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The Two Anniversaries Of September
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» basdini a répondu le Sat 22 Sep, 2012 @ 11:53pm |
 Coolness: 145175 | this may be TLDR for most people, if so skip it and do not comment
I'm not much of writer and I meant to get this out sooner...a little lazy these days I guess... well give it a read and tell me what you think... Much respect to dr. T for schooling me... ----------------------- September marks two anniversaries this year. The first, is the four year anniversary of the onset of the crisis. The second, is the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests. These two anniversaries bear some reflection. Concerning the first, the crisis has now become something more akin to a constant drone in the background. It is no less acute, merely more quotidian. We never really recovered even though we have been (on several occasions) told by those in the know that we have. Profits are back, jobs for most of the world, are not. Concerning the second, how could something that began so well, with so much promise amount to nothing? The fall of 2011 was truly breathtaking to see, for once the focus was on the right people, those who caused the crisis. The people in the streets were angry and out for justice. It was a worldwide movement that spread to the four winds in the blink of an eye. However, in the end, it seemed to be heavy on style and light on substance. I would like to take the opportunity to ponder these two anniversaries in the hopes of drawing some lessons from them that we might apply in the future if we are ever to find our way back. As the crisis enters its fifth year the guiding principle on the part of governments is austerity. Cuts, cuts, and more cuts. All, in the service of the moneyed interests whose greed and recklessness precipitated the crisis. Through the ratings agencies the economic royalists have sanctified austerity plans to the level of a holy diktat. All the while, retaining their quasi-government role. The ratings agencies, Standard and Poor, Moody’s and Fitch are tasked with rating investments. Both public and private pension funds by law, in many places around the world are forbidden by their charters and bylaws to invest in anything bellow certain investment level grades. Despite this seeming massive conflict of interest, this state of affairs continues to persist unnoticed by media and government. They are private entities whose declared purpose is to accumulate a profit for their share holders and they serve as what is meant to be an objective and non-partisan arbitrator in the public realm. This has led to a ferocious logic of ‘downgrade and cut’; downgrade by the ratings agency of the credit worthiness of a nation’s sovereign debt, cutting of the budget by governments. No where has this been more apparent than in Greece. And where have they cut? Most deeply into the programs of the social safety net and the stuff of ‘civilization’, what Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the floor of the senate called ‘the things which have given the lives of working people in this country a modicum of stability in their lives’. Sadly, the governments’ hopes of balancing the budget by cutting are misguided to begin with. It may be counterintuitive, but even in its own terms the program of cutting the budget to balance it, doesn’t work. In a time of economic downturn, when the private sector of the economy is depressed the government is the only source of economic activity; cutting the budget makes things worse not better. The reason for this is obvious. If for example the government decides to slash the budget of the post office, terminating half its workers these people all become unemployed they then need unemployment insurance and other forms of social assistance. This exasperates the budget, it puts more strain on it not less, the budget deficit grows it does not shrink. Again nowhere has this been more apparent than the case of Greece. The Greeks have been furiously cutting the budget since 2010 and have yet to deliver a balanced budget and aren’t predicted to do so next year. Given that cutting the budget isn’t the answer, we need to face the reality of our situation, we need a recovery. For a recovery however we need to first reexamine what we mean by a recovery and ask some of the most fundamental question of economics and what indeed an economy is. Recent figures indicate that fifty six percent of the United States’ economic activity is derived from financial services. The United States’ economy is described as a ‘service’ economy, where two thirds or more of its activity is achieved through ‘services’. This is a sad state of affairs. The problem is that we have forgotten what an economy is supposed to do. An economy is primarily about people getting the things that they want and need. It’s about stuff, literally physical things. This means production. One small factory that produces machine tools is worth more in the real world than the multitude of financial instruments owned by a hedge fund. You can’t eat a derivative, you can’t drive a derivative and you can’t use a derivative for medical care. We need to start grappling with the physical constraints of the real world and leave the parlor games of the financial services industry (and I wince as type that last word) behind us. We need to use the great powers of science, technology and human reason to fulfill their great destiny of human uplift, this means rising standards of living. Reactionaries will sneer, arguing that the only way we can return to production in the western world is by smashing the unions. This can be dismissed, Germany is an economic power house in terms of production and it has some of the strongest unions in the world. This brings us to Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street needs a fighting plan to oppose the malfeasance of the moneyed elite. Occupy Wall Street needs a recovery program. Never before in history have we seen a movement spread so broadly so quickly. Across national borders, in days, around the world in