Excellent Article: The 99% Rise Up

YES!  FINALLY!!!  OUR VOICES ARE BEING HEARD BY THE OLIGARCHY THAT HAS TAKEN OVER OUR COUNTRY.  WE, THE PEOPLE WANT OUR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC BACK!!!!
http://www.thenation.com/article/163942/99-percent-rise

EXCERPT: Occupy Wall Street started small, took a beating from the cops and struggled for weeks to get the attention of the political class, the media and even its own natural allies. The only thing going for this unlikely intervention has been the pitch-perfect resonance of its founding premises. The American people understood Occupy Wall Street, and began to embrace its promise, long before the mandarins who presume to chart our national discourse noticed that everything was changing.

This fight is too important to be about one politician, one party or one election. “Some people say we are the Tea Party for the Democratic Party,” said Emilio Baez, a 17-year-old high school student who joined the Occupy Chicago protests. “That’s bullshit. We are the working class for a mass movement of democracy.” Baez is right. America needs a new politics, as much of the streets as the polling place, a politics that, like the labor movement of the 1930s, the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, the environmental movement of the early 1970s, forces both parties to transform. Anything less is more of the same—more poverty, more inequality, more economic injustice. And if Occupy Wall Street is anything at all, it is a shout from the 99 percenters: “We have had it!”

The genius of Occupy Wall Street is that it is not a traditional political project. It did not arrive with a set of talking points and an organizing template. Its evolution has already taken it far from where it began, physically or politically. Its alliance with unions and other progressive groups will in all likelihood transform the movement as it spreads across the country, just as the movement has the potential to transform its allies. There will be ongoing occupations, but there’s also the prospect of countrywide—indeed, worldwide—days of action, like the one planned for October 29, in American capital cities and cities around the world, the weekend before the G-20 summit in France. The prospect of massive demonstrations like the 1969 anti–Vietnam War Moratorium, the immigrant rights demonstrations of 2006 and last winter’s mobilizations in and outside the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, has already unsettled mainstream politicians and the pundit class that serves as their stenographers. New York Congressman Peter King told right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham, “It’s really important for us not to be giving any legitimacy to these people in the streets…. I’m old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s, when the left wing takes to the streets and somehow the media glorifies them, and it ends up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.”

But it is happening. That’s exhilarating, and necessary. Our political culture, as dysfunctional as it is disappointing, will change only if those in power feel threatened by movements that are impossible to manage. Already, the reactions to the threat are clarifying. The Republican Party, with rare exceptions, has rallied to defend the banksters, with Representative Paul Ryan fretting about “sowing class envy” and Representative Eric Cantor warning that Americans might become a “mob.”