Tipping points are funny things. People don't always see them. Sometimes people don't even realize that they happened a long time ago.
The conventional story is that Occupy Wall Street was a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing. A bunch of disaffected youth that know nothing and did nothing. That's the story that the main stream media has continued to tell itself since the uprising.
Comedians who are supposedly on the left, but who have more money than sense I'm talking about that guy who Donald Trump wanted to sue over a joke, consider the movement a punchline.
If you were a part of the movement you know that parts of Occupy, particularly in Atlanta were very effected at the time by the execution of an innocent man named Troy Davis. I spent the better part of a week at the beginning of October 2011 at both Occupy K Street and Occupy Wall Street and his name was part of the conversation on the ground. The conversation was broad ranging and unfocused, but the big issues were clear, social justice, on the economic front, the flaws in the criminal justice system, corporate power, and the failure of the electoral process to yield the results people had voted for 3 years earlier were all on the agenda.
No one on the political left was going to change horses in midstream. Obama was going to be our guy in 2012 regardless, even though he hadn't gone far enough. He hadn't pushed for our agenda. He hadn't fought for us. He hadn't worked to give our agenda voice. He took our causes off the table and gave the right exactly what they wanted.
The health care plan pushed by a Democratic administration was written in the mid-1990s by the Heritage Foundation for Christ's sake! This was not the change we voted for, and we had flat out rejected the corporatist wing of the party that Secretary Clinton and her husband represented in 2008.
What the Hillary supporters today just don't seem to get, is she lost. She lost. She lost. We rejected her ideas, and the guy without experience got the half-measures we thought she would fight for passed, why would we want to elect her tomorrow?
She isn't the change we wanted in 2008. She isn't the change we need in 2016, and WE KNEW THAT IN 2011!
Occupy Wall Street was as much a rejection of the Clintons as it was a rejection of Obama who had failed the progressive, liberal, and yes, socialist elements of the party.
The Clintonites will tell you that she is inevitable. This election, all elections are about money. We rejected that in 2011. We flat out rejected it. One of the core causes of the revolution that we have yet to finish is the flat out rejection of Citizens United. Does money matter in elections?
Yes, we are realists. We are rational. That's why people dispersed when the police came in 2011. It wasn't because people feared arrest, because quite frankly the people who were ready to sleep on the streets of New York, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, Oakland, and hundreds of other cities around the United States to prove that the country was broken, had nothing left to lose.
Yesterday a diarist here pointed out when they were a military adviser in Vietnam they were ordered to read a book by a man named Ted Gurr, "Why Men Rebel." The reason, the one and only reason that people rebel is "Perceived Relative Deprivation." If you don't perceive deprivation relative to what has been expected of life here in America, congratulations, you are the 1%, you've won, but don't feel too comfortable, and you better hope we use the electoral process to right the ship. Historically the "haves" don't fair well if the ship isn't righted.
Those deprivations are already boiling over on the streets of Baltimore, New York, and Ferguson. The push back amongst the black community in the United States has plenty of people from every segment of America ready to join in support because things remain broken. Police brutality and a sense that the police have been granted a status that puts them above the law is only the tip of a very large iceberg that the protests and the riots have been about.
That tipping point, that boiling point, the point of no return came in September 2011, when hundreds of thousands of people were ready and willing to travel hundreds of miles to voluntarily become homeless to make a statement about how broken the country has become.
This America IS NOT the America we were promised. When I was a child, we were the gold standard on human rights against whom all other nations were measured. We had the moral high ground. That is gone. It died with the Patriot Act in 2001, and god damn it, I was mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore then. If you think that those voices were loud before, they have only grown louder.
When I was a child, we were made a promise, go to school, work hard, get good grades, go to college, work hard, get good grades, go to work, get a good job, work harder, get a better job, get comfortable, find a spouse, buy a house, have some kids and live a pretty good life. Show of hands, how is that working out for everybody? I did all of those things, and good job, nope, house, nope, wife, nope, kids, nope, good life, nope, and I'm a white guy from a middle class family. I can't even fathom how bad it is for my black peers.
This is not the American dream we were sold, and all the while, the richest 1% of Americans have been collecting 90 plus percent of all the new income in the US, while wages remain flat or falling for the rest of us, hmm. Yeah, I think that rebellion thing, its still on.
So in 2011 the media kept asking, who is the leader, where is Occupy Wall Streets leader. What do you want? Who is in charge? We didn't have an answer, because we were actually just happy to realize that it wasn't just us, we weren't alone. Everybody felt the same way.
