty Plaza looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or conspiratorial Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. They're briefly disappointed to find none of the above. Instead, it's a bunch of people - from round-the-clock revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to zealous students - spending most of their time in long meetings about supplying food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza's limited space and what exactly they're there to do and why. And that's the point. More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money......Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O'Brien, an IT content management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform--"One citizen. One dollar. One vote."--and decided to peg her efforts to theSeptember 17 action in New York, together with organizing similar ones in five other cities.
As a result of these hiccups, in the lead-up and early days of the occupation, media coverage almost always associated it with meme floaters like Adbusters, US Day of Rage and Anonymous. But none of them alone was as responsible for what would be happening on the ground starting on September 17, ultimately, as the group gathered in the GA.
