My View of Occupy Wall Street

Many have accused the protesters of being disorganized and vague in their demands. Well, the protesters are a diverse group with many different demands, it's true. Here are my specific and concrete demands

I'm posting this on my personal website because I'm not sure where else to put it. Comments, unfortunately have been disabled due to spam. Human readers can, as always, find my email at the bottom of the page and contact me that way.

Demands

  • Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act.
  • End corporate personhood
  • Enact any number of proposed campaign finance reforms:
    • Establish pubic financing for political office and a fixed election calender.
    • Ban all private campaign donations and 501(c) groups.
    • Establish provisions for candidates for national office to have equal air time to get their vision across to the voting public.
  • Abolish the electoral college
  • Establish rank voting (sometimes call preference or alternative voting) for all elected positions to make 3rd parties viable. Rank voting described with cats
  • Congressional Reform Act of 2011 (Proposed, I believe, by Warren Buffet)
    1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
    2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
    3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
    4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
    5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
    6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
    7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

The above is just a start.

What can individuals do?

What we need

Occupy Wall Street desperately needs its own candidates. Being non-hierarchical and leaderless will only get us so far. We need representatives throughout all levels of our representative government who we can support.

Why rank voting is essential

Which came first low voter turnout or the belief that our votes don't matter?

The upcoming presidential election will illustrate the lack of choice voters in this country have better than any other. The Republican field continues to be a divided mess with no clear front runner. Meanwhile Democrats are increasingly displeased with Obama's performance in office, yet would never risk voting third party after the Nader-gave-away-the-election-to-Bush disaster.

Yet I continue to see a backlash against the Occupy Wall Street movement centered around the argument that all these whiny people should simply get out and vote, but who would we vote for?

The regular third-party voters are now deeply offended by my treatment of Nader and claim of a lack of options, but the fact of the matter is, the current voting system is designed to keep third parties out. There is no way a third party candidate can reach the highest level of government without voting reform and campaign finance reform.