Occupiers Plan to Trek 240 Miles from New York to Washington D.C.

On the heels of the successful OWS Movement’s General Strike in Oakland last week that shut down the fifth largest port in the U.S. the Port of Oakland, a group of New York activists are planning a trek to Washington D.C. arriving there on November 23rd. This is the date the Super Committee must have reached a consensus on trimming the federal budget.

The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction called The Super Committee is composed of six Democrats and 6 Republicans. It was created by the Budget Control Act of 2011 last August to prevent default that would have resulted in a debt ceiling crisis. Many believe it was created because of the partisan political disputes and the precarious struggling to recover from the recession.

In a report today in talkingpoints.com. a member of the Senate Democratic leadership team has predicted the panel will fail and placed the blame squarely on Republicans.

As GOP committee members met privately, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen — a Democrat on the panel — told Bloomberg, “You need to close some of these tax loopholes and you need to generate additional revenue. And so that balance is going to be important. We saw the dueling letters just last week. We had a bipartisan group in the House that said, ‘Look, everything is on the table including revenues - tax revenues.’ And within 24 hours you had 33 [Republican] Senators say, ‘no new net tax revenues.’”

The gridlock since the inception of the committee does not appear to be disappearing, and the OWS marchers will be there when the committee either reaches a consensus or fails, at which time the “trigger” will be released and an automatic deduction including $600 billion in across-the-board, automatic cuts to defense and security programs, and hundreds of billions more in cuts to Medicare providers, for a 10-year total of $1.2 trillion starting in January, 2013.

The marchers plan to emphasize that retaining the Bush Tax cuts favor the rich and not the 99 percent. The organizer of the march Kelly Brannon together with other marchers hopes to gather support in towns as the go along. They will be camping out or staying in volunteer accommodations.

David Crosby and Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are performing at Zuccotti Park this afternoon. They could perform this appropriate song to celebrate the marchers. “Just a Song Before I Go.”

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF-oWhD2itE