What Do They Want? Justice

October 6, 2011

By Robert Scheer

How can anyone possessed of the faintest sense of social justice not thrill to the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading throughout the country? One need not be religiously doctrinaire to recognize this as a “come to Jesus moment” when the money-changers stand exposed and the victims of their avarice are at long last offered succor.

Not that any of the protesters have gone so far as to overturn the tables of stockbrokers or whip them with cords in imitation of the cleansing of the temple, but the rhetoric of accountability is compelling. “I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail,” one protester told New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. That prospect has evidently aroused concern in an industry that has largely managed to escape judicial opprobrium.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the CEO of a major bank asked Sorkin. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all this. Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

It should pose a threat, not because peaceful demonstrators will suddenly morph into vigilantes fatally damaging their cause with violent action, but rather because government prosecutors should fulfill their obligation to pursue justice and incarcerate some of the obvious perps. As Sorkin conceded, in one of the rare instances of the business press attempting to understand the protesters: “the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.”

Sorkin ended his account with snarky comments about the protesters using ATM machines and about the ever-admirable Code Pink founder Jodie Evans having flown a commercial airline to get across the country to the demonstration. He also offered the predictable dismissal that could be made about any genuinely spontaneous movement, that “the protesters have a myriad of grievances with no particular agenda.”

But ignore the mass media’s nitpicking and mostly derisive coverage and wonder instead why it took so long for this grass-roots movement to emerge as an alternative to the tea party, which exonerates the thieves of Wall Street. With 25 million Americans unsuccessfully looking for full-time work, 50 million experiencing mortgage foreclosure and an all-time high of 46.2 percent living in poverty, including 22 percent of all children, isn’t it logical that the faux populism of the tea party be confronted with a progressive alternative?

The Republican narrative, which the media have treated with considerable respect, blames “big government” for our ills, not when Washington bails out the banks, or feeds the maws of the military-industrial complex, but only when it might go to the aid of the victims of the financial conglomerates.

It was the Wall Street lobbyists, with the complicity of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who caused the Great Recession by destroying a sensible regulatory system — one that had kept U.S. banking reliable since the Great Depression — and by legalizing the securitization of homes. But the Wall Street titans escaped being held accountable for the excesses of their greed: They got their lackeys in government to throw them a lifeline bailout while their victims among the unemployed and foreclosed were abandoned.

“We bailed out the banks with an understanding that there would be a restoration of lending. All there was was a restoration of bonuses” is the way Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz described it in speaking to the protesters on Wall Street.

It was a thought echoed by George Soros in expressing his support for the demonstrators: “The decision not to inject capital into the banks, but to effectively relieve them of their bad assets and then allow them to earn their way out of a hole leaves the banks bumper profits and then allows them to pay bumper bonuses.”

Those bonuses are part of a practice throughout the corporate world that has far less to do with corporate performance than with the power spoils of CEOs. As The Washington Post points out, “The gap between what workers and top executives make helps explain why income inequality in the United States is reaching levels unseen since the Great Depression.” While the median pay for top corporate executives has quadrupled since the 1970s, the pay of non-supervisory workers has declined by more than 10 percent.

“Ultimately this is about power and greed, unchecked,” Jodie Evans told the Times’ Sorkin, and it is a protest that the columnist’s newspaper, along with the rest of a mainstream media that editorially enthused over the radical deregulation that unfettered Wall Street greed, should now honestly cover.

Cross-posted at Truthdig

Author’s Website: http://www.truthdig.com

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Anatole France

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Occupy Main Street: Long awaited cure for a fraudulent democracy

October 6, 2011 by legitgov
By Michael Rectenwald

OBAMA’s “accomplishments”. They forgot “healthcare reform”

THE WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER is in the throes of severe crisis, a crisis for which economic or political experts and advisors have no answers at all. The crisis is the direct result of the contradictions of capitalist production and exchange, which have come to a head as capitalists have reached (perhaps temporary) limits in global labor exploitation and resource acquisition. The political establishment is also hostage to the same capitalist crisis. It has nothing on offer for the vast majority within existing conditions, and certainly cannot propose anything beyond them. Reformers have no new tricks left in their bag and the reforms that haven’t been enacted are beyond the reach of the system.

