OWS Eventually Will Have to Engage in Politics-as-Usual

I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea where the Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately is going or how it intends to get there.  But as I’ve mentioned before, the OWS protesters are the only people to have explicitly pointed out who the dealers are in the economic Three-card Monte game that has been used to hose working- and middle-class Americans for more than 30 years now.  That alone is enough to merit my wholehearted support for their efforts to end America’s ongoing impoverishment of the many for the enrichment of the few.

Where I run into difficulty is in trying to understand how, exactly, OWS intends to stop the United States from continuing what by now has become business as usual.  As mentioned previously, the options for effecting change essentially boil down to either (i) negotiating, compromising and working within the existing system, or (ii) trying to completely replace the existing system, root and branch, with something entirely new.  

What is 'Occupy Wall Street' Doing?

I cross-posted my critique of Occupy Wall Street's First Official Statement at Daily Kos over the weekend and it generated a good deal of commentary.  The vast majority of comments fell into two groups:  (i) people who agreed that the First Official Statement was not particularly well-crafted, and (ii) people who took exception to my “armchair quarterbacking” and told me that I had to “trust the process.”  Almost nobody defended the Statement itself, though -- instead they ended up defending “the process” that had produced the Statement.

More below the fold.