The Future of OWS Protests...Make Your Prediction

Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?

The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.

This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.

There is no agreement among Occupy Wall Street members over what these policies - their “demands” - will yet look like. The demonstrators have been derided in some media and political circles for not having such “demands,” but - as today made abundantly clear - Occupy Wall Street is not about to become a "left-wing version" of the Tea Party. Occupy Wall Street is about being heard. It is about finding a way to be heard over the sound of money and legislation changing hands in US government through such creatures as SuperPAC and ALEC. As another chant went, "Banks got bailed out; we got sold out!"

Writing in The Washington Post, James Downie hits the nail on the head:

"Democratic support for Wall Street was one of the major motivations behind Occupy Wall Street in the first place. When you read the heartbreaking “We are the 99 percent” Tumblr and you listen to the protesters, you don’t hear frustration with Republicans. The frustration is with Washington."

Other Occupy Wall Street activists I spoke to reiterated that the movement is not a specific campaign, but rather, a forum to jump-start engagement with people on the sidelines. “I’m here for the jobless, for the foreclosed,” shouted Arthur Brown of the Local 802 musicians’ union, as he played a drum he’d brought with him to the demonstrations. “We employ the politicians,” he told me as we walked toward another drummer in the crowd. “After today, they have to listen to us. They can no longer deny that our voices are there and must be heard.”

Adding their voices were religious leaders. At least a dozen pastors marched as a group, as did members of the Union Theological Seminary and the intensely activist Judson Memorial Church.