I loved the demand for democracy. Here was real democracy. We're all equal here.
Everybody has a right to speak. Nobody can use money to influence how we're going to say
whatever we want during these meetings. Democracy was radicalized again. It became real instead of
those empty forms that we've become used to and pay so little attention to. That was powerful.
It was applied to not just politics but to economics. We are the people.
The economy should serve us, the majority, not some profit-driven minority. And that could be
spoken, and that could be shared and that could be affirmed. Occupy gave us the task: democracy
and the critique of capitalism. And for us, the solution then became becoming advocates for a
radical transformation of the workplace, because the workplace is the starkest example of no
democracy I can think of. When you and I cross the threshold into our workplace,
our office, our store, our factory, whatever the workplace happens to be,
we enter a realm from which democracy has been banished. A tiny group of people (the board of
directors, the owner of the business, the CEO, it really doesn't matter) tells us what to do.
Go there. Do this. Work with this. Work on that. Do it in this way. Do it at this pace. And then,
when you're done pouring your brains and muscles into these tasks you have been told to do,
the output that you've helped to create belongs to this other person. Your job is to go home and
get ready to do all that again tomorrow. You are a drone. What a strange arrangement. So powerful
do we make the people at the top that they can take the ultimate step and tell you to get lost.
You don't have a job. Which doesn't just condemn you to no income, but it condemns your spouse,
your children, your community, the stores that counted on you to buy milk and bread there.
All of them can be shaken to their core by a group of people over whom they have no power
at all. The CEO isn't elected, at least not by the workers over whom he rules.
As I have said on this program in the past, we never really got rid of kings.
They all hid from us. They left the palace and moved into the next most comfortable thing:
the headquarters of the corporation, where they got a new name- CEO. And there they sit,
laughing at us when we think we overcame kingdoms. Democracy is the issue,
and the democratization of the enterprise is the struggle that can take the democracy
Occupy Wall Street championed and sediment it, sync it with deep roots into the daily
life of all American people. The country will never go back to what it was once it takes that
step. We need the courage to believe it. We need the courage to act on it. And Occupy Wall Street
was that moment when this idea and that commitment began to be real in millions
and millions of our fellow citizens. We just have to have the courage to carry that forward.