Occupy Wall Street – Page 2

Rebuilding the republic one protest at a time

#OccupyWallStreet is changing the political landscape.

Like all important movements, the anti-corporate protests have altered the political dialogue and could — hopefully — break the grip that the moneyed classes have on our electoral system.

How do I know this? Because even the establishment is shifting its allegiances. The early coverage of the protests was dismissive when it wasn’t downright snarky, but now we are seeing editorials in The New York Times applauding the protesters — even as U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, one of the more liberal members of the House applauded the protesters while accusing them of allowing the GOP takeover of the House (funny how it wasn’t the Democrats or the president and their timid incrementalism that was to blame) on Rachel Maddow earlier this week.

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The protests are making a lot of establishment types uncomfortable, which is where their political power grows from. The occupiers, as Jim Sleeper calls them in Dissent

aren’t storming established economic and political institutions as much as they’re bypassing them and old news media that’s enmeshed in them. They want the American republic to declare its independence from the market forces that are driving the old journalism and governing the government.

They are

reminding us that republics have to be more than just aggregators of investment and consumption patterns. They’re proving grounds for citizens who learn to coax one another beyond algorithm-driven self interest to find their larger, better selves by pursuing goods in common that consumers and investors can’t. They’re challenging both market and state power with “cooperative power,” whose elusive strengths the writer Jonathan Schell has followed in Gandhian and American civil rights movements and Eastern European revolutions of the 1980s.

Frank’s argument that the protesters should take to the ballot box is as corrupt as the system he ultimately is defending. Frank has served a long time, has taken contributions from the same industries being protestsed — $1.3 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, according to Opensecrets.org — and the Dodd-Frank legislation that he touts, while an improvement over the status quo, is exactly the kind of incremental reform that is the problem.

As Sleeper says, the

next logical step from park occupations and new-media swirls would be into massive non-compliance: imagine 50,000 recent graduates declaring that they won’t repay their exorbitant loans. The irony is that it could happen by “default,” in both senses of that term, as thousands of students, like millions of homeowners, are simply unable to repay. The difference would be that no one could throw these recent students out of college or take back the diplomas they’d earned. The challenge would be to organize the political, logistical support they’d need in order to resist intimidation and prosecution by collections agencies and sheriffs. Beyond a certain point, the current outrageous lending system would be unable to enforce the rules enacted by its own bought-and-paid legislators.

A republic depends ultimately on public virtues and beliefs that neither markets nor governments can provide. It needs the oxygen of a deliberation and voluntarism that a newly democratized journalism may summon, even more than Paine’s pamphlet did, but that it cannot ensure. So far, at least, the occupiers have issued and answered the summons with courage and comity, as well as with their digits. Soon it will be up to the rest of us.

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.

The fallacy of free trade (another reason to #occupywallstreet)

There is no doubt that trading across borders can have a positive impact on American jobs, but only if trade pacts are structured to support workers and consumers and not to create a race to the bottom of the wage barrel.

That’s why unions and much of the manufacturing sector are opposing new trade deals with Pacific Rim partners. The problem with the pacts, as critics point out, is that they are designed to allow companies to chase labor and have little to do with expanding markets.

The primary benefit of the deals, they say, is that corporations are able to produce goods more cheaply for consumption in the United States.

“We don’t have a free trade agreement with Great Britain, which could actually buy American products,” said Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, which opposes the agreements. “Instead we have this penchant for doing free trade agreements with countries that are low-cost manufacturing centers. Why? Because multinational companies aren’t looking at this and saying, ‘It will be great to make things in Ohio and send it to South Korea.’ No, they’re looking at this and saying, ‘It will be great to make things in South Korea and send it to Ohio.’ ”

Making things in South Korea may make them cheaper, but it means fewer jobs here — and the ones that do remain end up paying less. That flies in the face of Henry Ford’s dictum that you have to pay your workers enough to allow them to buy your products.

The problem is that we have bought into the false notion that we can have truly free trade and that free trade implies a lifting of rules. The fact is, all trade pacts have positives and negatives — and even the freest of trade operates under specific rule sets. What we think of as free trade today is a pro-corporate construct that only considers cost. A different set of rules is possible that could prioritize sustainability, high-paying jobs, workplace safety, etc.

The trade issue, like so much of our economy, has been framed in such a way as to benefit the corporate classes and not the rest of us — which is just another reason the #occupywallstreet protests continue to grow

#OccupyWallStreet: Here’s as a good a reason to protest as any

From The Huffington Post:

While most Americans aren’t expecting their incomes to rise with the cost of living in the near future, more than 60 percent of Wall Street professionals say they anticipate their bonuses will be higher or the same as the bonus they earned in 2010, according to a recent survey.

Sixty-two percent of Wall Street workers said they’re expecting a bonus that’s in line with last year’s or higher, according to a survey from eFinancialCareers.com. And while still a firm majority, that’s down from last year, when 71 percent of survey respondents said they expected the same or higher bonus than what they received in 2009.

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: The Times gets it — a surprise

The New York Times has weighed in on the protests in lower Manhattan and its verdict is a bit of a surprise, given that much of the media coverage has been pretty dismissive until now.

The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people.

While the protest was triggered by college-age men and women, it is “more than a youth uprising.”

The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.

It is an analysis the left has been making since before the crash of 2008 and the failed bailouts of American industry. The restructuring of the American economy over the last 40-plus years — the move away from manufacturing to finance — has meant that the economy no longer supports the working and middle classes. Wage-earners have no place in an economy built on speculation, which uses money as raw material to make more money without leaving anything of value behind.

It leads to a redistribution of wealth — but not one that aids the poor. It pushes money upward, into the hands of those who already have it, stagnating wages and leaving the poor with few options and no safety net.

Think about it: The economy, by traditional measures, is stalled and yet we have witnessed record corporate profits. Unemployment — both the official number and the broader measures designed to describe the real employment situation — remains at numbers not seen since the early 1980s. We are laying off teachers and police officers, allowing our school buildings, bridges and roads to decay, but we are not willing to bump up tax rates for the rich to Clinton-era rates — which were not exactly onerous.

How has this happened? First, we are the victims of a corporate coup. Corporations control our lawmakers and run our government.

Second, we have stayed silent. The left, in particular, has allowed itself to be co-opted by the Democratic Party, silenced by a fear that breaking ranks with the Democrats will create an opening for a Republican victory at the polls.

In practical terms, this has been a disaster. President Barack Obama, called a socialist by the know-nothing right, has repaid support from his left flank with derision and triangulation, following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton.

So the protests stand as the best news on the political front in years — a chance for the left to separate itself from the Democrats and stake out their own responses to the shifting economic sands on which we are forced to rebuild.

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.