“These men combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil doings. I regard this contest as one that will determine who shall rule this free country-the people through their chosen representatives, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”
- Teddy Roosevelt

I recently received correspondence from a reader in response to some of USTV Media’s postings regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement, accusing OWS of being anti-business, with the target of its ire being misdirected away from “the politicians” where it is claimed it belongs.

“But seriously, i’m a business owner and I can hardly stand to hear about the corporations taking everything over and being greedy. I highly recommend that you put your anger where it belongs–with the politicians. They write the rules and the laws and corps wouldn’t get away with anything without them. Corporations and banks are in business to make a profit, you can’t be pissed at them for that.”

I reference this note because I think it highlights what comprises a fair amount of the criticism surrounding the OWS movement. It also brings to light the nature of the disinformation about the movement which is currently infiltrating the national discourse. This kind of criticism makes some bold assumptions about what those supporting OWS understand or don’t understand about the true nature of the conditions which are currently ailing our country, politically and economically. I find that a number of people who make these assertions have rarely ever talked with people who are actually participating or supporting the movement. Nor have they taken much time to read from the multitude of statements from the people involved, or read any one of hundreds upon hundreds of articles, interviews, analysis, etc… of what this movement is about and what is animating the purpose of its efforts?

The statement that protesters don’t seem to know “why” they are protesting is a favorite talking point from the establishment media mouthpieces, particularly those who work for corporate television. The protestors know why they are there (the fact that “Wall Street” is in their name should serve as a helpful hint). However, those who retain ownership over most of the media in this country have no interest in seeing the mass majority of citizens hear those critiques too clearly, as those audiences might start agreeing with those critiques, and thus join the chorus in demanding a little more (a lot more, actually) accountability in the workings of our system of governance towards the well-being of the great majority of “we the people,” for whose interests it is ostensibly dedicated to serving.

As for the letter writer’s points which they highlighted in their discourse to me about “businesses already paying taxes,” well, most do, yes. Unless that is, you are business big enough and/or influential enough to purchase the lawmaking (or law enforcing) apparatus enabling your enterprise to avoid that act of citizenship responsibility (or yet still, to receive generous subsidies from the public till).

The USTV Media website has literally thousands of articles and postings from over the years on topics which touch on this and related issues, which we welcome people to peruse through for further insight and background on why we have the perspectives that we do on this issue. This excellent piece by Matt Taibbi, does a really good job in elaborating on the whole meme of OWS being “anti-business”, and the accusations that the movement is inherently anti-success, anti-wealth, which is slathered like bad propaganda throughout the corporate media.

Focusing in on this point, Taibbi states:

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning, they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs, not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That’s why it’s so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn’t disappointment at having lost. It’s anger because those other guys didn’t really win. And people now want the score overturned.

All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren’t jealous and they don?t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like: (Go Here for more).

As Taibbi would state, there is a clear distinction between supporting business and condoning criminal fraud. (Al Capone was a “businessman”, too, by the way). There is also simply no comparison whatsoever between relating what the average, American businessman and investor is familiar with in regards to what their daily experience of what business is, to what these behemoth corporations which are larger than a majority of nation states are engaged in. Half of the 100 largest economies in the world are nation states, but corporations, and some of them are larger than all but the top 10 biggest countries on earth.

The evidence as to to the extent of our political and economic corruption by certain cliques of business interests is simply incontrovertible and overwhelming. Critics, such as the letter writer, can choose to dismiss such critiques as “crap,” but I would assert that doing so is much more an act of ideology than empirically-reasoned analysis.

The letter writers says that we should address our anger towards “where it belongs–with the politicians.” But what about those whom these politicians are meaningfully responsive to, the one’s whose interests they are preeminently representing? Hint: it’s not you or I. There is a reason why the prevailing lingo on Wall Street refers to Goldman Sachs as “Government Sachs”; it is because of the literally hundreds of that firm’s employees and managers who have served in government, and then moving back and forth between those government positions and the private firm that they were supposedly regulating while in government. All the while maneuvering the law and the full weight of the coercive power of the state to serve their individual business interests. This is what a large percentage of these major corporations have been doing with dramatically increasing success over the past decades.

