A New York Times article about Democrats aligning with the Occupy Wall Street protests for their own good got me thinking about the paradox of this idea.
Occupy Wall Street is a resistance movement without a leader consisting of people from all backgrounds. The common denominator is that all of them belong to the 99% and are protesting against the greed of the 1% in the ‘Arab Spring style’.
The fact that the Democratic Party intends to use Occupy Wall Street for getting reelected is a contradiction in itself. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee came up with a petition saying “I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests”, and they are looking for 100,000 signatures. However, they are also looking for the money they get from Wall Street to finance their campaign.
The question is: can you play for two teams at the same time? I hope not.
-Adrienn
I hope that the involved in the protests would be able to see past this sort of action by political parties and make it clear that this is not acceptable.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I suspect that there is a large population that is not following the protests or do not understand different political ramifications and will be impressed by political parties siding the the 99 percenters.
Although I do not think that the political parties should be able to use the language and ideas of the protestors for their own benefit if they are not truly going to make the changes that Occupy Wall Street is calling for, I do think that they are only able to do so because of a sort of opening left by the protestors themselves.
By this I mean that from what I understand of the movement, the overall goal is very vague. This means that politicians are easily able to mold their ideologies and policies into the language of the movement.
I understand that with such a large protest it is difficult to articulate an outcome that everybody involved would be accepting of, but I think that this is the only way to make the politicians more accountable.
- Danielle