For nightly network news to portray "Occupy Wall Street" as our own "Arab Spring" is like putting honey out for bears. Good for bears. Bad for people.
NBC last night trotted out some expert no one ever heard of, drawing parallels between disaffecting youth. That is wrong. As flat out wrong as the notion to the unemployed, under-employed, or educated college students with no job prospects, that the economy is in risk of a "double dip recession". Watch the television images from the networks: the visuals are picking out "hippies" in the crowd. In the Daily News, Mike Lupica writes, "There were college kids down here, and old hippies in a world where you don't even hear that word - hippies - much anymore. There were Vietnam vets who marched against that war once, and young women in sleeping bags and guys handing out a broadsheet newspaper with this headline on the front: "Declaration of the Occupation."
Some history of bear traps like this. Those television images of hippies marching against the war in Vietnam in the late 1960's and early 1970's helped transform the right-wing in America. Up to that point, the right-wing had been mainly organized around segregationist John Birchers. A 2005 article from AlterNet by Don Hazen described how the right-wing was transformed: it was "... panic among conservatives, especially in corporate boardrooms, that capitalism was under serious attack, and something drastic had to be done about it. The National Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a former head of the American Bar Association and member of 11 corporate boards, to write a blueprint of what had to be done. The result is one the most prescient documents of our time. The memo lays out the framework, the goals and the ingredients for the conservative revolution that has gained momentum and power ever since. Two months after penning the memo, then-President Richard M. Nixon appointed Powell, a Democrat, to the U.S. Supreme Court."
What is so interesting about the current disorganized series of protests is that nothing-- and I mean, nothing-- has been heard from the "Tea Party" whose televised events are staging areas for Republican causes. The Tea Party that is now standing up is a different one, from that co-opted by the radical right, and its organizers need to understand how the media portrayals will fuel the same opposition that arose those long decades ago.
"Powell told the conservatives that they needed to confront liberalism everywhere and needed a "scale of financing only available through a joint effort" focused on an array of principles including less government, lower taxes, deregulation and challenging the left agenda everywhere. The conservative right, starting with seed money from the Coors Brewing family and Richard Mellon Scaife's publishing enterprise, moved forward to implement virtually every element of the Powell memo. It is a story of how the conservatives – in spite of political differences, ego, and competing priorities – were able to cooperate and develop a methodology that drives their issues and values relentlessly.
Starting with just a handful or groups, including the Heritage Foundation, in the early '70s, the conservatives built a new generation of organizations – think tanks, media monitors, legal groups, networking organizations, all driven by the same over-arching values of free enterprise, individual freedoms and limited government."
Eventually and over time, those values became the Potemkin Village through which big government and corporate subsidies deformed democracy. The protesters in NYC and Miami and other cities around the nation ought to be thinking of themselves as the inheritors of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, which followed the complaint of taxation without representation.
Today's parallel and object of protest is a democracy that taxes people more than corporations and empowers corporations over people. The fig leaf of the 2008 Tea Party covers up the fact that the progeny of Powell are radicals and extremists who glorify corporate power and authority: this is the Manifest Destiny of Bush Republicanism that is still, despite the economic crash, alive and well in so many forms because none of powerful interests have been held accountable, at all, for their roles in steering the economy on the reef from which the remnants are being scavenged. (On the tiny scale, in Miami-Dade County, read G.O.D.'s description of the effort, promoted by county commissioner Lynda Bell, to further empower rock miners and big ag in South Miami-Dade over environmentally sensitive lands.)
For a new generation of political activists, some advice: don't let the mainstream media paint you into the same corner as protesters in the 1960's. Those images of latter-day free spirits in Manhattan are meant to serve up old antagonisms that generate significant campaign money at election time for candidates who, among other lies, pose as sympathetic to Tea Party rank and file.
Keep it simple: corporations are not people and must not have the same rights as people. There is a litmus test.
7 comments:
Gimlete, as I wrote yesterday, corporation & UNIONS are in the same category. I don't know why you avoid this, but that was the Supreme Court Ruling!
I agree with what CATO wrote yesterday on this as well, and that is rare!
As to the litmus test, I'd challenge the Unions to get out of the NLRB before I'd challenge corporations.
People losing their homes are subjected to property taxes, paying for out of control public employee pensions. That's a bit closer to home here in Miami Dade, not Wall Street! That's something I would and do protest about.
These protests are so misguided and just plain stupid, in my opinion. And, I'd say the same for the Tea Bagger's as well. But, heck, that's what freedom of speech is about. As long as they're not violent, so be it.
Thanks for the blog, its useful. For some good debate and analysis on the Occupy movement check out Organizing Upgrade on the back and forth:
http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2011/09/a-response-to-sally/
And "Anonymous". Unions and corporations the same thing? I'm sorry, but working people organized don't donate a tenth of the $$ that corporations do.