The OWS protests understand this growing plutocratic manipulation of the political process by these narrow interests. The basic thrust of their arguments are very much in accordance with the foundational principle which animated the original American Revolution. That revolution was, if about anything, was a rebellion against the idea that government was a tool to confer privilege on insiders.

Gerald Celente sums all of this up very well in this short interview. He nails it, simply and straightforwardly. He is especially pointed in his criticism of the crushing regulations against average businesses, which are often actions designed to favor the major corporations that use government as their tool for those special privileges for themselves.

In the end, these current protestations spreading the land are about injustice and inequality of access to the law. As Alan Grayson

“Wall Street wrecked the economy three years ago, and nobody’s been held responsible for that. Not a single person has been indicted or convicted, for destroying twenty percent of our national net worth, accumulated over two centuries. They’re upset about the fact that Wall Street has iron control over the economic policies of this country, and that one party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and the other party caters to them as well. That’s the truth of the matter.”

And if anyone thinks any of this is no longer happening, or that these banks are not simply huge corporate welfare queens whose idea of garnering profit isn’t simply to loot the American treasury to cover their actions, and failed schemes, they need to read this, again from Matt Taibbi, who reports that…

Bank of America is shifting a huge collection of Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts onto its own federally-insured balance sheet. This move of risky instruments off the uninsured Merrill balance sheet onto the commercial bank’s balance sheet was done to prevent Bank of America’s creditors from attacking the firm with collateral calls and other sorties. Essentially, an irresponsible debtor, B of A, is keeping a loan shark from breaking his legs by getting his rich parents to co-sign his loan. The parents in this metaphor would be the FDIC.

The FDIC naturally is not pleased with this development, but the Fed, the supreme banking regulator, is apparently encouraging this move. Here’s how Bloomberg characterized this move:

In short, the Fed’s priorities seem to lie with protecting the bank-holding company from losses at Merrill, even if that means greater risks for the FDIC’s insurance fund.

Again and again, the Fed proves it has no appetite for allowing Wall Street to eat its own pain, and continually encourages banks to stick the government with its losses and bad assets. This move will allow Bank of America to keep a Band-Aid over its disastrous financial situation far longer than it would be able to in a genuinely free market. People should be outraged at this development.

Yes, you can blame the politicians for this, but as Celente points out, who are these politicians, and where do they come from? Who are they actually serving? Half of Congress are millionaires, and their “service” within that body almost invariably nets them even more lucrative opportunities with powerful financial players after their stints in legislation-making, often with the same firms they were ostensibly overseeing in a regulatory role.

The excellent Acadamy Award-winning film Inside Job details much of this in much more insightful, often enraging detail. It highlights why there is so much legitimate anger at banking institutions for their special type of “profit making” which they so cavalierly engage in with impunity.

Perhaps the best single piece yet written on this whole issue comes from Glenn Greenwald, with his “Immunity and Impunity in Elite America”.

Thom Hartmann provides some good overview on this, as well, particularly in regards to the history behind it, with this excerpt from his book Unequal Wealth.

“In the absence of the controls recommended by the Founders and early state regulation, corporations have continued to grow in size and power without limit. But they haven’t done it just by creating new wealth in the economy. 

Much of it, instead, has been accomplished by increasingly consolidating existing wealth, moving it out of the hands of the middle class and into the hands of the top few percent of Americans economically. Of course, some new wealth has been generated, but nowhere near enough to explain the observable facts.”

Of course, there is, unfortunately, a seemingly limitless supply of similar reports, history, studies, evidence, etc… detailing the ongoing trends of how more and more continues to find itself into the hands of fewer and fewer. And how this trend is not the natural result of success in “the market,” but rather the result of concerted and designed policy.

If people choose to consider these efforts to counter this looting of America as misguided, then so be it. But to challenge them as illegitimate is another matter entirely, and one that should be challenged by open, empirically-informed debate as much as can be managed in what is left of an arena of democratic discourse in this country.

