Some basic & practical rules for successful radicals

[Are_grits_groceries]

from blog:
<snip>
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Mahatma Gandhi

I cut my political and protest movement teeth on the anti-apartheid divestiture movement of the early eighties.
<snip>
I have been thinking about what we did in the eighties and in that context I offer some "lessons learned."

The traditional media is your enemy. As we have already seen, their first inclination was to ignore. Then Fox started mocking. Then the rest of the press eventually started paying attention - but they did their fair share of mocking, too. Especially Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. This deliberate and willful effort to ignore the protests and intentional failure to cover dissenting movements is a deliberate effort to cause confusion about what your movement is about within the mainstream, evening-news-and-morning-paper audiences. This is purposefully done in order to piss you off. If they can piss you off, they can make you appear unreasonable, and we all know what happens to unreasonable people...they either get negative attention, or they get rendered invisible.

The movement will be infiltrated. Hell, it already has. While the press sends mixed messages or mocks dissident movements, the corporatists who are threatened by the movement are already busy putting operatives in your midst to both disrupt and co-opt.

Only after infiltration is accomplished will the media start paying attention. Indeed, that is how you know they have succeeded in planting moles/operatives in your midst. The media won't bother covering you until they know what the answers will be to the questions they ask. we have already seen this with Jesse LaGreca. How long do you think it will take for the M$M to get back to interviewing him on camera again?

Politicians will start jumping on your bandwagon -- just as soon as it looks safe to do so. At that point, they will start relating tales and waxing nostalgic about how Wall Street corruption is the very reason they got into politics in the first place, way back in seventh grade when they ran for student council.

"Non-Partisan" entities will start writing checks - but their checks will come at a cost. They will "help you organize"
and "plan strategy." Once that happens, they control you and the threat you represented is effectively neutralized.
<snip>
But for the movement to succeed, a few things need to happen.

Practical advice about organizing and keeping it running as smoothly and effectively as possible at this link:
http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/

I'd pay attention to this advice. It was learned the hard way.

[leveymg]

1. Blue Girl has it nailed, particularly they ignore you until they infiltrate or coopt you part

As for how a movement can remain independent, it needs to provide its own media, audience, and financing. Take a tip from Wall Street: Commodify your dissent, know your customers, and dominate your market.

[gratuitous]

2. They will push you for an answer to "What do you want?"

Knowing that they can then spend endless time speculating whether reforming Wall Street should really be the top priority, or should it be bringing home the troops? Why doesn't anyone mention jobs? Clearly, the first priority is regulatory reform. But you can't get to that until you have a proposal for repairing infrastructure. Nobody's going to care about any of that until we figure out how to solve homelessness. Hunger's a major problem, and rising food prices don't do anyone any good.

And before you know it, the group has fractured about a thousand different ways, pitted against one another, and the 1% just laugh and say, "All too easy."