Editorial Opinion on the Occupy Solidarity Social Forum

This personal critique represents the views of TruthMerchant.  Other persons may publish their own observations.

I arrived in Olympia in time for the Greeting event and found the conference well attended.  More people arrived as time passed and by the time the Greeting event was done there seemed to be a very large crowd.  It was interesting that the greeting that was to begin at 9:00 am did not start until 9:30.  There is a new word that was defined and to be added to the dictionary and it is “occutime”.  The word is very appropriate for a great many of our Occupy affairs and is actually a term of endearment.  The smart people have learned to adjust the closing time of events and the length of the various event segments to accommodate this reality.  This is unlikely to change and is to be part of our culture. As the event was extended to include “Occupy Presidents Day” (which is today), the statistics of how many people attended the event and the finances and the like are not yet available.  Those who will report on these matters are still conducting the event.  But in my own estimation, this was a resounding success and the Olympia people should feel quite proud and happy concerning this success.

It is remarkable that this was much like other conventions I have attended in my life as an I.T. pro, but with a very large difference.  In all of the conferences I had ever attended before, it was strictly a learning experience in which I gathered information on the latest technical developments and product offerings from the “establishment”.  The OSSF  was a much more interactive venue in which the people presenting were less “authoritative” and much like provocateurs. And although that word seems out of place it isn’t.  For those who presented themes and issues were there to provoke consideration and discussion as opposed to displaying their superior knowledge or “selling” some widget.  It was a very enjoyable experience.  I was able to “get my licks in” without a lot of rancor and angst for myself or others.

Prior to the greeting I was able to acquire a schedule of workshops so as to select the particular events I wanted to attend.  The facilitators of this gathering did a pretty good job of deciding how to combine the many workshops/presentations into 8 time slots over the two days. I was able to choose one of the 4 to 6 parallel work shops that was of interest to me in of each of the time slots.  I had offered to take people from Occupation park to the Olympia event but I only got one taker.  However, there were at least 10 people at the event at various times from Occupy Tacoma.  After the greeting I attended a “workshop” entitled “Web Development/Communications” which was a tutorial on creating a web site based on Word Press.  The workshop was very enlightening for the attendees and for especially for me in that I have never messed with Word Press. (about 10 people).  I know not which workshops were attended by the others.  I “ran in to” the others at various workshops during the two days of the event. It is quite likely that people arrived from as close as Tacoma to attend the workshops they really wanted to attend as opposed to showing up for the entire affair.

I then attended a workshop on “How Can we fix Lawmaking For Sale” (about 25 people)  This was put on by the same people that seem to be running the Seattle “Get Money Out of Politics” workgroup.  The focus was on Citizens United and the need for a constitutional amendment.  But there was also much discussion of public campaign financing.  The primary achievement for me was to get the presenter to state, for the record, that an amendment to address corporate money in politics was/is a totally different issue than publicly financed campaigns.  This made the entire event a resounding success in my own eyes even without the benefit of the the rest of the project. And even without my “comments”, more time was spent on addressing the corporate problem than on campaign finance reform (as it should have been — whoopie).

The first afternoon workshop was billed as “Wall Street Vs the World”.  That session was not well presented but the title attracted about 30 people and a lot of extremely good open discussion ensued as the organizer/presenter did a pretty good job of facilitating and I stacked. The discussion involved quantitative easing and the purchase of six hundred billion of treasury notes from T-Bill dealers, including, but certainly not limited to Goldman Sachs.  A long list of incursions by Goldman Sachs into the administrations of Bush and Obama was the presenters main theme.  And just a general observation of how Goldman and others have been hijacking American sovereignty.  I managed to remind people that money created by the FED is _NOT_ an obligation of the US taxpayers. I tried to stress that the banks OWE the FED all the money not paid to them simply to purchase T-Bills that they held, but that part seemed to be too much for the participants.  All in all, however, it was a good session and some clarifications were achieved while retaining the proper “evil bankers” theme.  Another resounding success in my own small world simply because of these “clarifications” entering the discussion.

Then came “The Strategy of Popular Sovereignty: How the Will of the People Shall Become the Law of the Land”.  This was well presented to a group of about 25, and was about the basic plan for the NOW DC event.  The idea that people can amend the constitution without a formal constitutional convention was touched upon. I silently rejected this idea (I did not intervene) because at this point it doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that at least some of the minds are now turning to solutions as opposed to problem awareness.  The NOW DC event is shaping up to be only somewhat like the Olympia event. It is intended to be much larger and with more focus on organizing a more democratic decision making, and proposal generating/approval, national convention for July.  I was able to interject the idea of video conferencing at the national assembly in July if not a trial run with the DC event.  As it turns out, the event in Washington is now being seen as a means to plan the much revised 99% Declaration event for July.  The July event is being considered for a move to Kansas City (or some other central location). I have learned to very much appreciate the “squishiness” of Occupy events and schedules.  It truly is how democracy must work.  Everything is much unsettled until the event “happens” and this allows the event to be shaped right up till “occutime”.

This will end my editorial comment on the OSSF.  In my opinion a very large success for all of us.