zlacker

There is a persistent desire to suck the funds out of the police force budget and redirect the money to things the community values. This unlike occupy is a tangible goal and if people only elect people willing to give it to them it will happen regardless of what people outside of Seattle want.

>>michae+(OP)
Occupy Wall Street had a tangible goal. Break up big banks, and forgive predatory loans.

Even with Obama in office, we ended up with even bigger banks and a spiraling debt crisis.

>>hedora+Z
This goal can be accomplished one municipality at a time which cannot be said of occupy.

>>hedora+Z
Even with Obama in office...

Ha! This is a better jest now than it was ten weeks into his administration!

>>michae+w1
I didn’t mean to imply the current protests were hopeless. I certainly hope not, and you’re right: They can start with local action.

>>hedora+Z
What's funny is, at the time, we thoughts its goals were intangible!

>>hedora+Z
That demand was not consistently communicated. My time at Occupy made it feel like it was basically against everything bad in society as believed by left/socialist/anarchists.

The Occupy demand messaging never really worked cause it was never nailed down to a simple single talking point. That this current movement can be simplified and understood as one demand, “abolish the police” seems related to the success of the movement.

>>hedora+Z
I don't remember that being a consistent, clearly articulated goal. That's also orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish than shifting some city budgets around.

>>noelsu+g81
Protests almost never have a "consistent, clearly articulated goal," because of the nature of protests. People protest a problem and there are sometimes hundreds of proposed solutions. Unfortunately, certain biased media outlets choose the most extreme offered solutions and highlight them to discredit the entire movement and ignore the problem. And "shifting some city budgets around" is not as easy as it sounds.

>>hedora+Z
> we ended up with even bigger banks

That's my prediction: they'll succeed in diverting tax funds from the police into social programs... and then three months later, the police budgets will be back where they started, but we'll be paying for the additional social programs, too. In a year, our taxes will go up, again, to pay for all of this.

>>noelsu+g81
Via http://web.archive.org/web/20120621221550/http://occupycg.or...

- Reinstate Glass-Steagall to separate commercial and investment banking

- Require all votes to be made on paper to prevent malicious manipulation

- Overturn Citizens United v. FEC to prevent corporations from buying politicians and elections

- Implement the "Warren Buffet Rule" and restore historical tax rates for the wealthiest 1% of Americans

>>comman+Bp1
Any group of people presently acting in a leadership role can be removed tomorrow.