Kiss Up, Kick Down

What does it say about our modern values that we always give the benefit of the doubt to the wealthy and assume the worst about the poor? Here's an article from the Guardian about how we punish the poor for being poor.

Everybody agrees it’s wasteful to throw money at the poor. A lazy way of thinking. But the rich? So much is given to them you couldn’t begin to throw it, it has to be delivered in semi trucks, in supertankers. Everybody’s giving money to them, so it must be a good thing. That’s lazy too, and wasteful in much larger amounts. The rich get so much it seems to justify giving them everything. Rich people pass us in the street and without thinking we hand them the contents of our wallets. We buy them drinks and lunch, pay their parking meters, polish their cars, kiss their feet. Here's an article from Vox describing how the rich get richer no matter how lousy they are at their jobs, assuming they have one.

Poor people, though? Ugh. Let’s criminalize poverty. Let’s fine them for being poor and charge them a fee for being unable to pay the fine and imprison them when they cannot pay the fee for nonpayment of fines. This accomplishes two things: it teaches the poor a lesson––not to to be poor––and it adds to the enormous profits we pay to the for-profit prison industry and its wealthy shareholders.

Our society is so clever though. Always innovating. Inventing new ways to kiss up and kick down. Devising new methods for discouraging and penalizing the poor who are already discouraged and penalized and new rituals for worshipping the rich.

Our urban landscape has a new feature: spikes to prevent the homeless from lying down to sleep.

New apartment buildings are being built with separate doors for the rich and the poor. (This way the developers get a tax break for housing us poor folks without forcing the rich to tolerate our company in the elevator.)

Our society used to dish out indignity to one easily identified segment of the population, people with darker skin. The system was called Jim Crow. What will we call this new system?

Sadly, our vocabulary is deficient. We aren’t innovating there. We don’t have words that adequately describe this galloping unfairness. Why? Because in our kissing up we are careful not to cause offense to our betters. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of the rich by explaining how monstrous their privileges are. We don’t want to understand the ways they are robbing us all blind.

Let’s get to work on a fairer vocabulary. Terms like “wage theft” are just coming into use. Let’s see it used more often. Until it was labelled as theft, it seemed perfectly legal for rich employers to do what they were doing. We need to use our language. It’s the only weapon we have left.

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” ~Davis X. Machina

Good Economics vs. Bad Economics-You Choose

It's time to choose sides. Despite what you hear on the money programs and from the Wall Street cheerleaders, there are very good economists who think austerity economics is a bad idea. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, our most recent Nobel economists, are on the Democratic side of this argument, the side of the 99%. Others are stepping up too.

"On November 13th 2011, economists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst drafted an open statement to the Occupy Wall Street movement pledging their support. Since then, more than 250 economists from around the world have added their names. Read more at econ4.org "

To be fair, there are two sides to this argument. Having watched the documentary Inside Job, I know that some economists know exactly who butters their bread and it isn't working people. It's the people who now have all the money who butter their bread. Some economists are happy to tailor their ideas to suit their benefactors.

Then there are the mouthpieces for the 1%, who earn a lot of money just by being mouthpieces. For instance, there's Ann Coulter, who said recently that she thinks the horrible dirty worthless people of the Occupy movement should be gunned down by the police. It worked on the Vietnam protesters, she says.

Larry Summers, who led Obama's economic team, doesn't come off very well in Inside Job, but he is on the right side of the argument now, favoring aggressive stimulus and tax cuts to working people––instead of more billions thrown at the rich, at corporations and banks. He's no fool.

Concentrated wealth got us here. It made our economy topheavy and fragile. It sucked the life out of the consumer economy by making working people less prosperous and less able to make ends meet.

Our economy will only revive when working people feel prosperous again, confident that their jobs are secure, that their health and their families are secure, that their children have a future. We need to shift from the Reagan economics of concentrated wealth. Those economic policies promoted and exploited broad insecurity and vulnerability rather than broad prosperity and strength.

