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Three Months In, Occupy Wall Street is Already Shaping Politics

The United States began organizing a local suppression in South Vietnam during the late fifties. It took years before the American antiwar movement caught up with its government’s actions, and there was little domestic opposition after the war kicked...

The United States began organizing a local suppression in South Vietnam during the late fifties. It took years before the American antiwar movement caught up with its government's actions, and there was little domestic opposition after the war kicked off in 1962. These facts have largely been forgotten. The history of that era's dissent has been revised and restructured, along with the story of the civil rights battle. Tell someone that nearly a decade passed between the time Rosa Parks refused to switch seats and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and they are liable to ask Siri if you are telling the truth.

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And so it goes with Occupy Wall Street. People, including many who seem sympathetic to the cause, wonder when occupiers will be able to declare a victory. ‘Yes, this is all well and good,’ people say. ‘But really, what has changed? The protests are doing nothing. It's been a whole three months, and surely a system maintained by the richest, most powerful people in the world should have crumbled by now, right?’

That analysis is disappointing, but it also ignores reality. Things are changing and OWS bears some level of responsibility. After less than a half a year, its supporters victories are as impressive as any other American social movement’s.

For starters, look at the fact that the Manchester-Union Ledger backed Newt Gingrich for President. I know what you're thinking: ‘Who cares? Newt Gingrich is deplorable. Also, what the fuck is the Manchester-Union Ledger?’ The answer to the first question is no one. As to the second, it's a shitty and spiteful paper notorious for attacking Maine Senator Edward Muskie's wife in a series of editorials that were printed back during the era where people gave a shit about things like newspaper editorials. Theodore Harold White recently said that the rag is a "practitioner of a style of knife-and-kill journalism that went out of fashion half a century ago in the rest of the country." Oh wait, that’s not recent because he died in 1986. He wrote that at the beginning of the 1970s.

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The paper declares, "Readers of the Union Leader and Sunday News know that we don’t back candidates based on popularity polls or big-shot backers. We look for conservatives of courage and conviction who are independent-minded, grounded in their core beliefs"… blah blah blah blah. It doesn't really matter.

Here's the point: In identifying Gingrich as a preferable choice to Mitt Romney, publisher Joe McQuaid explained, "I think — and this is crazy, but so are we — that Gingrich is going to have a better time in the general election than Mitt Romney. I think it's going to be Obama's 99% versus the 1%, and Romney sort of represents the 1%."

Let's follow that admission—that OWS rhetoric is shaping the upcoming election—with this: a year ago, Republicans denounced the extension of the payroll tax cut as a temporary fix, inadvertently acknowledging that it did, indeed, fix things. The cut dropped the taxpayer's rate from 6.2 to 4.2 percent.

Now many Republicans have completely flipped their position. Can anyone honestly maintain that the growing public debate regarding economic inequality had no influence on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell when he recently said, "I think at the end of the day there's a lot of sentiment in our conference, clearly a majority sentiment, for continuing the payroll tax relief that we enacted a year ago in these tough times"? This from a party that denounced the cuts as "sugar-high" months before Zuccotti Park was renamed Liberty Plaza.

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But wait, there's more. Recent rumblings indicate that Republicans actually (in the most sullen way possible) back an extension of unemployment benefits. Republican leaders in both Houses insist that they want to renew the benefits; it's just a matter of working out the logistics with Democrats. House Speaker John Boehner says, "So let’s try and work incrementally towards a conclusion this session that can benefit all Americans. Because we Republicans do care about people that out — that are out of work."

Why does John Boehner suddenly sound like a rational human being? Insight can be gathered from commenter Frank Luntz, the animated GOP strategist who you have seen on various cable news programs, who just gave a speech for the Republican Governors Association. Luntz said he is "scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death." He went on to instruct the assembled Republicans to stay away from certain buzzwords, phrases that are suddenly polling poorly: “capitalism,” “middle-class,” “bonus,” and “taxing the rich.”

All of this pales in comparison to Judge Jed Rakoff striking down a $285 million settlement that Citigroup had reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“In much of the world, propaganda reigns, and truth is confined to secretive, fearful whispers," Rakoff explained. “Even in our nation, apologists for suppressing or obscuring the truth may always be found. But the SEC, of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if fails to do so, this court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances.”

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Does Rakoff's decision owe some of its reverberation to the OWS protest? Do you believe it isn't one part of a much wider indication that something is in the air? One of the major obstacles of the anti-Vietnam War movement was "bringing the war home," convincing everyday people, especially those who had children that were not in the military that they should care deeply about what was going on in Southeast Asia. Kicking the reality of economic plight to folks isn't comparable to the daunting task that faced the antiwar movement at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Walk up to almost any American and ask them about their current economic situation. Ask them about the economic situations of their friends and family members. Ask them how it makes them feel. Ask them what they think about the politicians in Washington.

The worried instructions from Luntz demonstrate the effect the Occupy movement is having behind the scenes. The dominant Republican perception—that OWS is a bunch of loser kids campaigning for hippie world-domination while taking their moral cues from Ke$ha—is losing the party support from a domestic population crippled by debt, foreclosures, and the slashing of public funds. In some ways the Democratic response has been even more infuriating: the kind of paternalistic condescension one would implement when speaking to a six-year-old who has pointed out they want to be a princess when they grow up. Yes, the Bill Clintons and Barney Franks of the world say ‘I understand your pain and anger, but rather than occupy locations, you should begin to back this bill, get behind this proposal, and campaign for the president.’ The same president who the NYPD blocked OWS from getting near the other night: Obama was at the Sheraton on Seventh and 53rd in Manhattan, at a dinner where a plate would have cost you between $1,000 and $36,000.

When it comes to Occupy and politics, it’s not about candidates and it's not about demands. It's about nothing less than fundamentally changing the parameters of the economic debate in this country and, after less than a few months, we are already starting to see that happen. Early on in the occupation, Judith Butler gave a speech in Zuccotti Park in which she said, "If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible." That still sounds pretty good to me.

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