The Occupy Wall Street movement represents the long-standing, brewing and boiling over of anger, disillusionment, dispossession, and growing despair of the many millions affected by this systemic crisis. Indeed, the movement represents, at least figuratively, the cry of the vast majority of the nation’s and the world’s population – “the 99%.” The movement thus contains the germ of revolutionary potential – a potential, however incipient and faint — to completely overthrow the existing state of affairs and to commence the long revolutionary process of inaugurating a successor social order.

Yet the importance and relative success of the Occupy Wall Street is not due to any program, platform or series of demands, nor to the array, number, or character of protesters themselves. Rather, the potential of the movement derives from the objective historical conditions of capitalism and its effects on hundreds of millions worldwide. These conditions have emerged in the consciousness of workers, students, and the under- and unemployed, prompting action across the country and across the globe, the likes of which OCW is only a recent and growing example.

By the same token, the crisis in capitalism is not due to the character of Wall Street executives, the psychopathic greed of the bankers, the deregulation of the stock market, the outlandish salaries of corporate executives, or the utter ineffectualness of bourgeois political parties. These are all symptoms of the crisis, not its causes. No psychological, sociological or strictly political explanations are adequate to explain the death grip that the system has on the vast majority in the U.S. and across the world. What appears as increased rapacity and seeming utter indifference to the needs of the vast majority on the part of the ownership class and their political representatives is in fact a function of the same capitalist crisis that has brought the protesters to the streets. The deregulation, the bailouts, the hoarding, the investment boycott, the austerity measures, the imperialist wars, the political and economic inaction and indifference – these are all symptomatic of the same crisis and cannot simply be attributed to individual character flaws or even to political desiderata. Certainly the system produces the very monsters and policies that the protesters declaim. But their existence and behavior is an utterly predictable product of objective historical conditions.

Likewise, the political establishment and their mouthpieces either attempt to dismiss the protests as irrational and misguided, or, in the case of the left Democrats and the unions, to co-opt them for electoral and thus dead ends. The political parties will battle over the future and meaning of the protests. But in no case will an alliance with either party or any of their representatives yield any benefit to the protesters or the hundreds of millions that they represent. The political establishment cannot but represent the interests that the movement necessarily opposes.

The movement must utterly reject all ties to the Democratic Party, including its boosters, apologists, ginger groups and union surrogates. These can be spotted by their suggestions and deflections. Do they call on the removal of greed and a character change of individuals, or do they reject a system that necessarily promotes and rewards greed? Do they point to the other political party as the culprit, or to the Federal Reserve, or do they recognize the complicity of the entire political and economic establishment in the conditions that obtain for the vast majority? Do they appeal to and petition the lords and masters for mercy, or do they work to mobilize the vast majority for a showdown against them?

Some Democrats and their proxies will attempt to reframe demands away from systemic change. But progressive reforms will not be forthcoming – because capitalism cannot afford them. What may pass as reform can only be roll-backs for the majority and boons to the ownership class. This is Obama’s role precisely—to package as reforms policies that are essentially austerity measures for the vast majority and hand-outs to the corporate class that he represents.

To avoid being co-opted or crushed, the Wall Street Occupation must become Occupy Main Street. It must attract the many layers of the 99% that are not yet literally represented within its ranks. These include industrial but also temporary, piecemeal, service, educational, medical, communications, technical and unemployed workers, amongst others. The 99% must represent a factual, not merely a rhetorical inclusion. The terms must be broader and deeper than leftist reformism, comprehending and including the whole workforce, such as those at the Wall Marts of the world. It must focus on the exploitation of workers everywhere, and their liberation from the lottery-like conditions of the capitalist marketplace.

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. is Chair and Chief Editorialist of Citizens for Legitimate Government. More of his writings can be found here and here.

¶

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//

“I’m mad as hell and I’m NOT gonna take it anymore!!” (VIDEO)

ART SOMETIMES CAN BE SAVAGELY ACCURATE IN ITS PREDICTIONS, and so it is with the movie classic Network, and its epic “prophet of the airwaves,” UBS’ anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who’s exploited ruthlessly by the corporate suits while having a nervous breakdown. But here’s the kick: Howard Beale’s “insanity” is saner than all the smooth spin dished out by the prostituted voices emanating from the system. It is a parable that finally has come true. —PG
VIDEO FOLLOWS BELOW

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Occupy Wall Street Ends Capitalism’s Alibi

Published on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

This protest pinpoints how dysfunctional our economic system is: we must refashion it for human needs, not corporate aims

By Richard Wolff

Occupy Wall Street has already weathered the usual early storms. The kept media ignored the protest, but that failed to end it. The partisans of inequality mocked it, but that failed to end it. The police servants of the status quo over-reacted and that failed to end it – indeed, it fueled the fire. And millions looking on said, “Wow!” And now, ever more people are organizing local, parallel demonstrations – from Boston to San Francisco and many places between.