Today, more than 2 million Brits took to the streets to protest their government's austerity policy. What is Austerity? It's the rich elite's answer to global recession. "We have money so we get to buy. Everybody else is poor, so they should live that way."

AUSTERITY IS HOW THE RICH AND POWERFUL TEACH WORKING PEOPLE TO BE POOR.

That is where austerity measures bite. They bite the poor, the working people, the middle class who are getting poorer every year. Austerity bites the victims of the global collapse which was caused by the very rich.

In this country it's the Republican economic policy. They want most Americans to be a lot poorer, a lot less secure. When Americans are afraid they work harder and longer for less. That's the long term Republican goal. In the short term the Republicans simply want Americans to suffer, figuring an unhappy populace will vote for Republicans next year. They are happy for Americans to fail in order for Obama to fail.

Do you want to see what effect Republican policies have? Look at the map of the British austerity measures put in place by their Conservative government.

Austerity doesn't work during a recession. It hasn't before. It won't now. Imagine an airline pilot in a stalling aircraft. Does he see the emergency as an opportunity to save fuel? No. He pushes the pedal down and accelerates out of the dive.

Here are some sound commentaries from economists on the intelligent side of this argument, setting out the dire consequences of these ugly conservative policies. From EconMatters.com

From CNN

Here's Robert Reich's useful and persuasive debunking of the Republican austerity policies.

Sadly, cable television is dominated by a Republican network and talk radio is all Republican all the time. And a lot of Americans are easy to fool.

Occupy Wall Street Isn't About Real Estate

From Reuters, a good summary of the cluelessness of "the haves and the have-mores" who've been catered to and hugely benefited over the past 30 years.

If you think this preferred treatment of the very rich is an illusion or an invention, it was expressed very succinctly and clearly, even arrogantly and jokingly, by George W. Bush when he ran for the presidency in 2000. He might almost have been addressing a frat dinner at Yale. The man oozes privilege. How did America not see this and worry about it? We were carefully instructed otherwise by a media owned and operated by the 1%. Journalists who tried to tell the truth were let go, muzzled, discouraged, suppressed, edited. More systematically they were not given microphones on 24 hour cable news.

Could there be a more cynical, cheerful acknowledgement of what's become of this country?

Nicholas Kristof says something important in today's New York Times: the Occupy movement isn't and needn't be about the real estate. It is and should be about the idea of vast inequality, vast power of the very few vs. powerlessness of the many.

Via MSNBC, a retired Phildelphia police captain worries that the brutal crackdowns in NY, Oakland, Seattle and elsewhere represent corporate America using the police as hired thugs. Hired violence is a chilling throwback to darker periods in our history. Watch the more documentary passages in The Grapes of Wrath and you'll see how police were co-opted by the powerful and the moneyed in a period of economic depression. We don't need to borrow examples from the Nazi era, we have our own.

These evictions also remind me of the violent treatment of the 1932 Bonus Army by Douglas MacArthur, with the encouragement of President Hoover, as explained in the Guardian newspaper.

I also can't help being reminded of the American Revolution. Valley Forge has been mentioned, as the occupiers faced a winter in the open, but the more important comparison is with the strategy Washington used then against overwhelming odds. He didn't confront, he avoided battles that would destroy his smaller force. He used evasive tactics. He and his army endured and eventually won. He won by enduring and keeping the message alive. 99% of Americans need to understand how much wealth and power has been taken from them by the 1% over the past 30 years. This is a fact that Wall Street is working very hard to obscure and disguise.

Here's a good summary of the victory of the 1% written by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Here's a very good summary of what the 1% have stolen from all of us, from the New York Review of Books. We should resurrect the term "Robber Barons" first employed by journalists like Mark Twain in the 19th century.

Vigorous regulation of Wall Street has come from both parties in the past. Today, we only see it from the Democrats. (Obama's attempts to get more thorough reform have been thwarted by a lockstep Republican minority in the Senate.) People forget the original opponent of Wall Street power was Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican who would be drummed out of today's GOP.