weeks. We are after all only celebrating its first birthday. Fifty two short weeks ago no one had heard about the movement. Indeed there is a lot to celebrate. However the movement has fallen short of its goals. Perhaps that is the key, the goals were not well articulated enough to begin with. At the start there was a lot of rage directed towards Wall Street which was entirely warranted. Unfortunately, this strong feeling never managed to coalesce into a plan of action to redress the grievances that the ninety nine percent had against the one percent. For any social and political movement to be successful three things must be present, program organization and leadership. I will address each of these in turn. One of the hardest things for the non initiated to understand is why it seems the Occupy Wall Street movement hasn’t been able to say what it’s ‘for’. It is clear what it is against, the big banks domination of our society, but what it is actually ‘for’ in the sense of what reforms must be taken to fix this situation, isn’t very obvious. This brings to the foreground the thorny issue of demands. This became apparent early on, with some luminaries of the movement suggesting that the movement should never have demands as this would prevent it from being co opted by the ruling class and would keep the movement from dividing itself. This is completely unacceptable because this has led to a situation where there is lots of noise but little in the way of things being done. It also prevents the movement from growing. Working families around the world do not have time for this type of thing. They are suffering in the here and now and need a political program which will have some ability to mitigate the powerful forces of economic depression which are bearing down hard on them. We need to consider which demands will be the most effective at defending hard working people from descending into a form of barbarism as a result of the current breakdown crisis. Food, housing, medical service, the availability of technical training and education badly need to be protected from those who would loot them for their own benefit. Given this the following set of demands seems appropriate. This list of demands is primarily for the United States and consequently would need to be amended for use in other countries based on specific needs: 1) No cutting or gutting of the social safety net. 2) No foreclosures on any family’s primary residence. 3) Freeze and forgive the student debt. 4) 1% Wall Street sales tax on all stocks, bonds and securities 5) The use of national credit creation facilities for infrastructure to jump start a recovery Lets look at each one of these in turn: First, we need to take measures to preserve the social safety net. In places where they have already been cut, roll them back. We’re going to need these programs to protect the viability of our labor force into the future. We simply cannot have millions of people falling into destitution leaving them nothing but their eyes to cry with. It is inhumane and makes bad economic sense as well. Second, in the 1930s during the height of the depression the administration of FDR passed the Fraser-Lempke act, this provision allowed homeowners and farmers to keep their property if they could make an agreement concerning new repayment terms with their creditors and have it approved by a judge. As it stands today, over seven million homes have been pushed through foreclosure since the beginning of the crisis, this means. Given the average size of a family of between four and five people, over thirty million people have gone through the horrors of having their home repossessed. This is unacceptable, we need a Fraser-Lempke redux which will provide for a freeze on all foreclosures for five years or the duration of the crisis which ever comes first. Third, as it is today the student debt bubble in the United States stands at just bellow a trillion dollars. Most of the students owe on average thirty to forty thousand dollars each, they are having trouble finding jobs which simply pay them enough to make their loan repayments. We have all heard the stories of new grads returning home to their parents because they simply can’t afford to live on their own. These students have been reduced to a level of indentured servitude. Some of this money is owed to the federal government, this makes it easy to, at the very least, change the terms of these loan agreements if not freeze the loans and indeed forgive them outright. The rest of the money is owed to private banking institutions, many of whom received bailout money. The federal government can and should put pressure on these banks to amend the conditions of the loans. No one likes this situation, but this is no way for millions of young people to begin their adult lives and something must be done to remedy this else we risk a demographic crisis as this state of affairs is impeding the formation of families and indeed the normal course of life for these young people. Fourth, the heart and soul of any program to fight the banks must include some form of taxation on their speculation. A policy of ‘ban and tax’ on their derivatives seems appropriate. Ban the most dangerous practices, tax the rest. We may need to admit that we simply cannot feasibly live in a world where credit default swaps exist. They and other exotic financial instruments create too much volatility in the markets. It’s worth remembering that this crisis began in 2008 with too much ‘systemic risk’, nothing has been done to alleviate this. Other derivatives can be taxed. By some estimates there are over one and half to two quadrillion dollars of derivatives in existence at any time, with a total turn over every year of between three and four quadrillion dollars. A one percent transaction tax on these securities would in theory generate between thirty and forty trillion dollars of revenue per year which could easily be split between the local and federal governments. With this tax, the budget crisis could be rectified at the stroke of a pen. It should be stressed however that if such a tax were implemented speculation would