Tuesday, October 25, 2011

TODAY'S TOPICS: Occupy Wall Street, The Flat Tax, Greenwald, Hedges, Colbert, GOP Clown Car

I’ve got two phenomenal articles today, one from Glenn Greenwald the other from Chris Hedges (who I still think focuses a little too much of his ire on the liberal "elites"...but brilliant nonetheless)…and both are about the Occupy Wall Street movement….must reads…

I'm going to discuss Iraq and Libya next post...

Occupy Wall Street, the Media and the Message

Let me begin with a couple more factoids illustrating WHY protests are breaking out across the country…and in fact why this is the ONLY way change will come. I also keep putting these up in hopes some will stick...because this is the kind of "ammo" we will need to convince people they need to get more active and engaged.
  • Corporate tax revenue in 2010 was 27% lower than 2000, even though corporate profits are up 60% over the last decade.
  • Since 2000, over 12 million Americans have lost their health insurance.
  • Since 2000, nearly 12 million Americans have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty.
  • 1% of Americans own 42% of the country's wealth
  • 24 million people in this country can't find a full-time job
  • 50 million people can't see a doctor when they're sick
  • 47 million people in this country need government help to feed themselves
  • 15 million families owe more on their mortgage than the value of home

For all these reasons and more, it should be more than evident that real change can no longer be expected simply through the ballot box. As the saying goes, there are only two kinds of power in America: Organized money and organized people.

And as Chris Hedges consistently points out, correctly, we on the left have focused too much of our time on electing Democrats that sell us out, and not enough time on social movement building, protests, and directly challenging the Matrix – which includes large swaths of the Democratic Party.

This is not to say that voting isn’t critical, and we still must do it, and there are still fundamental differences between the parties. These truths are self evident…but they simply shouldn’t be our primary mission and focus anymore (ala Hedges constant criticisms of groups like Moveon…though I think he overdoes it).

Nonetheless, while real differences remain between the parties, we should also be very clear that the Democratic Party as it stands today is wholly inadequate and unwilling to even talk about, let alone fight for, the things that are really needed. I won’t go into the long list of why this is right now, but suffice it to say, while they score very high on say, our consumer rights legislative scorecard, this can be misleading (though important in light of the dismal GOP scores). We must remember the REALLY good and important ideas aren’t even tried or discussed…therefore the bills they score high on are ones that anyone in their right mind would support and vote for. 

In other words, the Matrix itself limits the scope of the debate, and the actions that can ever be discussed, let alone taken. This is critical…and points to the structural changes that are needed, and that can only be achieved, by MASSIVE SOCIAL STRUGGLE and civil disobedience…as almost all successful movements, and paradigm shifts in the past have been, be it women’s suffrage, labor rights, or civil rights…and that’s just in America…the same struggles were necessary around the world and throughout history.

What Difference Has the Movement Made to Date?

One of the criticisms from some in the Democratic party of the movement has been "where were these people when we were trying to reform wall street!" Or, "protests do nothing, only voting will change things." First, there is an assumption here that those protesting didn't vote in 2008, or won't in the future. Similarly, there is an assumption that they have never been active in the past. No proof of these assertions is of course offered. Even if correct on the not voting, the issue now is where do we go from here? 

I'd also argue that such mass demonstrations DO make a difference on a number of fronts, from changing the narrative, pushing the debate left (and Democratic leaders), educating the public, and forcing corporate and GOP forces to expose themselves due to panic and fear. While its true that this movement, to be fully effective, must reach the ballot box, let's review what has already been accomplished.

For evidence, consider the past year: Remember the constant talk from the austerity class, including our President, about the “deficit crisis” and the need to cut social security and Medicare? Remember the deficit commission (newsflash…they’re deadlocked…let’s hope it stays that way) and the debt limit "crisis"? Even in light of ALL known respected economists and documented history that pointed to the need for jobs…and SPENDING/INVESTMENTS to create them, all we got was one big criminal competition between right wing fascists and Democratic Party cowards and corporatists about who could cut desperately needed spending and public programs the most! How much can we give the rich and stick it to everyone else while keeping a straight face as they talked about deficits, rather than say unemployment? Do you hear this debate now?

That was the nightmare, bizarro world we had been living in, and the Occupy Wall Street movement has completely and totally reframed the discussion…which now, finally, focuses on the core issues that truly matter…economic injustice, wealth disparity, wall street deregulation, corporate crime, unemployment, wages, and on down the line.

