Progressive Media Advocates
Survey Saturday: With upwards of ten thousand Occupy protesters flooding through downtown Oakland yesterday to close shipping facilities there and organizers here in Los Angeles planning a full teach-in weekend with the likes of Robert Reich and Robert Scheer, the Occupy Movement has the world’s attention.
Randy Shaw: If President Obama and fellow Democrats agree to a deficit reduction deal that cuts Medicare, Social Security, and other programs serving the 99%, expect an electoral calamity for Democrats in 2012.
Shamus Cooke: If the Occupy Movement demanded that the wealthy and corporations be taxed to create jobs and prevent cuts to social programs, the 99% would see a movement built in its own image
Sikivu Hutchinson: Ever immune to morality, reason, church-state separation precedents and an understanding of the basic laws of biology, the most flat earth reactionary segment of the pro-death anti-choice movement wants to circumvent constitutional protections for abortion by conferring personhood on fertilized eggs.
Alan Grayson, the former congressional representative whose speech on the House Floor went viral on YouTube, because he spoke truth, needs your help. After telling the raw truth about healthcare reform, Grayson lost his seat. But Saturday, 12 November, 2 p.m. we can help change that.Grayson famously said that Wall Street controls our economic policy, Big Oil controls our energy policy, and the military-industrial complex controls our foreign policy.
Craig Williams: Now is a great time for the AFL-CIO and a coalition of groups involved in the Occupation of Wall Street movement to begin a national door-to-door campaign. It might not only be helpful to the effort but necessary given the commercial media’s negative coverage of the movement.
Brent Budowsky: I believe that the first big winner of the 2012 campaign is the Occupy Wall Street movement, whether or not it participates in electoral politics.
Bill Fletcher: The ‘Occupy’ risings have taken the country by storm and while there are all sorts of reasons that one can be skeptical or have any number of criticisms, the bottom line is that the Occupy Together risings have demonstrated that resistance is not futile; resistance is essential.
Randy Shaw: You know that Occupy Wall Street and its local, national and international progeny have reached a level of success when everyone is offering advice. Unfortunately, the most commonly offered view – that activists must get specific about their demands – is entirely wrong.
Tom Hayden: If there’s enough people and they all sit down and say “We want to appeal to a jury of our peers, which is our Constitutional right,” that’s something that should make the decision makers take pause because I don’t think juries are going to convict these people.
Shamus Cooke: The Occupy Movement has more than room for an umbrella of demands from diverse sections of working class people, but now we must focus on what unites the vast majority, since the corporations have focused on dividing us for decades.
Overall, LA Progressive readers who took this survey are quite enthusiastic about Occupy America’s potential. Five or 10 years from now, most think we’ll look back upon these days fondly
Brent Budowsky: Democrats should oppose, Congress should defeat and the American people will reject any windfall repatriation tax bonus to American companies that have exported American jobs.
David Love: Conservatives proclaim that they believe in freedom and the free market. But freedom never meant the right of a handful to steal most of the nation’s wealth, run roughshod over the rest of us and wreck the country for a buck.
Randy Shaw: A surprising shift has occurred in mainstream attitudes toward the openly anti-corporate Occupy movement: after first ignoring and then downplaying the effort, skepticism has given way to praise.
Peter Dreier: Too many lefties view “co-optation” as failure. I disagree. The success of every radical movement in American history has occurred when it is co-opted by the forces of reform.
Denis Campbell: As the Occupy Wall Street movement enters its fourth week, on Saturday the New York and Washington base camp plazas were so overfilled they resembled Tahrir Square, Cairo.
Peter Dreier: If the Occupy Wall Street activists join forces with the unions and community groups, they could catalyze a massive nationwide movement to resist foreclosures and block evictions.
Shamus Cooke: Ultimately, the Occupy Wall Street protests have already succeeded. The movement has successfully re-focused the nation’s debate on who ruined the economy and who should be targeted, shifting blame away from immigrants, unions, and other groups of working people, like public employees.
Brent Budowsky: I believe this new surge of all-American protest could be the beginning of a new American Spring that could rejuvenate the progressive and populist movements and win majority support throughout the nation.
Wendy McElroy: The raw politics and hypocrisy surrounding SlutWalk expose mainstream feminism as an exhausted movement that continues to have influence only because it has been institutionalized into laws and academia.
Brent Budowsky: Let me be the first to propose a national movement to draft Al Gore for president in 2016, carry the banner of the New Frontier heritage of the Democratic Party, and mobilize to elect true Democrats to the House and Senate in 2012.
Bill Londrigan: Working mostly behind the scenes in academic, political, and media circles for the past 40-plus years, corporations and the wealthy elite have funded a multipronged strategy to wipe out the history of the integral role played by the American labor movement in the founding and growth of our nation.
Paul Hogarth: Everyone from Howard Dean to Van Jones had the same message – that this political movement cannot be reliant on a charismatic leader, but instead on a charismatic network of activists.
Caitlin Vega: My mother-in-law is soft-spoken and sweet, but put her on a picket line and she is transformed. To me, that’s what Cesar Chavez stood for, and it’s what our labor movement is all about.
Lawrence Wittner: Despite the President’s rhetorical support for nuclear abolition, it looks like the United States and other nations are on a very slow track to ridding the world of the nuclear menace.
Carole Bartolotto: The good news is that you can easily replace cow’s milk with almond, soy, rice, hemp or coconut milk instead. I love Trader Joe’s Vanilla Almond Milk.
Robert Reich: The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up.
James Rhodes: Perhaps it is her wildly colorful style or the exaggerated use of glowing women and hidden cats or maybe it has something to do with the tranquility of her work that connects with the “common man” — certainly an artist of the people.
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