Will pull up the quotes as soon as I get home.
On Oct 8, 2011, at 3:29 AM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> FYI (sorry about the line breaks): A friend writes:
>
> I am told by someone who listened to Klein's speech online that she took questions afterward, which included the following:
>
> 1. In answer to the question "do you think OWS is an answer to the Tea Party?", she said "I think it's an answer to the Democratic Party ".
>
> 2. When asked "what can we do as individuals" to deal with the environment, etc. she said we can't do it as individuals, we must build a mass movement.
>
> 3. She spent some time arguing for the movement to develop democratic decision-making structures and not to "fetishize the lack of structure". She said that this had been tried before (probably referring to the 60s) and that it didn't work then.
>
> Point 1 is very important because the most common approach of the mainstream liberal intellectuals and journalists is to interpret
> the OWS phenomenon as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, the Obama administration and the presidential election. Even the
> more sympathetic prominent liberals (Robert Reich and Paul Krugman) are taking this line, despite the fact that the main thrust of
> OWS is that the problems are systemic and the political parties are bought and paid for servants of corporate wealth and power.
> It is this central idea that gives OWS its force and can make it the spark of a new beginning for America.
>
> Point 2 is important because mainstream ideology and the persistant message from the corporate media is that the way to deal
> with climate change and the despoiling of the environment is for individuals to pick up their trash and, of course, tighten their belts,
> while giant global corporations spew millions of tons of pollutants into the rivers, oceans and atmosphere, and do much of their
> dirty work in poor countries where people labor under the rule of authoritarian governments and their military and police forces.
>
> Point 3 is important because OWS is a beginning, not an end. It is a catalyst for a much larger movement that will need democratic
> structures, discussion leading to theories, strategy and program, and the ability to organize millions of people in all walks of life and
> to work with those who are already organized in unions. It would be a grave mistake to "fetishize the lack of structure" that currently
> exists among a few thousand people who have barely begun to come together in a shared mission. This deserves emphasis because
> many of today's young activists have inherited ideas both from mainstream culture and from the thinking of the New Left of the sixties,
> which were inadequate then and are even more inadequate now in the face of much larger problems.
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