Right-Wing politicians & insurrectionists, democracy in danger. Occupy Wall Street 10yr anniversary. Was it worth it? REGISTER: Ask Egberto Anything
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My thoughts on the 10th anniversary of the Occupy Movement (Occupy Wall Street)
Register: Ask Egberto Anything. It is Saturday, October 2nd, at 11:00 AM Central.
Jake Tapper destroys Mississippi Gov: With all due respect, Governor, your way’s failing.
Worthwhile Reads
Tiffany Cross schools ‘persecuted’ MAGA Treason Rally. We survived this act before & will again!
TX Rep. Jasmine Crockett identifies the most dangerous. It’s not the insurrectionists she fears.
My thoughts on the 10th anniversary of the Occupy Movement (Occupy Wall Street)
I still remember the feeling of empowerment I felt being a part of the Occupy Movement. It felt like it could have been the turning point. It was.
Journalist, Professor, and Author Michael Levitin, who was embedded in the Occupy Movement throughout the country, just released his book “Generation Occupy: Reawakening American Democracy." This book makes both the genesis of the movement and subsequent repercussion in hindsight most prescient. I interviewed Levitin right after the release of the book. It is a must-read.
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Michael still has the same passion that he had since Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in New York City. He tells the story as no one else can. I love his book because he told the real story instead of the false narrative that generally denies the Occupy movement its successes. He did not do that.
I had not seen him since we had lunch at the Democracy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin. I was honored that Michael interviewed me a couple of times over the last couple of years or so. Following are the parts of that interview that made it into the book with a few corroborating videos.
Occupy introduced a new lexicon
For progressive media voices especially, the movement produced a shift in the national narrative that drove to the heart of financial and political power. “Nobody ever talked about the degree of income inequality the way Occupy did. Nobody talked about corporate personhood the way Occupy did,” said Egberto Willies, host of the radio show Politics Done Right. In the aftermath of Citizens United, Americans became acutely aware just how much money corporations and wealthy individuals were pouring into the political system to shape electoral outcomes.
Occupy connected the dots
By connecting the dots and tracing the influence between Wall Street corporations and lawmaking in Washington, “the Occupy movement started talking about money in politics in a way that people could understand,” Willies said, and it moved the mainstream economic debate to a new place.
Occupy gave voice to Progressives
As for the progressive voices in Congress, it’s not as if they didn’t exist prior to Occupy; some people had been saying the right things, the problem was that no one was listening or took them seriously. Radio host Egberto Willies told me, “They had always shut Bernie down. Bernie was a comedy; he was a joke before Occupy. Dennis Kucinich was a joke. Elizabeth Warren would have been a joke. They were right, but they were jokes, because we had the Powell Memo, the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, which had all moved the country to the right. But no longer, because people saw what Occupy was saying made sense. Occupy saved the country, period. Obama was getting rolled. The media was in cahoots with the right wing to give people the impression that Obama was doing full-fledged socialism. Then Occupy defined and showed the problem to the masses: it brought it to the fold, right there up in front of your face. If I look at someone and say, ‘Fuck you!’ you remember that. Occupy gave you that shock value so that you absorbed the reality. It brought an awareness that stuck.”
Occupy was what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez encapsulated
Ocasio-Cortez proudly wore the democratic socialist mantle popularized by Sanders two years earlier, and her win—which The New York Times called “the most significant loss for a Democratic incumbent in more than a decade”—invoked comparisons to the ground-shaking upset that Tea Partier Dave Brat pulled off four years prior when he unseated Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. ... When radio host Egberto Willies interviewed Ocasio-Cortez shortly after she announced her run for Congress, he recognized instantly that she had a political persona “different from anybody else. I was so impressed with her. I could see she had the ‘it’ factor.”
For Willies, who had participated in Occupy Houston, Ocasio-Cortez’s ability to go to the heart of issues of economic injustice, in language incisive and inspiring, marked a clear evolution in the years since Occupy Wall Street first confronted corporate power. “AOC isn’t there without Occupy. And now AOC is doing it correctly: all the middle Democrats, they need to fear being primaried because the country has already stated that it is a liberal country economically. Ask them about the policies they want: Medicare for All, pay it forward education, [childcare] aid for parents—they’re all over sixty percent support. They killed the physical Occupy movement, but they didn’t kill what Occupy stood for,” he said. Now Ocasio-Cortez stood in its place.
Occupy gave permission and spine to other movements
Occupy was an incredibly important, lasting power because of what came after. It’s not just Occupy, it’s the whole generation that it kicked off.” Echoing Zeese’s long view of history, the radio host Egberto Willies said he believed it’s still too soon to accurately assess the impacts of the movement—particularly when it comes to the climate crisis.
“The Occupy legacy continues because we’re still building on that legacy. All of the activism that you’re seeing out here now, those tentacles are right there in Occupy,” Willies told me. “Occupy gave permission, it gave a spine, to a lot of other movements to exist. We forgot about civil disobedience but we see that it’s now back in vogue, [because] Occupy reminded us that it’s okay to have civil disobedience—and now it’s actually existential because of climate change. We’re talking about our existence: it’s reached the point where our corporations are killing us, and we’re now going to fight. Occupy said, ‘We can do something about it.’”
Occupy lacked diversity, its appendages started to mitigate that constancy in the progressive movement.
