Forum Post: The Rangel Story: Why we need our own people running for office

Apparently, despite voicing public support for OWS, Charlie Rangel turned around and voted for a free trade agreement which is most likely going to ship even more jobs overseas and runs contrary to the founding principles of the movement. This is despicable, and a fair number of people on here ought to be pretty pissed. Here's my question to those of you who don't want to see this sort of behavior continue: When's the next round of Democratic primaries, then? And which OWS organizers are in Harlem and willing to locate and get behind a challenger for Rangel's seat? This is why we need our own slate of people running for office. If we want to get real change then we're going to need to offer real people willing to run for office and able to win; we can't trust people like Rangel to vote with their constituents and the general election offers us a choice between lip service and outright hostility. If, however, we unseat Rangel in the primaries, then we can probably put our man through the general election with little opposition and we'll have our very first OWS'er in DC.

The thing is, if we try this for Rangel and succeed (which we should) then it sends a message to the rest of DC that they have to start taking us into account if they want to keep their jobs. The Tea Party did it, the Populists did it, the Green Party does it on occasion, and generally speaking it works. Citizens United allows us to build and fund an OWS superPAC, essentially a war chest that we can spend on our candidates across the country. Now, we'd obviously not start soliciting corporate funding for it because that goes against everything we stand for, but imagine the power that an independently aligned national coalition of small donors would have to influence this country during elections season. We could throw our people (actual OWS'ers with community organization/activism/legal backgrounds or OWS sympathizers in that category) into Democratic and Republican primaries across the country, and even if we only take one or two seats most legislators will think of the Tea Party and be less willing to ignore our interests.