A Humble Three Point Plan for Occupying Washington DC and Changing This Country

by Kyle Byron

I trust you've noticed there are a few people here and about camping in tents in our city parks. Something about protesting the banking industry. Or greater poverty and homelessness because of, oh yeah, the banking industry. There has been so much criticism and so many suggestions thrown at these people that it almost boggles the mind. They are said to be leaderless, with no clear intentions, demands, or goals. As if these things were negative! I think they just have not yet had someone tell them exactly what to do. So right here and now, I will lay out the only plan that could ever work to change our completely broken and failing system. Like all wonderful, completely new ideas, I've borrowed a few things and sewn some new out of whole cloth. Think of me as the colorfully-coated Joseph of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

All of the following things will need to happen simultaneously. With enough people in the right places at the right time, we can make this happen.

1. Communicate and Deliver Our Demands to Congress—The 5 Million Person Sit-In

Here are the demands our group will need to deliver (more about HOW we'll do it in a bit):

Demand 1: All consumer debt must be forgiven immediately. This is a very simple, straightforward suggestion that has been mentioned before. But, you say, the banks will have to eat all those massive losses! Yep. Here’s a neat little sub-demand: all negative home equity must be forgiven immediately. Yep again. Imagine that, requiring a business to write down actual losses instead of keeping imaginary assets on the books.

What, do you expect the be-suited group of 50 Attorney Generals to ever be capable (or willing—lots of them are in the pockets of the banks to begin with) of brokering such a deal with the banks? Keep dreamin’, sucker! Besides, I’m sick of people like Matt Taibbi, Adam Levitin and Robert Reich talking down a well. It’s time for real action, not liberal talking points on Post-it Notes nobody will take seriously. And don’t even get me started about conservative cries of “class warfare” against the rich on the news.

Anyway, this will be easy to roll out because of the next demand:

Demand 2: All the major banks must be broken up and restructured. We'll let Elizabeth Warren figure out the details. Glass-Steagall something something, since I’m not an expert in regulating financial markets. (That’s all I’ve got, by the way. Seems like a super-simple demand.) Actually, wait. There’s a little more: Sorry, President Obama, I guess I sorta left you out of this so far. Here's your task on this one—part of this demand is that you give her the complete power to do this. We're all pretty tired of those limp Exec Orders you've been drafting lately.

Delivering the Demands. This will be the fun part. Forget the Million Man March. Forget the Sanity Rally. This is big time, life-changing shit. We’ll need about 5 to 10 million people. There are currently about 14 million officially unemployed folks in this country. Many more millions of underemployed (working part-time involuntarily), plus those not counted because they don’t qualify for unemployment benefits anymore. Maybe not a lot of these can afford the plane ticket. But the organizers out there can organize bus caravans, flight pools, whatever it takes. I’m not an organizer, but I know people who are. We can pull a group together. But it must be massive. And it must be focused. We need to occupy Congress. Doesn’t matter what day, really. (Have you seen a typical session on CSPAN? Not many of them show up on any given day anyway.) What’s important is that there be a LOT of us, and that we continue to push forward until we are IN THE BUILDING and completely occupy it. I think it would be a good idea to rally all the wacko backwoods militias around the country and assemble them in front, “leading” us. Because you know what? The military will start to assemble to halt us. And believe you me, they will not tase you, they will freakin’ kill you with real bullets. Once they understand we are serious, that we are mad, and that we are going in no matter what? Well, here comes the National Guard, the Army, the Marines.

But here’s the part that makes me sad thinking about it. There will be casualties. Some of us will be killed by the military. No tear gas and rubber bullets like Oakland. That’s police BS in response to “unlawful loitering in the park” nonsense. This is real change, real occupation, real revolution. The government will do everything in its power to stop that, because our rights, you know, they only go so far. As George Carlin said, “If you think you do have rights, one last assignment for you: next time you're at the computer, get on the Internet ... in the search field at Wikipedia, I want you to type in Japanese Americans 1942, and you'll find out all about your precious fucking rights.”

That’s why there have to be so many of us, because we need to continue forcing our way into that Capitol building, until it is completely occupied. When they start killing unarmed people, that’s when the tide will change. But they will still need to do their jobs (maintain the status quo). And we will still need to tear that down.

2. Anonymous: Take Down the New York Stock Exchange

The same day we flood congress with The People, it would be great if the headless, lawless, exceedingly shadowy hacker group Anonymous were to flex its cyberpopulist muscles with a takedown of the NYSE. Perhaps just for a few minutes. And I’m not talking about taking some affiliated website down and posting a snarky note. I’m talking about taking the exchange down. Entirely. The-lights-are-out kind of takedown. There will be a brief, blacked-out pause in the entire finance machine, and then we can turn the lights back on. Enough to give every trader a momentary, profoundly frightening OMFG pause. ON-OFF-ON. Then a quiet message trailing along the main ticker on Wall Street: “This was only a test of the Anonymous Emergency Market Takedown Service.”

This is just a suggestion, by the way. I would like to personally say to all those Anonymous members reading this right now: Obviously you don’t need to do this if you don’t want to. I do NOT want to mess with you guys. Seriously. Thanks.

3. Liberate the National Zoo

Now some of the details of the previous points might have seemed a bit of a downer; thousands dead, international financial markets in freefall panic, etc., etc. To offset the darkness with some entertainment, we need a group of people (what with all the other chaos reigning, we might only need a few hundred, or a thousand) to occupy the National Zoo. But we don't want to just sit around here and pass the llamas some demands. Boring! Instead, we will release the creatures into the streets of D.C. This would be great stuff for the networks to pick up and cover on the evening news. Besides, I would love to see a military drone take down a giraffe or scimitar-horned oryx. You heard what I said; they have those there. I can see Anderson Cooper now, crouched beside the dying oryx, sobbing into the CNN camera, while the drone hovers nearby like some menacing mechanical wasp. That’s entertainment!

Occupy Washington: The Real Jobs Creator

Here's the good news about my perfect plan: when we are all through with the occupying, the dying, and the legislative changes, when Elizabeth and crew have set about making banking more like dentistry (getting a home loan will be like getting your teeth cleaned, as it should be), then the real economic engine will start to rev up: corporate and private wealth security services. The fear and trembling the rich will feel when they see us sitting in Congress on CSPAN 2 will create millions of jobs: every hedge fund manager with a house behind a gate will call their accountant and start spend millions making their Home-Sweet-Italian-Villa a high-tech secured compound. Every car they own will be converted with bulletproof glass and doors. Safe rooms will be built at every vacation home and in every yacht. Construction jobs! Security camera installer gigs! Windshield replacement work for every struggling mechanic! Bodyguards, gunmen, private investigators, and computer forensics specialists ... these careers will be in high demand. Get your ISSA certification and gun license today!

And once we’re inside the compound rewiring the alarm system, maybe we’ll look around and take back a few nice things we’ve been missing, just for fun. Or take the Maserati for a joy ride. Call it the New-New-Fuck-You-Deal. Why? Because we’ll all still be pretty freakin’ mad about things, that’s why. And they’ll see firsthand just what kinds of things we can accomplish, when we really get mad enough. Are you mad enough to join me? I volunteer to hand the demands over to Congress. There’s only two of them, after all.

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