Why Occupy Wall Street and its offspring should stay away from electoral politics

glenn...

[T]he reason this is a street protest movement (rather than, say, a voter-registration crusade or an OFA project) is precisely because the protesters concluded that dedicating themselves to the President’s re-election and/or the Democratic Party is hardly a means for combating Wall Street’s influence, rising wealth inequality or corporatist control of the political process.

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[T]he unique value and promise of these protests is that they are independent of prevailing political institutions, and it’s difficult to see how these protests can simultaneously be fully integrated into those institutions while preserving that value.

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Dedicating oneself principally to the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects or Barack Obama’s re-election campaign would seem a glaring non sequitur to those concerns.

i am in total agreement... our electoral process is so seriously broken and so fundamentally compromised by the vast amounts of money thrown at it by our super-rich elites who are hell-bent on vacuuming up every last scrap of money and power on the planet, it's pure idiocy to waste time on it unless and until it's fixed...

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