Actually, I think this deserves a little more clarity. The entire reason why the county had to look to property taxes is because the state has been shaving its responsibility for over 30 years- cutting programs and pushing the responsibility onto municipalities.
The state can legally tax corporations and the wealthy, but by law the county can only look at property and sales taxes. If Miami-Dade wanted to maintain its dismal ranking in public spending per capita (among the lowest in the nation), it would have no other option than to look at property taxes.
Property owners and low income folks targeted by sales taxes suffer because the state refuses to ask high income earners to pay their fair share.
I very much appreciate the efforts of the protesters, and will join in any similar local efforts.
And, ohhh, the irony of JP Morgan’s mafia-esque pay-off/gift of $4.3 mil to the NYPD for “protection”.
-Melbourne, FL
From Huffington Post today, Josh Silver: The Wall Street protests represent the most potentially transforming political movement in generations: finally a revolt against the root problem that corrupts and paralyzes U.S. government. And the nascent movement might actually succeed if we stop turning ordinary Americans against each other along the tired and destructive battle lines of left vs. right.
For the past forty years, the expansion of unchecked corporate power has taken over Washington and state capitals. Armies of industry funded lobbyists, PR firms, think tanks, fake "Astroturf" groups and billions in campaign contributions have quietly corrupted a vulnerable system of government and seized control.
This juggernaut has decimated basic consumer protections and created the biggest gap between rich and poor since the Great Depression. It created the financial meltdown and the Great Recession. It is why nearly 50 million Americans lack health insurance. It has created a political system that is more like a heroin addict: dependent on billions of dollars that determine who gets elected, which laws get passed, and which don't. Both major political parties are addicted and beholden.
While the protests are proudly decentralized and leaderless, the unifying theme is "revoking corporate personhood" and "campaign finance reform" that would reverse the January 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that lifted the flood gates to unlimited corporate money in elections.
Some call the protests a progressive response to the Tea Party movement, and play right into the hands of the corporate juggernaut, whose proxies -- along with a compliant media -- have mastered the art of turning ordinary Americans against each other instead of the real problem.
This is a right-left issue if there ever was one, and the potential to build an unstoppable movement is unprecedented. Just last weekend, liberal and Tea Party activists joined together for an unusual conference about the feasibility of a constitutional amendment to check undue corporate power in elections and government.
The right-leaning Daily Caller wrote, "Tea party activists made common cause with anti-corporate liberals this weekend at a venue quite unlike the firebrand populist movement: Harvard Law School. The improbable allies met to discuss the possibility of a new constitutional convention to address what they see as fundamental failures in the American system of government."
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Grassroots liberals and conservatives agree on this issue. But many argue that there are too many differences between them to allow a unified movement. To them I say, find common ground or fail. Fixing this problem will require getting the fox to put a lock on the henhouse. That requires the kind of heat Congress felt after Watergate, when they last implemented sweeping reforms. A unified movement is not the same as seeking compromise between sold out Democratic and Republican politicians; it's about finding common ground between real people across the nation who are all suffering.
76% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats opposed the Citizens United decision. A long-running Gallup poll shows that Americans politically self-identify 40% conservative, 35% moderate and just 21% progressive.
Just look at the numbers. The way we win is by rallying around a democracy reform agenda, being thoughtful about how we talk about it, and building the kind of broad-based political movement that cannot be stopped.
What does a democracy reform agenda look like? Concrete answers are notably absent at the Wall Street rallies, so let me suggest this starting point: we must support an omnibus democracy agenda that both reduces the role of money in elections and politics, and enfranchises and protects voters so that our democracy enjoys full participation.
The actual policies that will save our democracy are wonky, and the list is long -- I will save that for a subsequent post. In the meantime, remember: before any lasting structural reform will advance, we must build a diverse movement of millions that cannot be ignored. Americans from the right and left must abandon the polarizing rhetoric from our leaders and our TV screens, and join hands in support of a 21st century democracy reform agenda that reclaims our government from moneyed special interests.
The future of our nation depends on it. The time has come. The beginning of a much larger uprising is at hand. The journey begins at the Occupy Wall Street website or Rootstrikers.org.
The Citizens United case stands for the simple idea the "Congress shall make NO LAW restricting the freedom of speech". Period. A law that restricts corporate (and union and non-profit) political speech (and the money they want to spend on that speech) is unconstitutional. Its really that simple. Don't blame the Supreme Court; blame the First Amendment!
Do you want the government limiting how much money a newspaper or blogger can spend on publishing their political ideas? No? Well, the NY Times is a corporation. Can Congress limit the editorial page because of that? Of course not. But the leftwing narrative is that Citizens United was a right wing victory for corporations. Bullshit! It was a victory for free speech for ALL incorporated entities: corporations, AND non-profits AND unions. Its just that the Left so opposes corporations and the profit motive that they also reject any result that corporations can use to a greater extent than their precious unions. For the Left, the ends that justify the means, and that isn't fair. Freedom for all or freedom for none!
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