The basic message was that it’s time to mobilize a movement to Take Back the Dream. Conference organizers are aiming for a day of action around the country on November 17, a week before the Super Committee’s budget reduction plan is due. The details of this mobilization are to be determined.
They have a leader. Robert Borosage, co-director of the sponsoring Campaign for America’s Future, is promoting Van Jones and his organization Rebuild the Dream.
For six months in 2009 Jones was a special adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He resigned after Fox News discovered some youthful associations and statements made years ago which it used to smear him as an extremist.
He got more podium time than any other person at TBAD, and was both speaker and emcee at a post-conference rally on Capitol Hill attended by about half of the thousand people who went to the conference.
The next day, another thousand people gathered at Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Ave. for the outdoor, do-it-yourself version of the TBAD conference. They were not the same people, but except for a handful of Ron Paul supporters, they could have been.
The Freedom Plaza protest had been months in the planning by anti-war activists, who chose the tenth anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion to denounce the fact that US troops are still there. Originally inspired by the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, their issues expanded to include those raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
At some point, they began calling themselves Stop the Machine. Reflecting their planning and organization, they had multiple tents – legal, food, media, first-aid, and story telling as well as a stage.
On Thursday afternoon they marched from the Plaza to the headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce, one block from the White House, to ask "Where are the Jobs?" Then they marched down K St., which is to lobbyists what Wall Street is to financiers.
In McPherson Square, on K St. a few blocks north of Freedom Plaza, Occupy DC set up shop on October 1, in a last-minute effort to show solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. A younger, more anarchistic, crowd than those camping out in Freedom Plaza, they had their own feeding station, workshops and marches.
Both groups held general assemblies of whomever wished to come, to reach consensus decisions on what to do. They both used hand gestures as a simplified version of Robert's Rules of Order.
While the two groups were mutually supportive, they often did not know what each other was planning, or not planning as the case may be. From each of the parks, occupants marched to different destinations throughout DC at different times and marched back.
When they chanted "How to End the Deficit. End The Wars. Tax the Rich." they probably didn’t realize that that was the essence of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. On the other hand "We got sold out. Banks got bailed out." was not a campaign promise but an unintended consequence of a bipartisan effort to avoid another Depression. Unfortunately, the banks took the money and kept it.
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