“When wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the multitude, excite emotions of disgust; when, instead of drawing forth admiration, it is beheld as an insult upon wretchedness; when the ostentatious appearance it makes serves to call the right of it in question, the case of property becomes critical, and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security.”
- Thomas Paine; The Rights of Man

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

Ohio ballot Issue 2 has been the focus of massive effort and expense. When the Ohio Legislature passed Senate Bill 5 into law, the unions and professional organizations that represent public employees in Ohio went to work to put repeal of the law on the November 8, 2011 ballot. They want to stop this law. Why?

The Wall Street wisdom is that they want to protect pensions and benefits. While that claim is partly relevant, it is not the real story. The law’s main purpose is to de-fund the remaining voices of workers in Ohio and in America. If AFSCME and the OEA are not allowed to collectively bargain in any meaningful way, and are forbidden to withhold their services if their employer will not negotiate a contract in good faith, the unions are done here. Some will cheer if that happens. I will mourn the end of workers’ rights and the establishment of Wall Street rule over us- the impending death of American democracy. Flawed as it has often been, I still prefer constitutional democracy to corporate rule, also known as fascism.

What are workers’ rights? Corporations provide capital that they have borrowed from shareholders, investment banks, or that is provided by private owners. They use this to set up operations, fund payroll, and acquire assets, such as real estate holdings or subsidiary companies. What do workers provide? They provide labor. It sounds simple but what it really means is that they sell their time, a finite and irreplaceable commodity, to the employer. Their physical and mental energy is also part of the bargain. This frequently includes intellectual property rights as well as day-to-day problem solving. Physical labor, done under less than ideal circumstances, often results in disease for workers. Environmental and ergonomic hazards are normal parts of working conditions even today. Workers’ Rights, therefore are either the legal or contractual obligations of the employer to the worker. The right to negotiate as a group to make contracts with the buyers of their labor, the right to fairness in compensation, the right to be safe and healthy in and around the workplace, the right to reasonable agreements about how much time they will sell to the employer, and the right to retire from their labors at a reasonable age without being cast into untenable poverty, reasonably can be counted among them.

Many corporations do not want to be held accountable for any of this, either legally or contractually. That is why they propagandize against government agencies like OSHA that are charged with protecting workers, calling them bloated government bureaucracies and so on. It is also why they despise unions. Unions act on behalf of workers. Collective bargaining groups (unions) are the worker’s version of a corporation. Unions try to get good contracts for members, and to protect them from harm. Unions also however work to set professional standards for the professions they represent, which makes them different from for-profit corporations, which exist only to make money. Corporations that offer shares for sale to the public are legally required to do nothing that deters moneymaking.

The lies and spin about the reasons for this new law serve the banks and their interests. At one time, before banks and finance houses were deregulated during the Reagan years of the1980s, many American workers in both shops and offices had guaranteed pension plans. The peace of mind that resulted from that was considered the norm, and most working people thought that it was never going to change.

When it did change, it was a bonanza for the financial institutions. They had a massive supply of new customers who needed to set up individual retirement accounts, Roth IRAs and 401Ks. These new retirement plans differed from each other, but the most important differences were between them and traditional pensions. They were not overseen by workers or worker representatives, but only by newly gutted bank regulations, and they were not guaranteed at all. If the market fell dramatically, as it did in 1987, you would lose the money you were saving to retire.

While the Reagan administration worked to deregulate banking, they also diligently went about weakening and destroying labor unions. The first thing Reagan did was to take a hard line against the air traffic controllers. When they could not get a deal for safe working conditions, they went on strike. Reagan fired them all and replaced them with people who had no union. This was a harbinger of things to come.

While federal employees who were represented by unions had to be replaced with other Americans, private sector employers could simply move operations to countries where people lived in abject poverty and governments were openly for sale. Mexico, Indonesia, The Philippines, and other industrializing parts of the world became the manufacturing centers. In many of these countries, unions are absolutely forbidden, so workers there are at the mercy of employers where safety, working conditions, and pay are concerned.

The United States government did nothing to interfere with the runaway shop phenomenon, and when computers made it possible, white collar sweat-shops replaced American clerical and other office workers as well. The George W. Bush administration even hired people in Asia to field IRS calls, and the Bush campaign in 2004 used Asian call centers to process donations for his Presidential re-election campaign.