For me the clear compelling and obvious answer to the question, who is the leader of Occupy Wall Street emerged from the ether earlier this week.
Yes, the agenda was never completely finalized, yes the movement was aborted by the powers that be, yes, the whole point was to be leaderless so that they couldn't wipe away the movement by wiping out leaders, one of those lessons from the 1960s that people learned.
Of course everyone went home and now we are back to the game of electoral politics, with the first open election since the movement began, and a candidate who has said all the right things for thirty years stepped up to the microphone earlier this week and said, "I'm running for President, and I want the Democratic Party's nomination."
The professionals say he cannot win. He is irrelevant. He is unimportant. What he has to say doesn't matter.
They said the same thing during the first few days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street, but while I was there, the Occupied News published a front page story saying that what was happening there was the most important thing in the world, and it was right.
What I am telling you now is that the most important thing to happen to the Democratic Party since the election of 1932 happened earlier this week, so you had better pay attention.
The powers that be don't know it yet, because they think this election will be about money.
They couldn't possibly know what is coming for them. They haven't shivered on the street during a chilly fall night in New York to make a political statement. They don't even have a clue of the resolve it took for the people who were there to do that. They to this day do not understand that an Army of Americans mad as hell about the state of their country made sacrifices to be there, just to voice their frustration.
They don't understand that the people who were there haven't moved on, and are just biding their time, ready to change everything, and rebalance the scales.
They mistakenly think that the 2014 midterms and the Congressional elections in 2012 prove that the army of angry Americans actually didn't care, and were a bunch of neophytes who are ineffective as a political organization.
They don't understand that people with nothing left to lose know when they have been sold out. They don't understand that the people who were there won't carry water for empty suits with empty rhetoric. They don't understand that the people who were there are ready to lay down their lives for THE RIGHT candidates, the people who will actually fight the fight that those people took to the streets to have.
In one day Bernie Sanders raised $1.5 million from 35,000 donors with an average donation of about $43. It isn't anything monetarily, but it means oh so much more, and they don't know it.
A guy who would have been out there shivering with us if he wasn't already a United States Senator fighting for us has asked for our votes to become the President of the United States next year, and they just don't fucking get how important that is going to be to that army laying in the weeds.
The experts say he can't win, because he can't raise the money. What they don't understand is that he is right on EVERY SINGLE ISSUE and in poll after poll about 80% of Americans agree with him. What they don't understand is that he already has an army that was ready to be homeless rather than take the crap that the corporatists in both parties have been giving us for far too long.
He is in favor of breaking up the big banks because too big to fail is too big to exist.
He is in favor of Medicare for All because healthcare is a human right.
He is in favor of increasing Social Security benefits because people paid for it and are entitled to it, and the fact that the corporatists have stolen from Social Security to fund their war machine doesn't mean they get to steal the benefits now too.
He was against the war in Iraq.
He is in favor of free tuition to public colleges and universities.
He is in favor a constitutional amendment to fix Citizens United.
He is in favor of unions and making it easier to unionize.
He is in favor of worker owned co-operative businesses.
He is opposed to NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and permanent most favored nation trading partner status for China, and the TPP. In other words he is in favor of American manufacturing.
He is in favor of net neutrality.
He believes in an America where no one is above the law, and equality is the order of the day.
He is in favor of taxing corporations and ending loopholes which let wealthy Americans and their corporations hide their money overseas to avoid taxation.
He is in favor of rebuilding America's infrastructure and putting 13 million Americans back to work.
He is in favor of growing our economy by investing in sustainable energy and ending our dependence on fossil fuels to fight climate change.
He marched on Washington with Dr. King and was at the "I have a dream speech."
In other words, for 50 years, he has been right on the issues of the day!
He can win the Presidency, and he can win it without raising a billion dollars because he has an army to carry water. Does he need money? Yes. Will he raise enough? Yes. What he really needs is the people who were willing to make a stand and sacrifice their comfort at Occupy all around this country to stand up for him and with him to carry his message, because it is a message that sells itself.
He needs more than that though too. With the prospect of a President who will fight for the things we believe in. It's time for Occupy to elect a Congress and a Senate next year that will carry water for him. No half measures. No corporate shills. We need the same kind of people who would sacrifice their bodies for Occupy to stand up and be counted and run for office, with a pledge not to cede an inch to corporate power or the moneyed interests in America.
We have a person who can win the Democratic nomination, and who will win Independent and even Tea Party votes -at least the part of the crowd that was upset by the bail out of Wall Street- who is asking for our votes. Lets get him about 70 million votes next year.