Ellison on Occupy protests: ‘Politicians don’t see the light until they feel the heat’

Speaking at a rally for a group advocating for the rights of immigrant workers, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison said that Washington needs to start paying attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“It’s about the movement in the street, but here’s the thing: Washington knows what to do. In the progressive caucus, we’ve got 77 members, we know the rich are not paying their fair share, we know the government has not done anything to help bail out citizens who are in foreclosure,” Ellison told The Uptake at an event for the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha. “We know what to do, and we need to start doing, and this movement adds the heat, sometimes politicians don’t see the light until they feel the heat.”

“In Washington what I’ve heard from a lot of people is, ‘If the movement turns violent, maybe it will be wise not to be connected to it,’” Ellison said. “Let’s get rid of super-playing safe, cowardly chicken-style, let’s lead with what we believe for a change and say, ‘These people are absolutely right to get out there and express their outrage with these conditions.’”

Ellison said the Occupy movement is different from the Tea Party movement, which he said was influenced by Republican and corporate interests.

“Instead of turning to other Americans, they turned on other Americans and started looking for people to blame and hate,” Ellison said. “So, you see a lot of Tea Party rhetoric that is anti-immigrant, some of it, not all, some of it was kind of racist.”‘

Ellison said a more apt comparison of Occupy Wall Street was with the democratic Arab Spring revolts that swept the Middle East.

“If you look at the Arab Spring, for example, these are people living under years of oppressive conditions that decided to just spontaneously get out and do something about it, no central figure,” Ellison said. “Here, people living here under oppressive economic conditions decided to just get out there and do something about it. In many ways there are some similarities to be drawn.”

(Hat tip to The Uptake)