While all of this was going on, police, firefighters, and schoolteachers were attempting to cope with pressures to give up benefits. Since there is no coherent health care system in the US, the market has been able to dictate terms to everyone about the cost and availability of health care. Health insurance costs have skyrocketed while pharmaceutical and insurance company profits grew consistently, and hospitals have been substantially privatized. (Interestingly, the for-profit hospital phenomenon first gained a foothold in the south, where public services and unions have always been weaker because of the corporate-friendly state and local politics throughout the region.)

Teachers, police, and firefighters gave back pay and benefits repeatedly. They accepted a higher share of the cost for health insurance, retirement, and in many cases accepted wage freezes that saw them losing ground compared to the cost of living. Yet they continued to perform. Many people are unaware that teachers in American schools spend hundreds of dollars a year out of each of their own pockets for the supply of their classrooms. This is true in urban, suburban, and rural school districts.

Public workers are irreplaceable, but the wealthy malefactors who favor this law do not want to pay for them. It doesn’t matter to them how well children in public schools fare- their own children do not attend them. It doesn’t matter to them whether your neighborhood is safe from fire and crime. They don’t live in it, and where they do live, they might rely on private security forces that patrol their gated estates.

American students cannot be taught to read and write by Philippine eleven-year-old factory workers, fires in Ohio communities cannot be put out by assembly line workers in Chinese factories, South Korean carmakers cannot make our streets safe, and Guatemalan raspberry pickers cannot protect the public health of Ohio’s citizens.

Public service workers cannot be outsourced out of their jobs, so the corporate interests adopted a different strategy: Buy the government with corporate campaign contributions and pervert the people’s government into a servant of Wall Street. There have been many ways corporations influenced elections in the US in the past, but now that the US Supreme Court has said that corporations can spend as much as they want on elections, the gloves are off, and they are doing everything they can to thwart the public and get their way.

There are many wealthy individuals in America who recognize how dangerous this boundless greed has become. They have begged our government to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans and try to balance the load a bit. Corporations are not people however, they are legally chartered entities whose only motivation is moneymaking. By their very nature they work to remove as many obstacles from this path as they can. That is why corporations must be prevented from shaping our political discourse the way they are trying to do on Issue 2. When corporations replace the democratic voices in our politics with dollars, they become a danger to the public good.

In Tennessee, a state hostile to workers’ rights, there was recently a huge scandal because the local government of a rural township could not afford to operate its fire department, so it began charging an annual fee (in addition to taxes) to residents for the promise of protection. If you did not buy in, the fire department was legally obligated to let your house burn down if it caught on fire. There was a reason that people used the government to develop public fire departments in the 1800s.

The obscene travesty in the non-union privatization crazy south is the logical conclusion of the process that is being begun in Ohio by the new law. The people behind this movement want to return us to the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons. We cannot go down that road.

We must make the government the instrument of the people again. The first step is before us now:

We MUST REPEAL this union-busting, anti-public law by VOTING NO ON ISSUE 2 on Tuesday, November 8.

The people of Ohio will refuse to accept this Wall Street-inspired callousness from our government. We want a government that acts on behalf of its people, rather than doing the bidding of the shady political action committees (PACs) funded by out-of-state multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers. We refuse to accept elementary school classrooms crammed with more students than desks, taught by teachers who cannot even afford to live in the communities they serve. We refuse to accept a condition where the government of our state cuts taxes on people in the highest brackets, and then immediately sets about making up the difference in the budget by punishing those who protect and educate us.

The Astroturf (fake grassroots) campaign to support Issue 2 says public workers get forty three percent better compensation than the average Ohio worker. This claim is false; it is a statistical manipulation, a lie. This propaganda was created by The Heritage Foundation, a Wall Street supported Republican Party think-tank. The goal of the lie is to divide and conquer. It is to convince Ohioans that none of us deserve pensions or fair health care. “You are at our mercy for your medical care and retirement, why shouldn’t they be too!” they may as well ask. The real question is: Why should any of us put up with this race to the bottom for everyone but the wealthiest and most powerful? We must draw this line here and now. We cannot let the make-nothing, own-everything vampires kill the last voices for ordinary people in America.

