Tag: protest

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.

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  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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#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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

#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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

The revolution starts now

Jon Stewart, as always, has found a way to cut through the absurdity of a mainstream press trying to marginalize a growing populist movement just two years after it overplayed the conservative Tea Party’s import, helping the right-wing movement grow.

But rather than explain this, I’ll leave it to Mr. Stewart to explain:

Let’s be clear. The protests in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street are more than a side show. They are a natural outgrowth of the disregard with which the government and America’s financial elites hold the American people. Like Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in Network, they are screaming “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore.”

That’s why the specifics of the demands are irrelevant.

It’s true, as many have pointed out, that they don’t have a list of well thought out demands, but the demand to have such a list is just their elders trying to bring them to heel. The fact is, they don’t have to know just what they’re doing, any more than a writer or filmmaker has to understand the book being written or the film shot. It’s not a necessity. It’s not the price of admission. If there’s one thing that’s obvious and heartening, as my friend, the novelist Beverly Gologorsky, said to me while we oldsters circumnavigated the park, “The overwhelming feeling I have is that no one here is planning to go home any time soon.”

Never have they been more needed. Theirs is certainly a movement, like the ones in the Middle East, inspired in part by economic disaster and aimed at an airless political as well as corporate/financial system controlled by the 1% left out of the signs in the park hailing the 99% of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street hopes to represent. It’s a world set on screwing just about everyone in that vast cohort of Americans without compunction, shame, or even, these days, plausible deniability.

And screw us they have. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not abated, the cost of health care continues to rise, as do taxes on middle class taxpayers (in the form of state and local taxes), and we are told that our problems are being caused by greedy teachers and cops and not by a war-addicted government whose election campaigns are funded by the very people who should be brought to account for the country’s downward spiral.

But the TV pundits still make fun of the hippies in the crowd (forgetting the absurd site of grown men dressed as colonial revolutionaries and wearing tea bags from their tri-cornered hats). What we are witnessing in lower Manhattan and throughout the country is exactly what is needed — a rebellion designed to take back the American government from the financial elites, who think they own our government.

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Bloomberg, check your cops

The video from today’s protest, via Huffington Post and You Tube. Huffington Post has not been able to verify when exactly this is from — it is supposed to be tonight — but it really doesn’t matter. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg needs to order an investigation.

  • 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.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.