decline, this should not deter us as speculation is a social evil. One thing is clear, if there were a one percent sales taxes on securities, practices like flash trading and program trading (which see millions of transaction done a second) would no longer be viable as the tax bite would be too deep to sustain them. Again this is something not to be lamented but rather celebrated and perhaps would allow us to return to an economy that is less like a financial shooting gallery and more geared toward production. One additional proviso is worth mentioning, there could be a one million dollar a year exclusion so that individuals who trade in stocks and bonds for their retirement aren’t unduly harmed in the process. The importance of taxing Wall Street on its turnover, cannot be underestimated, if we are to make a difference, if we want to start to push back against the financier oligarchs, then we must hit them where it hurts, in the wallet. Taxing the rich is good but it simply doesn’t get us far enough, there just aren’t enough wealthy individuals to create enough revenue, taxing the same people on their speculative turnover however does take us quite far in terms of revenue creation, and it has the added benefit of taxing something which is essentially parasitical on the real economy. Finally, all of the preceding measures are of course worth while and indeed necessary in terms of class defense, however they remain just that defense. None of them alone or together can reverse the misfortunes that have befallen society as a whole. To do that we need to go on the offensive, we need a recovery. As it stands today bankrupt zombie banks that are stuffed to the gills with toxic waste in the form of kited derivatives, receive interest free or nearly interest free money from the Federal Reserve. If a hedge fund or an investment bank needs an infusion of capital to cover or refinance what effectively amounts to bad gambling debts in the form of unsavory securities, then; as has been the case through the bailout, stimulus, and the various QE programs, they receive it, with no questions asked. These institutions which receive the bounty of a Federal Reserve rate that has hung around the zero percent mark for well on four years, haven’t used this opportunity to lower the rates of credit cards or mortgages or even to increase lending to ordinary people and businesses. Rather, what they have been doing is pocketing the difference by borrowing from the Fed at this low rate at then using this money to invest in whatever speculative endeavor suits their fancy be it in Hong Kong, Singapore or Istanbul. So, all this cheap credit to Wall Street has done is create more hot money around the world. While state and county governments teeter on the verge of bankruptcy, Citibank and Morgan Stanley are flush with cash. This situation is untenable and has not created any type of a recovery in any sense for ordinary people. To change this, we need to force the Federal Reserve to purchase the bonds of states, cities, counties and entities like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at low rates. The bonds could be at a rate of 0.1 percent and have a term of fifty or a hundred years. Last year Cal Tech University issued hundred year bonds, if Cal Tech can do this then there is no reason the City of Philadelphia or the Port of Miami can’t. The Fed can purchase these bonds for cash through their discount window. If the Fed is reluctant to do this then it needs to be nationalized and subsumed as a bureau of the treasury. One thing must be made clear, the bonds are for infrastructure maintenance and creation. They have to be for things that bring real world economic benefit in terms of capital goods, not speculation and not financial services. Much of the infrastructure in the United States is already in such a terrible state that most of it will need to be simply rebuilt. Roads, rail, canals, hospitals and anything else that represents a key national interest in terms of infrastructure. A real plan to crisscross America in maglev trains needs to be drawn up. Power generation needs to be addressed, a program to construct one hundred new nuclear reactors and maintain the existing ones is well advised. Schools and hospitals will also need to be constructed. All the health and education legislation in the world will be for nothing if we don’t have the facilities to deliver on them. All the great projects that have stood on the drawing board for the last fifty to a hundred years need to be considered. We should be asking; ‘What are the real game changers in terms of economic development across the whole world that we can start trying to grapple with?’ The Panama and Suez canal are of this magnitude. We need to find others and start thinking of plans to develop them into real world structures. Along with this, all of the things of civilization, the great libraries, concert halls and museums. We now have a well rounded list of demands that should be used as the leading edge of agitation for change in the United States. They are by no means perfect and indeed as mentioned earlier will need to be amended for use in other countries based on specific needs. It should be understood that the demands are constructed to provide for as many of the segments of society that are suffering to get relief from some of the pain that the crisis is causing them. The list of demands should also be understood to operate as a quorum, in that we should aim for at least four of the five over a fixed term, say the next four years, and certainly, not less than three. The demands move from least important to most important. That’s not to diminish the first three in any way but to underline the fact that the last two are critical. If the goal is to smash the power of Wall Street then there is no success without a Wall Street sales tax and national credit creation, to jump start a recovery. Now after formulating the program aspect of the Occupy Wall Street movement we can move to deal with organization and leadership, which as we will see are deeply inter-related. If we take the Occupy Wall Street movement and compare