Forum Post: Chris Hedges: Liberal and Democrats Cannot Co-Opt this Movement

Will the Occupy Movement be co-opted? Not according to Chris Hedges:

[quote] There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform. ...

[quote] Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars.

[quote] The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn.org and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.

[/quote]

Hedges thinks that liberal institutions like MoveOn.org and others (including top-down union leadership) have lost legitimacy, and that the Occupy Movement, driven by values and not electoral goals, can't be taken over by them.

Hedges also says that the "liberal class" has always functioned as a safety valve for a capitalism that he views as rapacious; and that in their hubris, the 1% have decided to dispense with Liberals and to discredit them.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/a_movement_too_big_to_fail_20111017/