Protect your public services. Protect the right of workers to make contracts with their employers.

Vote NO on ISSUE 2!

- Ed Lacy, USTV Media

Bill Moyers delivers what may be the single most clearly succinct, historically astute, and morally inspired argument affirming the need for and validity of the Occupation movement sweeping the country and the world. Anyone who questions what the Occupy Wall Street movement is about, or why it should be supported, needs to read/watch this. Here are a just a few excerpts…

…[T]he property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges, is a common deference to cash…

During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains a century after the Constitution was ratified, the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed: “Wall Street owns the country…Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us…Money rules.”

That was 1890. Those agrarian populists boiled over with anger that corporations, banks, and government were ganging up to deprive every day people of their livelihood.

———

Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking: “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And that’s why in public places across the country workaday Americans are standing up in solidarity.

———

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist- friendly press. In the middle of the last decade - four years before the Great Collapse of 2008 - the editors of The Economist warned:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first) Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace….Everywhere you look in modern America - in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts - you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working stiffs.

———

And so it does. Evidence abounds that large inequalities undermine community life, reduces trust among citizens, and increases violence. In one major study from data collected over 30 years (by the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger ) the most consistent predictor of mental illness, infant mortality, educational achievements, teenage births, homicides, and incarceration, is economic inequality. And as Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow has written, “Vast inequalities of income weakens a society’s sense of mutual concern…The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the meaning of civilization.”

The historian Gordon Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on The Radicalism of the American Revolution: If you haven’t read it, now’s the time. Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness.” This democracy, he said, changed the lives “of hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”

———

Even as the [U.S.] Chamber [of Commerce] was doubling its membership and tripling its budget in response to [Future Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell’s manifesto, the coalition got another powerful jolt of adrenalin from the wealthy right-winger who had served as Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, William Simon. His polemic entitled A Time for Truth argued that “funds generated by business” must “rush by multimillions” into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and “the heretical strategy” [his term] of the New Deal. He called on “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount “a veritable crusade” against progressive America. Business Week magazine somberly explained that “…it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have move.”

I’m not making this up.

And so it came to pass; came to pass despite your heroic efforts and those of other kindred citizens; came to pass because those “men of action in the capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else.

———

So once again: Take heart from the past and don’t ever count the people out. During the last quarter of the 19th century, the industrial revolution created extraordinary wealth at the top and excruciating misery at the bottom. Embattled citizens rose up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting, that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new relation should be established between the haves and have-nots”… Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle the patriot’s dream.

For the full text of this insightful and inspirational speech, go Here.

You can also watch Moyers at the event in which he delivered it Here…

Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, calls out the political class, and the fraudulence of our political system today. This short little interview pretty much sums up the key reasons of the hows and whys behind the corrupting nonsense which plagues governance. The revolving door nexus between corporate power and government, the “money junkies” which live off the body politic, and so on and so on… American electoral politics is “The Presidential Reality Show,” and Obama is the star actor.

And yes, Wall Street = Washington D.C. = Wall Street = Washington D.C = Wall Street = Washington D.C. = Wall Street = Washington D.C…

This is a must see.

This is one of the better pieces yet written about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its meaning to future course of American (and global) politics. On a related note, it does continue to strike me how much people continue to insist on driving this movement into a ‘left/right’ paradigm, and try to apply labels identifying political ideologies from two centuries ago onto a modern, originally evolving process. A process that is badly needed by our civic society. And this is something that Bernard Harcourt touches on effectively in this highly recommended piece.

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

———-

One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.

This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”

———-

In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

Read the Complete Article Here

This is one of the best, most thoughtful responses to the anti-Occupy campaign I’ve read. Fair, inclusive, and accurate.

A few selections from it…

I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something.

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week? Do you think you can? Because, let me tell you, kid, that’s not going to be as easy when you’re 50 as it was when you were 20.