Let me urge the occupiers to ignore the usual carping that besets powerful social movements in their earliest phases. Yes, you could be better organized, your demands more focused, your priorities clearer. All true, but in this moment, mostly irrelevant. Here is the key: if we want a mass and deep-rooted social movement of the left to re-emerge and transform the United States, we must welcome the many different streams, needs, desires, goals, energies and enthusiasms that inspire and sustain social movements. Now is the time to invite, welcome and gather them, in all their profusion and confusion.

The next step – and we are not there yet – will be to fashion the program and the organization to realize it. It’s fine to talk about that now, to propose, debate and argue. But it is foolish and self-defeating to compromise achieving inclusive growth – now within our reach – for the sake of program and organization. The history of the US left is littered with such programs and organizations without a mass movement behind them or at their core.

So permit me, in the spirit of honoring and contributing something to this historic movement, to propose yet another dimension, another item to add to your agenda for social change. To achieve the goals of this renewed movement, we must finally change the organization of production that sustains and reproduces inequality and injustice. We need to replace the failed structure of our corporate enterprises that now deliver profits to so few, pollute the environment we all depend on, and corrupt our political system.

We need to end stock markets and boards of directors. The capacity to produce the goods and services we need should belong to everyone – just like the air, water, healthcare, education and security on which we likewise depend. We need to bring democracy to our enterprises. The workers within and the communities around enterprises can and should collectively shape how work is organized, what gets produced, and how we make use of the fruits of our collective efforts.

If we believe democracy is the best way to govern our residential communities, then it likewise deserves to govern our workplaces. Democracy at work is a goal that can help build this movement.

We all know that moving in this direction will elicit the screams of “socialism” from the usual predictable corners. The tired rhetoric lives on long after the cold war that orchestrated it fades out of memory. The audience for that rhetoric is fast fading, too. It is long overdue in the US for us to have a genuine conversation and struggle over our current economic system. Capitalism has gotten a free pass for far too long.

We take pride in questioning, challenging, criticizing and debating our health, education, military, transportation and other basic social institutions. We argue whether their current structures and functioning serve our needs. We work our way to changing them so they perform better. And so it should be.

Yet, for decades now, we have failed to similarly question, challenge, criticize and debate our economic system: capitalism. Because a taboo protected capitalism, cheerleading and celebrating it became obligatory. Criticism and questions got banished as heresy, disloyalty or worse. Behind the protective taboo, capitalism degenerated into the ineffective, unequal, crisis-ridden social disaster we all now bear.

Capitalism is the problem – and the joblessness, homelessness, insecurity, and austerity it now imposes everywhere are the costs we bear. We have the people, the skills and the tools to produce the goods and services needed for a just society to prosper. We just need to reorganize our producing units differently, to go beyond a capitalist economic system that no longer serves our needs.

Humanity learned to do without kings and emperors and slave masters. We found our way to a democratic alternative, however partial and unfinished the democratic project remains. We can now take the next step to realize that democratic project. We can bring democracy to our enterprises – by transforming them into cooperatives owned, operated and governed by democratic assemblies composed of all who work in them and all the residents of the communities who are interdependent with them.

Let me conclude by offering a slogan: “The US can do better than corporate capitalism.” Let that be an idea and a debate that this renewed movement can engage. Doing so would give an immense gift to the US and the world. It would break through the taboo, finally subjecting capitalism to the critiques and debates it has evaded for far too long – and at far too great a cost to all of us.

• Richard Wolff is participating in a day-long teach-in at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York on Tuesday 4 October. This article is based on remarks he will be addressing there at 6pm local time

on his site

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The Best Among Us

By Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

CHRIS HEDGES is an award-winning journalist and political activist whose previous career in the mainstream press included stints with the New York Times and other prominent media.

¶

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