SJ, thank you for your gracious remarks.

Effective social movements, later if not sooner, need allies on the inside to get things done.    Whether its introducing constitutional amendments in Congress to rewrite key rules as on corporate personhood or campaign financing, or holding hearings (not to be under-estimated as a potentially impactful thing to do--consider the impact of the Army/McCarthy hearings), or passing strong legislation, or lobbying successfully for strong and needed (and legal) executive action.     

I've said it before and I'll say it again: organizing on the outside and working the inside does not represent an either/or choice.  Rather, it is a both/and imperative for those effective change efforts which can only, or best, be addressed through our political system.  Disfunctional as it is, elected officials who sense the winds shifting rapidly sometimes do respond.  

For once progressives are on offense, reflected in both OWS and the push for the jobs bill, including, yes, Obama getting up off the mat at long last.  I say hooray for that.  Can progressives walk and chew gum at the same time?  I want to rock our opponents back on their heels and hold their lousy, pinched, total loser of a social vision up to the light of day for the load of undiluted crap that it is, for most of the electorate to see.  If we can do that on more than one front I'm all for it.  

One can take some action on behalf of the American Jobs Act without any commitment to vote for Obama or even vote at all, for that matter.  If it helps to think of it as not being about Obama or next year's elections or inside baseball or any of that other incredibly offputting stuff, great.  300,000 or 400,000 public education employees, and the kids who stand to lose out if they lose their jobs, would sure appreciate it if folks fed up with the status quo will help our economy and our country's present and future by rising up on their behalf, too.

That's disgusting on so many levels

[....] I spoke with a veteran of the Tahrir Square uprising that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to get his thoughts on what lessons Occupy Wall Street can take from the Arab Spring.''

[....]

4. Don't blame the media; change the narrative.

Occupy Wall Street's supporters have continually criticized both the dearth of media coverage of their movement and its dismissive tone. "The media has begun dismissing the protesters, calling them delusional, childish hippies," Elshamy says. "This is actually very similar to here in Egypt when the media portrayed protesters as thugs or foreign agents who were getting paid and had other agendas." At one point, Egypt's state media even suggested that the demonstrators were being brought out to the square by the promise of free buckets of KFC.

The crowd took the charges in stride. Vendors began selling T-shirts reading "I am a thug" and fake pamphlets featuring "foreign agendas." The square's makeshift medical tent was renamed "KFC hospital."

Most importantly, Elshamy says, is to be as "neutral and friendly as possible with whatever journalist, no matter where he is from." [....]

from

From Tahrir Square to Wall Street
What can "Occupy Wall Street" learn from the activists who took down Hosni Mubarak? by Joshua A. Keating, | October 5, 2011

Also too:

1. You don't need a leader, but you do need a platform.

[....] "There was strong agreement because there was a common target, which was toppling Hosni Mubarak," Elshamy says. "Nobody thought about whether we are going to have parliamentary elections after, or how we were going to write a constitution or all these fiascoes we have now. These divisions emerged after toppling. But during those days, no one brought these issues up."

Elshamy recalls that the protesters' list of demands was written on a building-size banner so that "everyone inside and outside the square knew what we wanted."[....]