————

Look, you’re a tough kid. And you have a right to be proud of that. But not everybody is as tough as you, or as strong, or as young. Does pride in what you’ve accomplish mean that you have contempt for anybody who can’t keep up with you? Does it mean that the single mother who can’t work on her feet longer than 50 hours a week doesn’t deserve a good life? Does it mean the older man who struggles with modern technology and can’t seem to keep up with the pace set by younger workers should just go throw himself off a cliff?

And, believe it or not, there are people out there even tougher than you. Why don’t we let them set the bar, instead of you? Are you ready to work 80 hours a week? 100 hours? Can you hold down four jobs? Can you do it when you’re 40? When you’re 50? When you’re 60? Can you do it with arthritis? Can you do it with one arm? Can you do it when you’re being treated for prostate cancer?

And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth?

Here’s how a liberal looks at it: a long time ago workers in this country realized that industrialization wasn’t making their lives better, but worse. The captains of industry were making a ton of money and living a merry life far away from the dirty, dangerous factories they owned, and far away from the even dirtier and more dangerous mines that fed raw materials to those factories.

The workers quickly decided that this arrangement didn’t work for them. If they were going to work as cogs in machines designed to build wealth for the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies, they wanted a cut. They wanted a share of the wealth that they were helping create. And that didn’t mean just more money; it meant a better quality of life. It meant reasonable hours and better working conditions.

Eventually, somebody came up with the slogan, “8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, 8 hours of sleep” to divide the 24-hour day into what was considered a fair allocation of a human’s time. It wasn’t a slogan that was immediately accepted. People had to fight to put this standard in place. People demonstrated, and fought with police, and were killed. They were called communists (in fairness, some of them were), and traitors, and many of them got a lot worse than pepper spray at the hands of police and private security.

But by the time we got through the Great Depression and WWII, we’d all learned some valuable lessons about working together and sharing the prosperity, and the 8-hour workday became the norm.

————

All the” 99%” wants is for you to remember the role that Wall Street played in creating this mess, and for you to join us in demanding that Wall Street share the pain. They don’t want to share the pain, and they’re spending a lot of money and twisting a lot of arms to foist their share of the pain on the rest of us instead. And they’ve been given unprecedented powers to spend and twist, and they’re not even trying to hide what they’re doing.

Read The Complete Post

Want to know what the Occupy Wall Street movement is about? This short video pretty much sums it up. It is up to each of us to decide where we stand in relation to the increasingly blatant need for systemic reform in our global political-economic system today.

This is an excellent summary of just how much the Republican Party has devolved over the past few decades, the detrimental effects that has been having on American civic life, and what kind of dire consequences that has on America’s future.

Most striking is the fact that it was written by a career GOP operative, who has worked for Republican lawmakers for decades. Distressed by what he was seeing happen in American policy making, and particularly the party he has worked for for over 30 years, he speaks out with this published work. This piece should be passed along to every person who continues to claim any form of ideological adherence to the modern Republican party.

Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats’ health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats’ rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

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It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

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It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

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The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a “high functioning” institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

“Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.”

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media.

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This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians. Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

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Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing…

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I post this because I think it is rather telling - and accurate - in detailing how far out, and how far gone the leaders and policy makers of what has become the modern GOP have become. As someone who was raised steeped in conservative traditions, and a supporter of them, I find this kind of intellectual dishonesty (or perhaps simply stupidity?) exhibited by modern so-called “conservatives” (”reactionaries” is a much more accurate description) to be truly disturbing.

And I’m certainly not interested in getting into some kind of argument about how the members of both the two corporate parties distort the historical record in order to make cheap political points for themselves. Regardless of the distaste I may have for what passes for the Democratic party today (and yes, it is the Democratic party, not “Democrat party), trying to generate some kind of false equivalency between them and the GOP by saying “They do it, too!” simply doesn’t wash in the grand picture of things. Plus, there is nothing as lamely irrelevant as resorting to the “they do it, too” argument as a defense against one’s own transgressions, particularly of the intellectual and ethical kinds.

