The GOP, the Media and Occupy Wall Street ... by gimleteye

When the media finally began to pay attention to protests gathering under the banner of Occupy Wall Street, the GOP response recalled how the 1960's protests against the Vietnam War energized American conservatives. Until the demonstrations by assorted students and labor and political activists (socialists, communists, etc.), the right wing had been defined by racism (southern and Democratic) and the stigma of the John Birch Society.

The counter-response came from the US Chamber of Commerce and wealthy industrialists. They invented a new political machine that now, nearly half a century later, has turned out to be the most successful in US history. It is a GOP dynamo incorporating the imperatives of the Christian right and the "free market". The juggernaut owes its success to a message machine book-ended by Fox News and the Murdoch empire.

The way that current media accounts of the Wall Street protesters focus on the "hippie-like" quality of the protesters recalls the 1960's. While this generation of disaffected youth have little in common with their predecessors, (deserves a longer explanation), the defenders of the status quo look very much like the same vested interests who organized in response to the perceived threat of the 1960's disorder in America.

Over the weekend, GOP House leader Eric Cantor appeared on the nightly news reading from a script that might have been cribbed from the 1960's: he darkly inveighed against the "mobs" that, he worried, could disrupt the economy. Cantor is too young to have experienced the 1970's and the aftermath of a failed cultural revolution. But he is a political offspring of its result, and in his remarks he appeared to be laying the case for "law and order" to sweep the streets clean.

The media hasn't picked up on the Cantor/GOP Morse Code, or has but is not revealing. That would not be a surprise. There is a certain Kabuki-theater like quality to the response of the media. On 60 Minutes, a brave effort by Lesley Stahl with GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to spring open the views of one of America's most powerful corporate spokesman was deftly parried. The interview ended abruptly with Immelt wondering why Stahl was "rooting against GE". Actually, all Stahl was trying to do was to channel some of the questions, concern and anger about the behavior of corporate America in recent decades. Immelt gives a polished interview, but his last comment -- delivered reflexively-- spoke volumes about the sense of power and privilege that not only dismisses the Occupy Wall Street'ers out of hand but is ready to move aggressively in its own defense. Ergo, Cantor.

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon a long essay I wrote in 1995 and unsuccessfully tried to publish. (Pre-blogger days) Bill Clinton was president. Jeb Bush was mounting an effort, that would eventually be successful, to be governor of Florida. The essay was shaped around a weekend planning charrette in Broward County to determine the fate of wetlands that were eagerly sought for development. Its title was: "Suburban Sprawl: In The World Series of Unfunded Mandates in Florida, Some Think The Bases Are Loaded In the Bottom Of The Ninth".

That was more than fifteen years ago. "Escalating taxes, congested roads and highways, overburdened schools, and deterioration of the natural world are driving Americans in metropolitan regions to distraction, pitting neighborhoods and communities against each other. Then, there are the ghostly features of the suburban landscape; broken families, alienation of individuals from public institutions, and evasion of personal responsibility, all tangled in the costs of sprawl. These are the facets of the debate on unfunded mandates, although you are unlikely to hear them discussed in Congress soon; how sprawl, encoded in planning and building codes, creates external costs that are recaptured as taxes or debits to quality of life whether the public wants to pay them or not. The pressure is on to find solutions, any solutions, to a dilemma that knows no boundaries."

The essay was written when a Democrat, Lawton Chiles, was governor. Chiles was under immense pressure-- and caved-- to development interests in West Broward and Miami-Dade. And that was before the dot.com boom and bust and the political juggernaut that pushed Jeb Bush in Florida and George Bush from Texas to the White House. Before a housing boom and bust delivered by the Chamber of Commerce and corporate power as "what the market wants"; a cliche that the media papered over while millions of Americans followed speculators driving the US economy into the deepest ditch since the Great Depression. In 1995, I hoped that the Democrats could be persuaded to do the right thing in Florida: protect our environment, our Everglades, and give more than lip service to the need to provide the right incentives and penalties for destroying wetlands; the excuse to pave over what was left of an environmental ethic that was, then, scarcely a decade old.

As to it being the "bottom of the ninth inning"; I hoped for a rally to save the day. Maybe that day is now.