The media and political debate has fundamentally changed…the GOP is in retreat…they are confused and scared…Democrats, as per usual, are largely in favor, with the corporate wing tripping over themselves to disown it. But its all about the discussion…and the Matrix, on this front, has been punctured.

But don’t take my word for it, as ThinkProgress cataloged, the corporate media sought early on to attack the Occupy Wall Street protest and the 99 Percent Movement as a whole. Right-wing outlets like Fox News and The Daily Caller continue to do so, but the 99 Percent Movement appears to have had a profound impact on the media at large.

A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times:

Yet now, things have changed. With the debt ceiling debates behind the country and thanks partly to the pressure being brought upon politicians and the media by the 99 Percent Movement and the occupations taking place all over the country, it looks as if the press is finally focusing on the jobs crisis and the behavior of Wall Street instead. A ThinkProgress review of the same three networks between Oct. 10 and Oct. 16 finds that the word “debt” only netted 398 mentions, while “occupy” grabbed 1,278, Wall Street netted 2,378, and jobs got 2,738:

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released an analysis of 52 different major media outlets and found that coverage of Occupy Wall Street dominated news coverage the week of October 10th, as stories related to the 99 Percent Movement filled 10 percent of the total “newshole.”

And, as the Center for American Progress also details, the combination of increased attention and a message that resonates has led the movement expanding too: "There are large occupations in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, and other major cities. On Oct. 15, the movement earned global solidarity as hundreds of thousands of peoplereach upwards of 1,233,000. The occupations across the country are persisting despite very aggressive action by city officials and police to try to restrict overnight protests in public parks. Well over a thousand Americans have been arrested for misdemeanors related to sleeping overnight in parks or obstructing traffic — a number that is in stark contrast to the almost no senior executives at major banks who have been arrested for fraud related to the global recession." rallied for social justice worldwide, with “99 Percent” signs showing up in countries as far apart as Canada and South Korea. By last week, the number of Facebook “Likes” on the more than 500 Occupy Facebook groups

Again, let’s look at some of the specific reasons why it’s expanding:
  • Fifty-four percent of Americans agree with the protesters, versus 44 percent who think President Obama is doing a good job.
  • Seventy-three percent of Americans want prosecutions for Wall Street executives for the crisis.
  • Seventy-nine percent think the gap between rich and poor is too large.
  • Eighty-six percent say Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much power in Washington.
  • Sixty-eight percent think the rich should pay more in taxes.
  • Twenty-five percent of the public considers itself upset, 45 percent is concerned about the country and 25 percent is downright angry.
We’re such a conservative country, right? The fact is, the movement is making A LOT of Democrats (GOP are a criminal enterprise, not a party) choose between - in large part anyway - their biggest donors and what’s right, and what the people want. This is VERY important. 

Of course, this energy and activism still must be translated to the voting booth…though we’ve seen what elections get us…not all that much. Yes, vote…but more important is to keep pounding the pavement and changing people’s minds and the media’s narrative. In some ways, this movement IS THE PRIMARY CHALLENGE to Obama many of us wanted…but without some of the potential for damage to his general election campaign.

I especially love how this movement has cornered and confused all those centrist Democrats out there that are bending over backwards to straddle the middle here…which there really isn’t one.

As noted by Matt Stoller, “This movement has heightened the contradictions of both parties, the Wall Street funding of the Democratic Party and its associated institutions, as well as the faux populism of the Tea Party-infused Republican. The main message of the occupiers is that the government and Wall Street are one tangled corrupt mess screwing everyone else. Centrists, many of whom live in the Democratic Party, at the Fed, in banks, and in law firms and think tanks, are the key linchpin of this system. They make the trains run on time, shuffling between the various institutions of national power. And they have a long history of dancing in between popular legitimacy and corrupt financial elites. An example is the Democratic embrace of Fannie Mae as an institution that broadens access to housing. This company was corrupt to the core, and the people profiting from it have gone on to senior administration positions in the White House -- Tom Donolan in National Security, Rahm Emanuel, Bill Daley, Peter Orszag, etc. These are the people who are centrally implicated by Occupy Wall Street.

Centrists dealing with the occupiers are suffering because they must now choose between their funding stream and their popular legitimacy. Michael Bloomberg, the centrist mayor of New York, is perceived of as weak by his friends, but he is also increasingly unpopular in the city. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago mayor, must now openly arrest the people he used to badmouth and bully while in the White House.”