Many progressives wonder why Obama hasn't waded fully into this Wall Street confrontation. Why hasn't he given a speech like FDR's famous "I welcome their hatred" speech calling out the plutocrats of great wealth? Well, these times are different. Washington is more narrowly divided, and the powers arrayed on the side of Wall Street are more considerable than they were in the 1930s. Here's a very useful discussion of these times vs. those times, by my friend Eric Black.

Prior to the New Deal most old people lived in poverty. FDR eliminated old age poverty, and in some ways helped create what we've come to call The Generation Gap. Much of that gap is a difference in world view between insecure young people and secure old people. The young of today fear they won't have the secure life their grandparents have enjoyed. And it appears their grandparents don't care or don't understand. Lori Sturdevant has a good piece about this in today's StarTribune. The blindness of older Americans to what is happening to their children's and grandchildren's future is downright alarming, and it makes it hard for the White House to be more confrontational. It's not about government debt at all; it's about the impoverishment of the vast majority of working Americans. A new Pew Center report examines this gradual but dramatic trend across age groups; it's summarized in The Atlantic.

The defenders of Big Money have no problem being confrontational. This recently discovered memo from a Wall Street lobbyist lays out their plan to discredit the Occupy movement. They have the lock on cable news and talk radio and the advertising apparatus to do this. A link to the actual memo is enclosed.

Here is a careful backgrounder on one of the counterprotests that's gotten a lot of play. Like the Tea Party movement, there is a bogus element. The Tea Party was funded by billionaires. The Occupy movement is genuine grass roots, with all its variety and occasional anger and shabbiness. It's real.

Income Inequality is Killing Us

This short TED lecture by Richard Wilkinson is worth watching and sharing. You might want to pause the video, as I did, to look more closely at the graphs. The TED lecture series is wonderful, a great place to learn from the best minds out there.

I like Professor Wilkinson's statement at one point, looking at a graph on upward mobility: "If you really want to live the American Dream I suggest you move to Denmark." I don't remember who he was quoting. Income inequality is killing us, but it's also making us miserable while we're alive. This is what is putting people into the streets.

Richard Wilkinson is an epidemiologist and professor at Nottingham University, and founder of the Equality Trust.

The 99% Are Being Heard

Most of the mainstream media still don't "get" what the Wall Street protests are about. This CBC interviewer tries rubbishing the protesters in the usual way, and Pulitzer Prize reporter Chris Hedges politely explains where the interviewer is wrong and then calmly folds the man up and puts him back in his sanitary wrapper.

There must be a circulating rule book titled "How to Dismiss, Insult and Marginalize Anyone Who Opposes the Total Power of Hedge Fund Billionaires", which instructs network talking heads how to be rude to people outside the money elite. Most TV hosts are contemptuous of this movement, and contemptuous in the same way, using the same words, the same references to the 60s and hippies and drugs and guitars and bongos. There has to be an approved script. Maybe Frank Luntz provided it.

(You might not know this, but most TV talking heads live in small furnished apartments inside the pockets of the expensive suits you see billionaires wearing when they creep from marble office to forty foot limousine. So talking heads are always alert to the moods of their billionaire hosts. Sadly, they have a tin ear for the lives and concerns of the real people living on the other side of the TV screen.)

Good news. According to this story in Business Insider, the Occupy Wall Street movement, sometimes called "The 99%", are twice as popular as the "Tea Party" movement (which is paid for and fully owned by the Koch Brothers and other billionaires).

The movement is spreading and gaining allies. It has a way to go yet. Take a look at the popular protests that took place in Paris in 1968. They were huge. They involved everyone, every class, every walk of life. Their mistake was resorting to violence––if they hadn't they would likely have succeeded.

The trick of true influence is a mixture of assertiveness and patience. The 99% have a real message. They are us. They are teachers, electricians, firemen, students, nurses, engineers, small businesspeople, retirees, people from working and middle class neighborhoods.

The majority of Americans agree that concentrated wealth has harmed the economy, made it less stable, less sustainable. We aren't pushing for confiscation of capital, we are talking about putting capital to work the way we used to. Putting Americans to work, and paying for that work in a way that strengthens the entire economy not just the top 1%.