It was evident very early on that this group wasn’t inclined in many cases to see economic justice with a racial analysis.” For Egberto Willies, the lack of diversity at Occupy presented a problem because it contradicted the movement’s core premise that it genuinely represented the 99 percent. As he put it, “I was a Black guy in Occupy, which was mostly white people.” Willies was born in Panama and earned his mechanical engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin, before starting his own software company. In 2008, inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he began writing political blogs that pushed him deeper into activism, and in 2010 [was a founding member of] the Coffee Party—an ironic, progressive response to the Tea Party whose goal, he said, was to “create an environment where people could have civil discussion, Republican, Democrat or otherwise, and sit down for coffee together to discuss real politics without all the animosity.” When the Occupy movement came his way, Willies jumped in, leading marches at Occupy Houston ...
But from the start, the movement’s race problem bothered him. “The country is fortysomething percent non-white, so the way you galvanize the entire country is you center your movement in such a manner that Black folk, Latinos, Asians, all these people actually feel like they’re part of it—and not just there because we want to show we have Black or Latino faces,” he said. “If an Occupy is going to be successful in the future, it needs to have everybody in the movement.”
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Jake Tapper completely destroys Mississippi Gov: With all due respect Governor, your way’s failing.
CNN's Jake Tapper did his journalistic job demolishing Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves for his COVID failure.
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Bumbling Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves did not help his case as CNN’s Jake Tapper drilled him. The Governor likely did not expect Tapper to push this hard.
Jake Tapper asked the Governor the fundamental question. Mississippi has strict mandates for various vaccines. Why is the COVID vaccine any different? Reeves did not have a valid answer other than one that sounded political.
“The reality is this is an attack by the President on hard-working Americans and hard-working Mississippians,” Reeves said. “He wants them to choose between getting a jab in the arms and their ability to feed their family.”
Jake Tapper pointed out to the Governor that President Biden uses a law that gives him the authority to protect the workplace. And the deaths of over 600K Americans make the use of the law apropos.
The Governor continued to fumble. He tried to make it that if the states consented, it would give the president unlimited power. That was a rather foolish statement, of course.
Tapper continued to ask the Governor what he would change to mitigate Mississippi's highest deaths per capita. After the bumbling Governor continued a fermenting word salad, Tapper could take it no more.
“With all due respect, Governor,” Jake Tapper said. “Your way has failed. Are you going to change anything to change this statistic from what you were doing already?”
The Governor made the silly statement that Mississippi has a part-time legislature and that the country would be in a better position if Congress operated in that manner.
An exasperated Tapper interjected.
“Better position than what?” Tapper asked angrily. “You are the second-worst in the world. How can you say that?”
Near the end, Tapper let the Governor have it. He implied the Governor intended to spin.
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Tiffany Cross schools ‘persecuted’ MAGA Treason Rally. We survived this act before & will again!
Tiffany Cross did not mince her words about today's MAGA insurrectionist rally. The premise that they are persecuted denies reality.
Watch Politics Done Right TV here.
An exasperated Tiffany Cross used a lot of sarcasm, objectivity, truth, and a good storytelling technique on this one. Watch the whole thing. She started her soliloquy this way.
"I really don't know how to capture the current state of affairs in the United States," Cross said. "I'm here in the nation's capital, and just outside, there are sporadic gatherings of white supremacists and MAGA members protesting democracy. And all across these divided states, there are at least 75 million people who voted for the MAGA ruler to continue to lead this country down a path of degradation."
Tiffany points out one of the genesis of our collective frustration. During the Civil Rights marches and protests, there was no insurrection. Even as a certain demographic in America were persecuted, as our government stripped their rights, no treasonous attack occurred on our country.
"It's a good time to remind the people that Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster, as my friend Michael Eric Dyson says, "Cross said. "And now the Frankenstein that is the extreme right has created the monster of white supremacy which is now cannibalizing. We all suffer because of them from the folks who mistake masks for persecution to the folks who deserve prosecution and even the marchers today hailing those hundreds of violent insurrectionists as heroes and martyrs ."
Cross is baffled by what is called patriotism. She should not be. After all, patriotism for those on the Right is but a foil. They do very little in our socioeconomic or international space to enhance the country.
Cross is not complaining, nor is she resolved to maintain a status quo. Instead, she made the reality of the truly persecuted very clear.
TX Rep. Jasmine Crockett identifies the most dangerous. It’s not the insurrectionists she fears.
Texas State Representative Jasmine Crockett exposed the reality that we should fear not the visible insurrectionist but those in Congress who wear suits and ties.
Watch Politics Done Right TV here.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett appeared with Tiffany Cross on the Cross Connection. They discussed the Justice for J6 rally and what it means. Tiffany Cross made a passionate assertion that there is something wrong that the MAGA insurrectionists act as if the country persecuted them.
Cross asked Crockett if she felt safe going to the Austin Capitol to work as a legislator. After all, Texas allows limitless guns with their recent passage of a law that will enable virtually anyone to buy gone; controls be damn.
Crockett made a vital observation that one should listen to keenly. We must keep our eyes on the correct ball, the real insurrectionists. I call them the virtual terrorists.
"I actually feel okay going into the Capitol because those extremists," Crockett said. "I mean, they're not really on the outside like you said. They're on the inside. In fact, one interesting point that you brought up, one of the people that participated in the insurrection is a lawmaker in the Texas House with me."
Crockett then pointed out the Right Wing Modus operandi that Progressives better match quickly.
"So let me be clear, these people are infiltrating every level of government," Crockett said. "It's not that they're just showing up out here. They're saying let me get on the school boards. That's why we have these ridiculous school board hearings where they're talking about, no no no, no to mask and no to vaccine mandates and things like that; critical race theory. So they're actually going one step further. They've realized that they don't get that much traction when they show up here, and they're now running for office. And they are the ones that are shaping policy. And that is what is so scary because they are wearing both hats. So for me, I don't know that it's the people on the outside that are scarier than the people that are actually sitting in the chamber with me."
Rep. Jasmine Crocket hits the nail on the head.
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