Obama Can Thank GOP and Flat Tax Plans for Second Term…

Perhaps most comical, is the way in which "Occupy" has exposed the GOP for what they are, and just how totally and completely beholden they are to that 1% and Wall Street. In fact, the Republican candidates for President seem to be more in a competition to “out crazy” each other than to win higher office. 

We now have three of the top five potential GOP challengers proposing (which bringing back the “birther” nonsense) the most regressive, reverse Robin Hood, flat tax plans in the history of the country…the DIAMETRIAL OPPOSITE of what is needed, what is wanted, and what is being advocated for in protests across the country and world. Truly astounding…the sheer tone deafness and criminality of these people…Obama should be thanking each, with a personal call and gift basket, for literally GIVING HIM a second term (I always have predicted he would win won...but this is getting ridiculous).

I’ll discuss some of the outrageous components of Perry’s plan next post (I detailed Cain’s last post). And now, the morbidly obese, serial liar and scum bag Newt Gingrich is also on board, and the all time waffle king, Mitt Romney, who once said flat taxes weren’t fair to the middle class said “I love the flat tax” just a few days ago…

Remember, the inherent argument of all flat tax plans is that the huge income gap between the rich and poor isn’t widening fast enough…with the only solution being to tax the poor more while DRASTICALLY cutting taxes for those who already have it all. 

Here’s the rundown of the candidate economic greatest hits from Center for American Progress...are these not the POSTER CHILD'S for the Occupy Wall Street movement???
This GOP clown car of knuckle dragging fascists is like nothing I’ve ever seen. They can’t speak in full sentences, nothing they say is true, and they are advocating huge giveaways to the rich and corporations that ship jobs overseas while advocating for the dismantling social security and medicare and increasing taxes on the poor (in the midst of a horrific recession and protests across the globe against these very policies)...not to mention they continue to focus on things like Obama’s birth certificate, Sharia Law, those scare Mexicans, and the threat posed by gay marriage…and on it goes.

I realize the American public isn't the most educated or politically astute populace in the world...but this platform won't fly with a majority of Americans, particularly when considering the amount of money Obama will have to dismantle these proposals...and he's REALLY good at doing that when he's in campaign mode. I think a lot of these schemes will only appear more out of step and outdated the more people suffer and the larger the Occupy protests become.

If only the American public could remember what this Party stands for for longer than a couple months…if they did, we could all be confident in the knowledge that we are indeed watching the implosion of one of the two major political parties. Regardless, I've always predicted Obama would win re-election, and its more apparent now than ever (though election fraud and voter suppression will make the race closer than it really is).

So with all that said, let's recap: the short answer for while he win is the GOP is batshit crasy, he's a great campaigner and finally changed his tone and focus, and has a TON of money. The long answer is the GOP is totally and completely fucking batshit crazy, he's a great campaigner and finally changed his tone and focus, and has a TON of money. With that said, CLEARLY, electing Obama is not an answer to this country's problems...and should not be our primary focus...

VIDEO SECTION

Nurses union rep talks with Keith Olbermann about being targeted and arrested by cops for helping people at the Occupy Wall Street protests:

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/director-national-nurses-united-union-resp

This is a week or so old…but if you haven’t watched it…YOU MUST…Colbert at his best…with accompanying video of troops actually burning O’Reilly’s books that he sends them as a “gift to the troops”…no fucking joke…hilarious:

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/stephen-colbert-defends-patriot-papa-bear-o

A great illustration of how some of the New Deal regulations that were repealed directly correspond with the bubbles and scandals that we’ve witnessed since the 1980’s…with the help of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and some great footage of the Occupy Wall Street protests…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wK1MOMKZ8BI

ARTICLE SECTION

Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land, by Glenn Greenwald

A FEW CLIPS:

Implicit in this framework was the claim that inequality was justified and legitimate. The core propagandistic premise was that the rich were rich because they deserved to be. They innovated in industry, invented technologies, discovered cures, created jobs, took risks, and boldly found ways to improve our lives. In other words, they deserved to be enriched. Indeed, it was in our common interest to allow them to fly as high as possible because that would increase their motivation to produce more, bestowing on us ever greater life-improving gifts.

