SIGN YOUR NAME TO THIS TRIPE. Please!?!? Who are you?

I want it noted - in the strongest terms possible - that this effluvium does not represent my views, is not an official statement of the "Occupy" movement, nor is it a statement of fact or purpose from "OccupyLA." Again, if it does not pass through the General Assembly, it is your own, personal belief. As important as that is and as much as I value it, it is far different than a statement of collective understanding.

No member of a major political party - who is BEHOLDEN to global finance and the notion of the primacy of corporate greed that stems from Wall Street - is capable of participating in the change we need, globally, while they are still collecting vast sums of money from those very conglomerates. Is this not entirely obvious to you folks by now? If not - will you talk to me in person so I can remove all doubt?! 

We are well past the point, as a global community, where we can afford the kind of tepid "change" these politicians are capable of offering us. Again - let me repeat: they are NOT CAPABLE of changing the system. They are part of it. And this is not exclusive to the Republicans or Democrats. It is a global system of Mammon-worship that continues to pervade our society and disenfranchise the vast majority of us from the sacred altars where the rules are made. The politicians, including President Obama, are fighting with each other over the scraps the 1% deign to leave to them - and their struggles against each other, in the political 'class,' only serve to distract us from what should be obvious: that this is not working. Period.

You want another McCain-Feingold? The eponymous authors of that bill themselves don't even abide by it? You want more 'free-trade' agreements, written by corporate lobbyists and presented on the floor of our highest, elected body as if they were actually drafted by those elected? If you want to know what is going to create inertia (don't use words you don't know the meaning of - it's embarrassing. Inertia means a resistance to movement or 'new direction'... quite the opposite of what you clearly intended...), it would be using the ground-swell of support this movement has to pass some form of legislation that ends up watered down by the powers that be. Or to invite President Obama to speak on our behalf. It's quite clear - after 3 long years - that he clearly does not...

Furthermore, it is precisely the kind of unprincipled, meandering, and frankly pathetic attempt at all-inclusiveness delineated in this "blog" that invites only mere piecemeal change that is - in fact - written by the elite themselves. Inviting President Obama to join the "Occupy" movement is so naive, it couldn't have been written by anyone with any understanding of the American political machine and its position as a mere but dutiful handmaiden to global finance or how it actually operates. I assume the anonymous author of this dreck likewise celebrates the City Council's paper-resolution as well - which is likewise meaningless fucking prattle from City Hall that does FUCK ALL to address our righteous indignation. (Which, it should be noted, the authors of are already renouncing.)

Sorry. President Obama is not welcome to "make it [his] own by simply joining it." For him to join, to be a real part, I'd suggest he'd have to renounce the corporate-funded and wholly corrupt Democratic Party, the war-chest he has amassed from Goldman Sachs and others, as well as his own proclivity to meet behind closed doors with PhRMA to draft his pitiful PPACA, with GS to draft the paper-tiger Dodd-Frank bill, and many other legislative acts this President has stood behind and/or openly touted as "progress." Of course, that's just my opinion. It wasn't ratified through the sparsely-attended General Assembly.

If politicians and political candidates want to make 'real change,' instead of just using those words as leverage to beguile the voting public and achieve only a slight shift in the composition of the entrenched powers in Washington and throughout the world (who rules: Bechtel or Goldman), they should start by dropping the patently-false pretense that they represent us at all. They don't. They never have. And so long as they are funded by mega-corporations, whose money is equal to speech and apparently enshrined in the Constitution of these United States, they never will.

FOR THE RECORD: I'm not here to find a career in this fraudulent government. I'm here to work towards a government that isn't fraudulent, that works with similarly-inclined foreign governments, and does right by the people it purportedly represents. Not the companies who subvert democracy and not the dollars that dictate what opinions are supposedly valid. 

I think the City Council support is the only thing keeping the LAPD from enforcing the laws and regulations around City Hall.  Getting them on the side of the protesters was very politically savvy.

Also, the term is "co-opt" not "co-op".  A "co-op" is a cooperative, or an employee-owned company.  I wouldn't worry too much about it, because the big progressive organizations do it all the time, where they glom onto a popular movement.

I wouldn't worry about it because it can often be leveraged in your favor.  For example, a lot of union people are supporting Occupy.  Some have relations with the City Council - so they can become allies who can help out.  The same goes for enviros.  Welcome to LA politics.

Organizationally, these institutional orgs don't have the capacity to co-opt Occupy as long as Occupy keeps its bottom-up structure.  The structures are still very different.  Over the years, the orgs will become more like Occupy, and Occupy may ossify into something more traditionally structured, and then cooptation is possible.

Occupy needs to recognize its strengths and weaknesses.

Occupy's strength is its virality - it is mobilizing more rapidly than any movement before it.  It has gone national and global in days.  Numbers are growing faster than anything else in the US.

Occupy has a unique ability to mobilize disengaged, uninvolved middle class liberals and moderates, particularly white people, who are considered hard to reach.  If you're white and not an enviro or gay, you're like a politically unreachabe cipher classified mainly by political party, and generally considered conservative democrats or liberal republicans.  Occupy has reached some of this group.

Occupy is openly attacking the rich and finance.  Until Occupy, the media and politicos tended to think of the middle class, particularly the college educated, as allied with the rich, banks, and finance.  (Just listen to the underwriting ads on NPR.)  Maybe this link is weakening.

Weaknesses are obvious: lack of organization, paranoia about alliances, lack of experience particularly with community groups, lack of endgame plan, lack of vision about how things work when they're better.  On and on.  But you can kind of work with what you have above, and use it to attain what you lack from orgs that already have what you all need.