Email from MoveOn.org Re: "Hijacking of the #OWS Movement."

[MOD]

 

 

 

MoveOn, please stop

 

 

Hi there,

 

I received the petition you signed regarding MoveOn's stance toward Occupy Wall Street and wanted to respond. We've been in lots of conversations lately about this, and we take your concerns very seriously -- so I wanted to take a minute to share our thinking. We have and will continue to give a lot of thought to the best way to stand in solidarity with this growing movement while being clear that we are not Occupy Wall Street, and have no desire to direct, control, or speak for it.

 

MoveOn is a grassroots organization with five million members. In the past few weeks, our members overwhelmingly expressed support for Occupy Wall Street and encouraged us to do whatever we can to help Occupy continue to grow, spread, and succeed. That's been our mandate: to help our members help wherever they can.

 

Many individual MoveOn members have chosen to join their local occupation. Others have gone down to their local occupations and provided material support. In cities like Chicago, Sacramento, and Columbus MoveOn members have started petitions calling for an end to arrests and evictions of Occupy protestors from city parks. And many MoveOn members are just grateful for the work Occupy Wall Street has done to draw attention to a system that's not working for 99% of Americans.

 

Because we've gotten lots of questions about what MoveOn is, where our funding comes from, what we stand for, and what our relationship to Occupy Wall Street is -- and because there are a number of straight-up falsehoods floating around -- we collected the answers to those questions in one place. From that page, you can also let us know if you have other questions that we should answer. I encourage you to check it out here:

 

www.moveon.org/owsfaq.html/

 

Thanks for letting us know what you think, and for your work to build Occupy Wall Street.

--Justin Ruben Executive Director MoveOn

 

related

Will The Real 99% Please Stand Up?

BY Sean CaptainToday

Occupy Wall Street is meant to be a leaderless movement. But that hasn't stopped some people from trying to identify leaders. And some activists charge that organizations are trying to co-opt their message. How can a phenomenon with no central authority exercise authority over its brand?

 

Over the past two weeks, a group of Occupy Wall Street supporters called "We Will NOT Be Co-Opted" has been working on a statement to declare its independence from any group or political organization. Nothing's been approved yet, but some form of the first sentence from the draft will likely make it through: "The Democratic and Republican parties do not represent the people because they've been bought and corrupted by Wall Street, and the occupation does not support their candidates." The statement probably won't name names. But activist journalist Dave DeGraw, one of the members, confirmed that it was prompted by fears of MoveOn.org trying to become the mouthpiece of the movement, and in the process co-opt OWS under the Democratic Party.

 

A bit more explicit is an online petition called "MoveOn, please stop," created by someone named Geoff Parker using MoveOn's own petition-generating platform.