In his piece in The Daily Beast yesterday, Jeff Smith, a member of the OWS press team argued that the movement has been right in targeting banks instead of congress because the banks control congress anyway. He elaborates on that in this older piece. But isn't it Congress that ultimately has the power to end "legalized bribery" in our politics and pass laws subjecting our elected leaders to the same financial rules that we the people are subject to, i.e. no insider trading? Obviously convincing them to pass such laws would be no walk in the park but why not use the momentum OWS has built up to force the issue? Ultimately, it is the people, the voters, who can change this issue, not the banks or our government, but as we keep one hand clenched around Wall Street, we should use the other to poke at our elected leaders until we get a meaningful reaction.
Targeting banks is narrow--but targeting concentrations of economic power (symbolized by Wall Street) is not. That's where the primary locus of power is our society--Democrats and Republicans are little more than servants to that power. As Peter Camejo once observed, "every major gain in our history, even pre-Civil War struggles such as the battles for the Bill of Rights, to end slavery, and to establish free public education -as well as those after the Civil War, have been the product of direct action by movements independent of the two major parties and in opposition to them". I think that's right. The New Deal is simply unthinkable without the explosion of militant labor struggle that happened in the 1930s. And the sit-down strikes and factory occupations of the 30s had no immediate electoral aims--and neither did the black freedom struggle of the 60s. But these movements won huge reforms from the system. They set the political tone for generations. That's what we need to do today. The electoral system is broken and incapable of delivering even minor reforms on its own. The Democrats, in particular, are a political black hole who deliver little more than cynicism, passivity and demoblization.
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