PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network.
I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
A new documentary called American Autumn:
An Occudoc essentially invites people to join
the Occupy movement.
Here's a little clip from the film.
UNIDENTIFIED: There is something more important
than the richest people becoming richer when
we have the highest rate of child poverty
in the industrialized world.
When is enough enough?
UNIDENTIFIED (VOICEOVER): You know that scene
from the Oliver Stone film Wall Street when
Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in
a role that would win him an Oscar, appears
at a shareholders meeting of a company, Teldar
Paper, to defend his actions and his grotesque
worldview and delivers the now famous speech
where he says:
GORDON GEKKO (MICHAEL DOUGLAS): "Greed, for
lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures
the essence of the evolutionary spirit."
JAY: Now joining us to talk about his film,
from Groton, Massachusetts, is Dennis Trainor
Jr.
He's currently the host of a web series, Acronym
TV.
He's been writing and producing editorial
video commentaries since 2007, published over
800 of these short videos, many of which have
gone viral on YouTube.
He was an adviser, a media adviser for the
Kucinich campaign.
And he's the writer, producer, and director
of this newly released documentary, American
Autumn: An Occudoc.
Thanks for joining us, Dennis.
DENNIS TRAINOR JR.: Thanks for having me,
Paul.
JAY: So, Dennis, just give us a little outline
of the film, what you hope to accomplish with
it.
TRAINOR: Well, I hope to entertain people
and answer the question, why Occupy.
I'm looking at the Occupy movement not as
a series of single issues but, say, people
interested in single-payer [unintel.]
people interested in the antiwar movement
or just people interested in anti-austerity
measures can choose to fight alone, or they
can choose to get under the big banner of
Occupy and push that fight up the hill together,
so that the single issuesóworking alone,
standing alone, people on the far left have
been working and mostly failing to demonstrate
any successful victories for the past several
generations.
So in my opinion, Occupyóand I think Occupy's
still a baby and the future of it has yet
to be writtenóis the best chance that we
have of getting our country back and moving
the center back left.
JAY: One of the ideas in the film, I think,
that comes out very strongly is there needs
to be a counternarrative to the presidential
elections in this next coming period.
And while I understand that the idea that
whether one section or the other of the elite
gets to rule can't be the only choice for
people, do you not think there needs to be
some kind of engagement, some form of electoral
strategy for this movement?
And I say some form of electoral strategy,
'cause at the end if you don't have one, at
best you are trying to just ask for and influence
the current parties, whichever one's in power,
to do something, which one of the voices in
your film says people should stop doing.
TRAINOR: There's a big strain within the movement,
a big thread within the movement of people
saying, we should not be asking this system
for anythingówe shouldn't be asking them
for permission, we shouldn't be asking them
to improve our lives.
We should instead create our own world.
Now, that's a big dream, and I don't see that
happening in the short term.
But Bill Moyer of the Backbone Campaign speaks
very eloquently about this.
BILL MOYER: Some of us knew better, that you
can'tóthere's no Messiah going to get elected
by this system and deliver hope and change
we could believe in.
UNIDENTIFIED (VOICEOVER): So how will the
Occupy movement that has wisely stayed away
from promoting political parties or individual
politicians navigate the minefield of the
potentially co-opting force that is the presidential
election cycle?
TRAINOR: So voting, yes, people should go
and vote their conscience or they should vote
tactically, they should do what they will.
I don't think that this movement should be
wasting too much time or energy on the electoral
process.
We saw big fights within the movement happening
aboutóin the wake of the Madison, Wisconsin,
failed recall effort of Scott Walker and people
splitting hairs over strategy and should we
back Democrats who are only slightly better
than Scott Walkeróthe Democrat that was put
up against Scott Walker there was almost as
antiunion as Walker himself.
So should we beóis it true to say Obama is
a more attractive presidential candidate,
a little moreóyesóthan Mitt Romney?
Of course.
Am I going to personally waste much time working
or campaigning for the Obama administration?
No, of course not.
JAY: And what about some of the alternative
parties that espouse many of the ideas that
you see in the Occupy movement, whether it's
the Rocky Anderson candidacy with the Justice
Party or Jill Stein with the Green Party?
What's your attitude towards that?