We should not, so the thinking went, begrudge the multimillionaire living behind his 15-foot walls for his success; we should admire him. Corporate bosses deserved not our resentment but our gratitude. It was in our own interest not to demand more in taxes from the wealthiest but less, as their enhanced wealth -- their pocket change -- would trickle down in various ways to all of us. 

This is the mentality that enabled massive growth in income and wealth inequality over the past several decades without much at all in the way of citizen protest. And yet something has indeed changed.  It’s not that Americans suddenly woke up one day and decided that substantial income and wealth inequality are themselves unfair or intolerable. What changed was the perception of how that wealth was gotten and so of the ensuing inequality as legitimate.

Many Americans who once accepted or even cheered such inequality now see the gains of the richest as ill-gotten, as undeserved, as cheating.  Most of all, the legal system that once served as the legitimizing anchor for outcome inequality, the rule of law -- that most basic of American ideals, that a common set of rules are equally applied to all -- has now become irrevocably corrupted and is seen as such.

SNIP

It is now clearly understood that, rather than apply the law equally to all, Wall Street tycoons have engaged in egregious criminality -- acts which destroyed the economic security of millions of people around the world -- without experiencing the slightest legal repercussions. Giant financial institutions were caught red-handed engaging in massive, systematic fraud to foreclose on people’s homes and the reaction of the political class, led by the Obama administration, was to shield them from meaningful consequences. Rather than submit on an equal basis to the rules, through an oligarchical, democracy-subverting control of the political process, they now control the process of writing those rules and how they are applied.

Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of Americans that the wealth of the top 1% is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship, but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems. Thanks to this control, they can write laws that have no purpose than to abolish the few limits that still constrain them, as happened during the Wall Street deregulation orgy of the 1990s.  They can retroactively immunize themselves for crimes they deliberately committed for profit, as happened when the 2008 Congress shielded the nation’s telecom giants for their role in Bush’s domestic warrantless eavesdropping program.  

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/25

Occupiers Have to Convince the Other 99 Percent, by Chris Hedges

A FEW CLIPS:

The power elite have desperately tried to tar the movement with a series of calumnies, branding protesters as hippies, anti-Semites, drug addicts, leftists, anarchists and communists. They have so far been unable to blunt the fundamental truth the movement imparts: We have undergone a corporate coup. It has to be reversed. But this truth has yet to resonate among those who for decades have been betrayed and ignored by white liberals.

SNIP

The power elite are frantically searching for the ideological weapon that will discredit the movement. But the clarity of the protests, the painful personal stories of dislocation that are the heart of its message, and, most important, the self-discipline, despite police provocation, which has kept these protests nonviolent have advanced the movement and discredited the forces of control. The power elite, held together by the glue of force and fraud, are seeking ways to communicate in the only language they know they can master—unrestrained force. And as we enter the second month of demonstrations, the power elite fear that the core message and the calls for resistance, which resonate with a majority of Americans, will lead to a direct confrontation with the corporate state. If the movement starts to pull hundreds of thousands of people together, if it leaps across class lines, as I saw during the peaceful revolutions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, then the corporate state is probably finished. Our corporate overlords know this. And they are doing everything in their power to make sure this does not come to pass.

SNIP

The only effective tool for change will come through movements such as those that stand in direct opposition to state power and seek through the sheer force of numbers and civil disobedience to discredit and weaken the corporate state. The corporate state cannot be the repository of our hopes and dreams. And the liberal establishment has, by making concession after concession, merged itself into the corporate apparatus and has nothing left to say to us. It is part of the elaborate and hollow political theater that has replaced genuine political participation. The dismantling of our radical social and political movements in the early and even middle part of the 20th century in the name of anti-communism left the liberal class, as well as the wider society, without a repository of new ideas. The utopian fantasies of globalism and naive acceptance that the dictates of the marketplace should be permitted to determine human behavior became not just the creed of the corporatists but finally the creed of liberal apologists such as Thomas Friedman and most professors in university economic departments. And the strength of the new movements is that they have exposed this lie. 

What we are witnessing in parks and squares across the United States is not simply widespread revulsion over the greed and cruelty of corporate capitalism, but the articulation of a new and potent radicalism. This radicalism challenges the right of corporations to poison our ecosystem and turn greed and self-promotion into the highest good at the expense of human life. If this movement can cross class lines, if it can articulate its vision to those in marginalized communities, especially poor people of color, it can tap into a force and power that was never part of the New Left. It can make possible the shaking of the foundations and, let us hope, the toppling of the corporate state.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/24-1

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