it to the Tea Party movement of a few years before the results are indicative of deep structural problems in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tea Party succeeded in electing 60 members of the house and half a dozen senators. One year on, the Occupy Wall Street movement has yet to elect one member to the congress or as far as I know to any serious level (state senator, mayor etc.) Dishearteningly, not a single law has been changed because of agitation. As the presidential race winds down, the campaign for both candidates centers on the economy but little if anything is informed by the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is amazing to consider after nearly a year of protest how narrow the bounds of economic debate are. Both candidates are committed free traders and both are committed to deep cuts. They are both set on a program of austerity. The only difference of course is that Obama promises the death of a thousand cuts where as Romney promises something much more overtly ferocious along the lines of a one quarter decrease in the standard of living of Americans. Rumor has it that the moneyed elite of Wall Street financiers has thrown its support behind Romney and the evidence of this is seen by a preponderance of donations to his camp over Obama’s by the financial services industry. Time will tell. How was the tea party so successful yet Occupy Wall Street seems, at least up until today, to have come up so short? The problem lies in organization. The Tea Party elected and contested primaries of Republican members based on a simple maxim ‘if you supported the bailout you’re out’. They went to all of these congressional districts and agitated and organized structures and pursued a rigorous campaign of political grassroots level guerilla warfare. If we look for the primary organizational structure of Occupy Wall Street we find it to be the General Assembly. These general assemblies sprung up around the world independently of each other. They take place in the occupied areas usually a park or a square. The format is different at each occupation. They are meant to be experimental projects in direct democracy. They are run according to rules that are decided upon by the group as whole and administered by facilitators. The goal is consensus. It’s difficult sometimes to say what consensus is, but it’s fair to say that it ranges from somewhere around ninety percent to unanimity of agreement by the people in the occupation zone, of a proposal that can be made by anyone. The overarching idea is to ‘build the world you want to live in at the grass roots level’ not just preaching revolution but living revolution. I shall return to the notion of revolutionaries shortly. The problem with this organizational structure is that it’s not very nimble. Many participants have complained that not much gets done and that when things do get done they move very slowly. Another complaint is that the process is directed too much to the immediate, like what to have for lunch and things to do with the encampment itself. When the process is directed to larger issues it’s primarily focused on education and less focused on actionable plans and coordination with other occupations around the world. No where was this more obvious than with the formulation of demands. After about two weeks in to the occupations, as September was turning to October still no concrete demands had immerged. At one point two members of Occupy Wall Street appeared on the Keith Olbermann show. They presented what was long list of grievances and it ranged over money in politics all the way to issues of sexism and racism. The two members of Occupy Wall Street compared themselves to the American Revolutionaries of 1776. These two members of Occupy Wall Street are right in some ways, the revolutionaries of that time did present ‘a long train of abuses’, indeed the declaration of independence can be seen as a list of ‘He has, He has, He has’. However, the members of Occupy Wall Street who presented their list of ‘demands’ on Oberman’s show forgot one important thing. The American Revolutionaries rounded out their list of grievances with one important action point. This was something along the lines of, given all these grievances ‘we will wage revolutionary war to remove the sovereignty of the crown over ourselves and this territory’. The moral of all of this should be clear, if you want to fight Wall Street, then you better be well organized and directed towards attacking them through concrete action against them, otherwise watch out because they are going to run circles around you. It’s time to begin to consider using other structures at the very least in parallel to the General Assembly to pursue the fight against Wall Street. Michael Pryzner who is prominent in the occupy movement in California recently appeared on Press TV following protests at the conventions of both the Democrats and the Republicans. When asked where his presidential candidate was if he didn’t like either of them, he answered that the process of democracy was a sham and rigged from the beginning and that the only democracy that we had was the democracy of the streets protesting these two conventions. This is hopelessly impotent. If the only democracy we have is in the streets why bother protesting at these conventions. If it doesn’t matter which candidate is elected why should the Occupy Wall Street movement debase itself by looking like a small dog nipping at the heels of the political establishment. Where is the occupy candidate? This I think points the way to a new organizational paradigm for Occupy Wall Street. It’s time for Occupy Wall Street to begin electing delegates to a higher organizational body. The movement up until now has prided itself on being a leaderless one, based on the consensus of the people involved. This will simply no longer do. The delegates could be elected to a body that would oversee the coordination of the various occupations across the country and indeed the world. Instead of having to protest the other two conventions Occupy Wall Street should have had its own, where the issues that