#occupywallstreet – Hank Kalet

#OWS: Democrats or democracy

This is an interesting piece from In These Times that rips the mask off the false pragmatism that the Democratic Party has demanded from its minions since the election of Barack Obama, but that has heightened in its hypocrisy as the Occupy Wall Street movement turns its attention to the broken party.

In it, Joe Macaré outlines four basic fallacies on which the prime criticism of the movement hinges — that taking a moral stand, as the Occupy protesters have done, is morally indefensible; that pragmatism requires protesters to trade principle for the potential of some paltry favor from those in power; that history shows that progressive protest creates backlash (when it actually shows that protest creates a moral momentum for change); and assumption that the Occupiers are looking to be an extension of the Democratic Party.

None of these assumptions are accurate, as Macaré makes clear, which is why they are fallacies.

The Occupiers are small “d” democrats who have as their chief goal breaking the grip of money on the political system and re-empowering the so-called 99 percent, to give us control over a government that now views corporate America as its sole master.

This goal may require the election of some progressive Democrats, but it may also require the defeat of corporate Democrats and the formation of a new progressive party outside the Democrats, which is something the Occupy movement understands.

This is about democracy not the Democrats or the liberal establishment.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Quote of the day: #OWS edition

From Guy Horton’s blog on Huffington Post today, in the aftermath of the New York crackdown on Occupy Wall Street:

So is this the death of Occupy? My suspicion is that this is, in fact, just the beginning. What form will it take next? It may not have Zuccotti Park anymore, but it increasingly has the intellectual and emotional landscape of the American psyche.

They can shut down the protests and end the physical occupation, but the fight to reclaim American democracy from the elite is just beginning.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Capital makes a clean sweep

Make no mistake, the nationwide purge of protesters from public parks is not about the comportment of the protesters, no matter how much the powers in cities like Oakland and New York want to paint it that way.

The sweeps are about capital and protecting the 1 percent in the cities, the people who pay the campaign bills for elected officials and, therefore, demand allegiance.

To understand how this works, one just needs to listen to the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg:

“New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” the mayor said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

New York also is the financial capital of the world and the place where the first police-triggered violence took place. It is a city in which the mayor has shown nothing but hostility toward the protesters from the inception of the occupy movement. In his mind, the bankers had nothing to do with the financial crisis and unrelenting economic meltdown that has left one in six Americans un- or under-employed.

The anger that has triggered these protests is real. Shutting them down will not make it go away. Asking the protesters to turn to the ballot box or petition Congress is, as the protesters know, a waste of time and ignores the history of social movements, which almost always begin with an aggrieved group taking to the streets and creating a moral imperative for change. That’s what the protests are about and it is why protectors of the 1 percent like Mayor Bloomberg have little sympathy.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

A conversaion with the OWS movement

I met some of the protesters marching from New York to D.C. today.

Read it here.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.