Call it liberal if you like. But wouldn't a true conservative want to restore and keep the institutions and rules that have worked well for us? The system that grew out of the New Deal worked very well between 1945 and 1980, the most prosperous period in American history. The Republican revolution dismantled that system, and we've seen what happened. Look who's prospered and who hasn't.

Today's Must Read-The Panic of the Plutocrats

Krugman won a Nobel Prize in Economics. So did Joseph Stiglitz. Why, instead, do Americans believe the stock speculator "experts" who dominate FoxNews and CNBC and CNN-Money? Krugman nails it again today. Now I know what the P stands for in GOP: Plutocrat.

What's alarming and disgusting is how much of our broadcast air is devoted to these Plutocrats, these puffed up aristos, many of whom have "earned" their fabulous lifestyles by speculating with mommy and daddy's money, playing with inherited wealth. America has changed in the past forty years from one that values and rewards work to one that worships and protects the few people with great wealth. Teddy Roosevelt called them "malefactors of great wealth". He was a Republican, but not today's kind of Republican.

The modern Republican Party caters to wealth. Working people don't have it. The financial system and the post-Reagan decline of the middle class has seen to that. The system has skewed so radically because of Reaganomics (the "trickle-down" fairy tale) to the point where owning is now more honored than working. Those who own stocks for a living pay a much lower tax rate than people who work. And anyone who doesn't like this is called a Marxist or a Hitler.

Nonsense.

The Wall Street protesters are protesting unfairness and the kind of Old World aristocracy America was created to get away from. (Think Louis XIV) We 99% are angry about the restoration of the Old World model––except for those still hypnotized by the Murdoch media. If the Tea Partiers would think about it, they belong to the 99% too. We have common cause.

The Demands of the 99%

Last night Keith Olbermann read a very articulate and comprehensive list of demands issued by the Occupy Wall Street group. It might be better to characterize them as a list of charges demanding redress or correction. A list of grievances. Naomi Klein addressed the protesters; her important speech is published in The Nation. Krugman wrote this morning that this is a watershed moment. We must seize it.

These individuals, working people, students, people who used to work until they were outsourced or downsized, teachers, nurses, engineers, communications workers, ministers, janitors, firefighters, neighbors, friends, are not radical. They are in a very important sense true conservatives. They are for restoring the rules and the rights and the public institutions that functioned well during the best half century of American history, the years following the New Deal. These rules and rights were honored and preserved by FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, even Nixon. But since the Reagan years these rights and rules have been systematically eroded or taken from citizens and given to corporations and corporations have been allowed to evade their obligations as members and leaders of our society. The corporation isn't a dangerous thing except when it works against the society and the people in it. Often corporations have been a strong progressive force in our lives, advancing civil rights, retirement security and other benefits, but without limits and reasonable regulation by the people and their democratic government corporations can be a dangerous thing.

The founders knew this. Contrary to what false conservatives say on television, the founders had concerns about the concentration of wealth. James Madison had this to say:

“[T]he day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes...we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.”

The founders' beliefs and ideas resemble not only what is being expressed by the protesters on Wall Street but the ideas put forward by the president and the Democrats and shut down by the Republicans in Congress. Reasonable limits on corporate power is not a radical idea. Progressive taxation didn't make Eisenhower a communist. President Washington formed an army to go after tax evaders. Hamilton created the national debt not as a burden but to enable the American economy to grow and prosper. The Republicans in Congress and their wealthy and powerful allies on Wall Street need to be subject to reasonable restrictions and levels of taxation. It is the working and middle classes who need protection and help.

Jon Stewart on Pathetic Hypocritical Tone-Deaf Pinky-Out Tea-Drinking Elitism on FoxNews

The best coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been in the Guardian.

The best analysis of the pathetic hypocritical tone-deaf pinky-out tea-drinking elitism of the talking heads on Fox and other television media has been Jon Stewart's. In this broadcast he's absolutely ruthlessly honest and on target. He helps them damn themselves with their own words.

Please share these links with everyone you know.