badly need to be addressed could have been addressed. It should be clear to everyone involved that the old Maoist quip that power comes from the barrel of a gun is wholly inadequate. Rather, power comes from a political organization. From structures that can move millions of people into action in concert. Let’s be clear, power is the goal. The members of Occupy Wall Street are very reluctant to speak in these terms, to be seen as focused on power is somehow uncouth for them. I wrote earlier of the notion of living a revolutionary life, I must stress that the point of Occupy Wall Street isn’t to have the feeling of being alive during a revolution but to be revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries want power. Real revolutionaries say ‘give me power and I will do this, this, and this’. Mere protest is for wimps and phonies. The goal has to be to seize power, and if you can’t take all of it take a piece of power and use that to further the aims of the movement. Occupy Wall Street badly needs leaders, who can be elected to bodies that represent broad cross sections of society which are endangered by the ongoing economic breakdown crisis. The questions for people who want to be elected as delegates to our higher bodies should be ‘what are you doing for each and every segment of society that is feeling the heat? What are you doing for old people, what are you doing for students, what are you doing for workers, what are you doing for the unemployed, what are you doing for minorities?’ The movement can’t be about everyone’s favorite pet project it has to be about the demands that are going to preserve society as whole from descending into a world of Dickensian cruelty reminiscent of the early 19th century. It can’t always be ‘me, me, me’ you have to be willing to fight for other peoples demands especially if you hope to have them fight for yours. Now after looking at the three things that the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to make progress in its fight against the economic royalists, that is, program organization and leadership, I would like to return to Greece, where we might find some inspiration for the future. Earlier this year the Party of Syriza under the leadership of Alexi Tsipris took his party from four percent of the electoral haul in an election to twenty seven percent. Tsipris and Syriza represent the leading edge in the battle against austerity and the finance capitalists in Europe. They have a program of demands (chief among them is their unwillingness to work with any party in the parliament who favors austerity) they have an organization (they are an amalgam of sixteen different faction that once feuded with each other) and they have leadership (Tsipris himself). They are now the official opposition in the Greek parliament and they stand a reasonable chance of being elected, especially if the current conservative austerity minded party falls. This is what success looks like. This is what needs to be emulated. If we are to have any hope of wrestling power from the likes of Citibank, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, then we need to focus on creating a program, implementing some sort of a structure of organization and pushing leaders up who can speak for our interests. The alternative is more dithering more bumbling and more inaction. We can’t afford that anymore, the stakes are simply too high. |
| I'm feeling surly right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» MtGreylock82 a répondu le Sun 23 Sep, 2012 @ 7:11am |
 Coolness: 28290 | Excellent article. The key to the Tea Party's success was organization. Unlike the OWS leaders who were novices, the principal organizers of the Tea Party had been involved with politics since the 1970s. Richard Armney (former House Majority Leader and head of Freedomworks), Grover Norquist (head of Americans for Tax Prosperity) and Ralph Reed (head of the Faith and Family Coalition) all served under President Reagan and were instrumental in rallying a demoralized conservative movement into opposing Obama on every piece of legislation. They raised money, recruited candidates for office and stoked the sentiment many felt in Red State America that Obama's central agenda was to redistribute income to people who do not deserve help (the poor, the uninsured, students, minorities etc). While they will probably fail in their goal of electing Mitt Romney (due to Romney's incompetence), the Tea Party will elect more members to the House and to the Senate, thus making Obama's second term pointless in terms of putting new liberal policies into law.
Can the OWS and other liberal groups fight back against the Tea Party? Sure, but they have to become serious players in the political game and focus on a few issues that are simple for the American people to understand. OWS needs to establish lobbying groups around the five agenda points you outlined like the Conservatives have in pushing theirs (low taxes, less regulation, less government involvement) and force Democrats to either accept their terms or face primary challenges in future elections. [ en.wikipedia.org ] [ atr.org ] [ ffcoalition.com ] [ www.freedomworks.org ] |
| I'm feeling santo trafficante right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» JasonBeastly a répondu le Mon 22 Oct, 2012 @ 2:22am |
 Coolness: 76685 | Why don't you just start a blog, put that in it, and link to the blog instead? Ravers are illiterate bastard children of acid casualties with severe brain deformities anyway. |
| I'm feeling a strong desire to kill somethin right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» basdini a répondu le Mon 22 Oct, 2012 @ 4:14am |
| Coolness: 145175 | no blogging allowed in the PRC... |
| I'm feeling surly right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» BonusBeats a répondu le Wed 24 Oct, 2012 @ 12:25pm |
 Coolness: 30815 | Originally Posted By BASDINI
no blogging allowed in the PRC... No blogging at all? Not even, I don't know, cooking blogs? |
| I'm feeling your mother right now.. | |
The Two Anniversaries Of September
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