TRAINOR: I think that the Green Party has
been working towards a lot of the things that
most people within the Occupy movement who
are very young and newly awakened to the movementóthe
Green parties were working towards those for
decades unsuccessfully.
Part of that could be some organizational
problems within the Green Party, but a bigger
part of it, as Ralph Nader has pointed out
on Real News over and time and time again,
is the exclusion fromóany other candidates
from the conversation.
So I think that, you know, for people who
live in states that Obama's going to carry,
if you're really worried about that, if you
can't find it within you to vote your conscience
and find a candidate that you are attracted
to, then you can vote tactically and give
your vote to Jill Stein.
Now, maybe the Green Party and Jill Stein
and Cheri Honkala can get a little bit more
of a slice of the conversation if they get
2 or 3 or 4 percent.
This is a tactical vote.
And for me, that's how I approach the election.
But I don't think people should take electoral
advice from me.
I've never voted for a winner.
JAY: Now, in a longer-term wayóthis isn't
going to happen this round, and it's hard
to say how many years it would take, but there
seems to be, in my view, a kind of false dichotomy.
There's either movement or there's electoral
process.
And one would thinkóI would think if you
look at places even like Egypt where you had
a massive movement but very little foróparties
ready to takeóparticipate in the electoral
process, except Muslim Brotherhood, and so
you wound up having this massóit's hard to
imagine a bigger mass movement than what happened
in Cairo and across Egypt, but completely
unable to take advantage of the electoral
process.
I mean, what I'm asking is: doesn't there
need to be both, not one or the other?
TRAINOR: You know, I think that's very possible.
And one of the things that I try to present
in the movie is I don't try to present myself
as a policy wonk or a talking head that would
normally be on a show like yours.
I'm a regular guy who lives on a main street
in a small New England town, who looks at
the world kind of honestly and thinks that
it's completely screwed up
I mentioned at the beginning that this movie
is an invitation for you to join the Occupy
movement, but there are no membership dues,
no papers to sign.
All that is required is the willingness to
see the world as it is and decide that you
were going to be part of the solution.
Occupy is less of an organization and more
of an organism, a living, breathing, multi-tentacled
force that refuses to find a niche or be pushed
into a corner.
This organism is still a baby, and the narrative
it will be telling in the years to come is
yours to write.
[snip] greed is a homicidal force in our culture
and that we need a cultural shift.
And some day, if we can shift the culture,
then perhaps we can shift the body of government
that governs for, of, and by that culture.
Right now, to say that we have a government
of, for, and by the people is a cruel joke.
You know, Citizens United may have been the
last nail in the coffin, but the giveaway
and the corporate takeover of our government's
been a process that's been going on for a
long time.
JAY: Well, yeah, I do want to take up this
concept of greed as the problem.
You know, in your film you haveóas we showed
in the clip, you talk about Gordon Gekko's
piece about greed is good in the Oliver Stone
film Wall Street.
And there was a mass movement against greed,
and it had great effect, and that's called
early Christianity, and it eventually got
assimilated by the state.
And part of the issue is, I think, thatóis
there's too much emphasis on the idea of the
morality rather than, you know, the fundamentals
of the system, and the most fundamental thing
about the system, how stuff is owned.
I mean, I don't know how many ordinary people,
if they were given controlling shares, or
even just a big stake of Goldman Sachs, you
know, wouldn't all of a sudden discover greed
is good, in the sense that it's sort of inherent
in the fact that if you own the commanding
heights of the economy and corporations are
about making maximum profit, not modest profits,
not reasonable profitsóyou know, that is
the essence of a corporation, to make maximum
profits.
Then why is it about greed?
Why isn't it about who owns it?
And then the issue of public ownership obviously
emerges.
TRAINOR: Paul, I do think it is a moral issue
that I hope that the Occupy movement can awaken
something in a culture that sees a shift in
that.
And like you said, you know, in the past year
we can now talk about capitalism as not, you
know, something that's the be-all and the
end-all.
We can question it without being painted red
and painted into a corner.
So in the infancy of the movement, we've accomplished
that, opened up the door for people to think
about a new way, a new system that should
govern the way they go about their lives.
JAY: Okay.
Well, there'll be a link to Dennis's film
underneath the player here if you want to
take a look.
Thanks very much for joining us, Dennis.
TRAINOR: Thank you, Paul.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real
News Network.
