Occupy Wall Street – Hank Kalet

Quote of the day: #OWS edition

From Guy Horton’s blog on Huffington Post today, in the aftermath of the New York crackdown on Occupy Wall Street:

So is this the death of Occupy? My suspicion is that this is, in fact, just the beginning. What form will it take next? It may not have Zuccotti Park anymore, but it increasingly has the intellectual and emotional landscape of the American psyche.

They can shut down the protests and end the physical occupation, but the fight to reclaim American democracy from the elite is just beginning.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Capital makes a clean sweep

Make no mistake, the nationwide purge of protesters from public parks is not about the comportment of the protesters, no matter how much the powers in cities like Oakland and New York want to paint it that way.

The sweeps are about capital and protecting the 1 percent in the cities, the people who pay the campaign bills for elected officials and, therefore, demand allegiance.

To understand how this works, one just needs to listen to the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg:

“New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself,” the mayor said. “What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.” He said the protesters had taken over the park, “making it unavailable to anyone else.”

New York also is the financial capital of the world and the place where the first police-triggered violence took place. It is a city in which the mayor has shown nothing but hostility toward the protesters from the inception of the occupy movement. In his mind, the bankers had nothing to do with the financial crisis and unrelenting economic meltdown that has left one in six Americans un- or under-employed.

The anger that has triggered these protests is real. Shutting them down will not make it go away. Asking the protesters to turn to the ballot box or petition Congress is, as the protesters know, a waste of time and ignores the history of social movements, which almost always begin with an aggrieved group taking to the streets and creating a moral imperative for change. That’s what the protests are about and it is why protectors of the 1 percent like Mayor Bloomberg have little sympathy.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

A conversaion with the OWS movement

I met some of the protesters marching from New York to D.C. today.

Read it here.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Supercommittee of the 1 percent

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Congressional focus on the deficit at a time of severe economic malaise is downright foolish and dangerous.

And, as Dean Baker points out, it also is just one more example of how deformed our politics has become. The existence of a supercommittee, first, demonstrates a distortion in priorities. We need a rebirth of the commons, a sense of common good and shared sacrifice that has disappeared.

That means wrestling the economy back from the legalized criminal enterprises that control our economic lives. Corporations control our economy and our political system and they have used their power to rig things — to create, in Dylan Ratigan‘s words, “a platinum citizenship” — and protect their own prerogatives.

The supercommittee’s focus on “entitlements” — it’s not should we cut Social Security, but how much should it be cut — even as both sides avoid going after the bog boys just shows where Congress’ loyalties lie.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

#OccupyWallStreet is about more than reform; it’s about reformation

This essay from the Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which ran today in the Guardian and on Common Dreams (where I saw it), fairly sums up the failed readings of the #OccupyWallStreet protests by the traditional media and political classes.

The expectation among the power elite is that the challenge to power will coalesce into a traditional reform agenda, one that tunes up the system and makes it a bit more fair without challenging its core assumptions.

But there is something else going on here, a desire not for nominal reform but for reformation. As Žižek makes clear:

The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

The ultimate solution is not a half-measure jobs bill, like the one being pushed by President Obama — or even a much more robust, New Deal-like bill such as the one being proposed by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (which I support in the interim) — but a dismantling of our failed economic system.

Capitalism, as it now exists, commodifies everything and makes it subservient to profit. Consider health care. Rather than focus on health, our system is focused on cost; the power is held corporate health firms (insurers, drug companies, hospital chains) and all decisions are viewed through the lens of minimizing costs — even if it means denying legitimately needed care. And rather than overthrow the system, our elected representatives — who get their campaign money from the industry — opted to leave it in place with some minor tweaks.

The same dynamic holds when dealing with the financial system, the manufacturing sector, the provision of gas and electric — and the use of the commons. Visit a mall — our new main streets — or a planned community like Twin Rivers in East Windsor, where homeowner rules supersede decisionsof the general voting public.

What is important about the protests is the protesters’ sense of “the commons,” the sense that there is something that binds us all together and something that we all hold as important.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.

So forget the calls from people like Bill Clinton and Barney Frank to come up with some kind of detailed plan (or in the case of Franks, the odd accusations that the protesters were somehow to blame for the failure of the political classes to do the right thing). Clinton and Frank — and Obama and most of the Democrats — have no interest in revolution. Minor changes that might ameliorate the pain of capitalism while leaving the financial classes whole are what they are after.

The protesters know that even if the politicians and pundits don’t.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.