This piece has a whole host of some gems of disinformation, and even outright propaganda. Particularly surprising is the extent of selective forgetting being pushed by the Right today regarding September 11. Arguments over the merits of the New Deal certainly can be engaged in by those with intellectual integrity. But when those arguments are also encouraged by the same people who want to write Thomas Jefferson out of American history books, and push arguments about how slavery really wasn’t all that bad, then Houston, we’ve got a problem. Extra kudos to this author for bringing up one of America’s foremost quack historians, David Barton. Barton is to American history what biolgist Trofim Lysenko was to Soviet agriculture.

1. Michele Bachmann on the founding fathers and slavery
2. Secession was fine, dandy and legal
3. Forgetting September 11?
4. Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History”
5. The New Deal did harm
6. David Barton
7. Texas Textbook Revisions
8. Jim Crow wasn’t that bad

Conservatives’ view of history is either a warm, patriotic tale of American exceptionalism or a tale of Big Government oppression. It glides over or misrepresents progressive triumphs like the New Deal or Great Society and ignores unpleasant episodes like the Jim Crow era. Only studying the United States’ “best hits” ignores the contributions of minorities, labor and other groups.

“Historians constantly challenge each other, and understandings of the past evolve (for whatever reason),” William Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, told The Nation. “But these people are different in that they aren’t really reality-based and don’t have much standing or credibility among scholars.”

For American youth—particularly those subjected to revised textbooks in Texas—the political revision of history may have important consequences. Imagine a future when children know about the contributions of Phyllis Schlafly but not César Chávez, have heard of the “Reagan Revolution” but not the Bush recession. “It can pollute the educational process,” Link said. “A good education involves a search for truth and understanding. To an extraordinary degree you have to validate what you say with evidence…. that’s the accepted professional standard.”

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John Adams, not my favorite American President (Alien & Sedition Acts, anyone?), but he certainly had his redeeming points. Particularly his astute observations as detailed in this piece by Andrew Trees…

“Swilling the planters with bumbo” was what it was once called — the Colonial American tradition of treating voters with gifts during election campaigns, particularly plying them with rum (including a concoction known as bumbo). Virtually everyone who could afford the practice did it, including George Washington, who served 160 gallons of rum to roughly 400 voters during the 1758 campaign for the Virginia House of Burgesses. Needless to say, this was a prohibitively expensive way to campaign, and it meant that politics was largely the preserve of the rich.

I was reminded of this phrase when a recent Center for Responsive Politics study of 2009 data found that 261 of the 535 members of Congress were millionaires (this probably understates the actual number because members of Congress aren’t required to report their homes as assets). When looking at both houses together, the legislators weighed in with a hefty median income of $911,000. For the Senate alone, median income was an astounding $2.38 million. This is not too shabby when the median household income in America is roughly $50,000.

In other words, politics has increasingly been turned over to the wealthy.

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This unfortunate trend of the wealthy monopolizing higher office shows no sign of slowing. Election financing laws continue to erode, and income disparities seem likely to grow for the foreseeable future.

John Adams railed against this development more than two centuries ago. At the time, the prevailing view was that government positions should pay little, if any, salary so that only men with virtuous intentions would fill them. But Adams pointed out that this so-called solution did not ensure the election of virtuous men, only the election of rich men. Simply paying a reasonable salary, he argued, was “one of the best securities of liberty and equality.”

Adams’ great fear was that we would have what he called “an aristocratic despotism”: the possibility of “the rich, the well born and the able acquir[ing] an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense.” In typical fashion, his judgment of that aristocracy was unstinting in its harshness. He wrote of “the weakness, the folly, the pride, the vanity, the selfishness, the artifice, the unbounded ambition, the unfeeling cruelty of a majority of those (in all nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence.”

Over time, most Americans came to agree with Adams, and that is why public office now comes with a regular salary, health benefits and all those other attributes we associate with most jobs (ironically, those benefits are becoming increasingly rare for nongovernment employees).

With the modern return of the practice of “swilling the planters with bumbo,” though, we now find ourselves in a new age of aristocratic despotism. You need only study income distribution over the last quarter of a century to see that the nation’s policies have been slanted overwhelmingly in favor of the rich. Between 1979 and 2004, the after-tax income for the top 1% skyrocketed 176%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. How did the bottom fifth do? They squeezed out a measly 6% gain.

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