Occupy Santa Rosa and the question of a national assembly in 2012

[neil]

There has been some informal discussion at Occupy Santa Rosa about possibly participating in a "national assembly" in mid 2012. Problem is, it seems (from my limited research) that the call for this "national assembly" is NOT from Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly, or any other Occupy GA. It appears that this call is coming from OUTSIDE, not from our own consensus process. Please see:

https://occupywallst.org/forum/the99...-ows-working-/

and the 4th and 5th paragraphs here:

https://jjie.org/occupy-wall-street-...-demands/49205

which read:

"The push to bring together a National General Assembly sprang from the Demands Working Group (DWG), a committee of protestors designated at one of the regular General Assembly meetings held in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. Their plan includes the election of two delegates from each of the 435 Congressional Districts by direct vote. The 870 delegates would then vote on a non-partisan list of grievances at the July 4th, 2012 Assembly in Philadelphia.
Soon after its formation, the DWG launched a website and published the list online. Yet, the demands and national assembly call have not been adopted by the movement as a whole, or even backed completely by the OWS movement in New York"

Here is the link to "the99%declaration" which calls for the "national assembly":

https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/

Does anyone have more information about this? Opinions?

Before we even consider sending reps to this "national assembly," we need to understand who is behind it. For now, I am super-skeptical about the whole thing. For one thing, it would totally shift us away from consensus decision-making and to representative power. I'm sure there are those who would like nothing more than to divert the energy of the Occupy movement into the dead-end quicksands of electoral and legislative politics.

Neil

["Mad" Miles]

Neil,

Your research is good. I spend a considerable amount of time every day reading about and watching events related to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy in general. A working group from OWS put out a proposal on a website, that's it. Nothing else has been consensed to.

Now, this may be an example of the inherent limits of mass assembly consensus process, or it may just be that it's too soon to conclude anything. I suspect it's a combination of both and more abstruse issues.

I've only been to Occupy Santa Rosa, physically, twice. I contracted a mild case of bronchitis last week, which I'm still fighting, so going to the March and post protest schmooze fest on Saturday was not feasible for me.

The best "history" of OWS I've read, regarding the lead-up to September 17th, was this profile of David Graeber, which is more than a bio of him, it contains the organizational history of OWS, prior to its public notoriety. As always, consider the source.

Everybody knows there's a General Strike called for Oakland and beyond for Wednesday? 11/2/11!! that was consensed to by Occupy Oakland.