Six years after the 2008 economic meltdown, the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. and the E.U are still struggling. Most people know the system is rigged against them, and there’s no relief on the horizon. Disenchantment with “free-market” capitalism—and the global corporate/banking model that caused the Western economies to tank—is growing. The anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street are the most well known expressions of resistance to the economic status quo. But disenchantment has filtered down to the person chatting in the barber’s chair or beauty shop.

Everybody knows somebody who is unemployed or underemployed or loaded with student debt. Devastated communities, like Jackson, Mississippi, realize that waiting passively for “jobs to come back”—to be granted at the whim of a corporation that extracts tax incentives from their community, pays low wages, and rewards it’s CEOs with obscene compensation packages—is no longer a viable option.

For things to really change, the extraction of wealth from our pockets and our communities has to stop. If we are to survive and support our families, we need humane and better paying jobs that provide a living wage. If the Earth is to survive, we have to move from an oligarch run, environment-destroying, war-centered economy to one that is life sustaining and wealth creating for everyone. But how can any of this happen when our elected officials are joined at the hip with those who have created this sick economy?

Waiting for austerity-addicted Washington, D.C. to create jobs isn’t the answer. Creating economic democracy, at the local level, is. Jackson, Mississippi, one of the poorest cities in the nation, is looking to older, successful, democratically run local cooperatives in Mondragon, Spain as a model for building wealth in their community.

What are the Mondragon cooperatives?

Michael Siegel writing at Truthdig gives a brief explanation of the Mondragon movement:

A leading international example of the cooperative movement is the Mondragon cooperative from the Basque region of Spain. Founded by a young Catholic priest and students of a technical school in 1956, Mondragon is now a cooperative of cooperatives, encompassing nearly 300 distinct businesses and employing over 80,000 people. Mondragon cooperative enterprises include banks, manufacturing, skilled and unskilled labor, public schools and a university. Consistent with a broader international movement to define and promote ethical cooperative enterprise, the pay differential between the highest and lowest paid workers at Mondragon is generally between 3-to-1 and 5-to-1, and the CEO of the entire Mondragon Corporation earns only nine times as much as the lowest-paid worker (this compares with an average ratio of 600-to-1 at large U.S. corporations).

Addressing Jackson, Mississippi’s wealth drain by creating local cooperatives

Siegel writes that although Jackson, Mississippi is 85 percent black, the student body of its public schools is 98 percent black, and the surrounding Hinds County is 75 percent black, out of the total of approximately $1 billion of annual public expenditures in the region, only 5 percent goes to black employees and black-owned businesses. The vast majority of government contracts are awarded to businesses outside of Jackson and even outside the state.

The late mayor Chokwe Lumumba secured a billion-dollar bond measure to rebuild Jackson’s infrastructure, including repairs to roads, water lines and sewage facilities. The funds will partly be used to incubate local worker cooperatives that could win contracts to rebuild the city. To address the draining of local resources out of the community, Lumumba put together a coalition of local and national groups including the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), the Jackson’s Peoples Assembly, and his office. “Jackson Rising” was born. Sadly, Chokwe Lumumba died of a heart attack in February of this year. The Jackson Rising conference was held in May. From the Jackson Rising website:

The primary objectives of the Conference were to stimulate and facilitate the creation of cooperative enterprises in Jackson to meet the unmet economic and social needs of the community. It also served as a space to launch Cooperation Jackson. Cooperation Jackson is an emerging cooperative network based in Jackson that is building four-interdependent and interconnected institutions: a federation of emerging worker cooperatives, a cooperative incubator, a cooperative education and training center, and a cooperative bank or financial institution.

The post Jackson, Mississippi rising appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Like so many other institutions in this, our neoliberal land of opportunity, universities have become infested with rent extracting parasites. Were I to say “We call those parasites administrators,” that would be wrong; surely there are administrators who are caring, competent, necessary, and neither over-paid nor corrupt. That said, university administrators are not, by definition, central to any university’s mission: Teaching and research, performed by professors, are. Therefore, it seems odd, or not, that we don’t look to the university administrative layer for budget savings first. But that’s what we’re doing. We’re feeding the tapeworm instead of freeing the host from infestation. The protests against budget cuts at the University of Southern Maine (USM, in Portland, ME) provide an excellent case study.  —Lambert Strether

On March 27, Aljazeera reported that the students and faculty at the University of Southern Maine (USM) were entering a second week of protests over the school’s decision to lay off up to 50 faculty and staff and eliminate various liberal arts programs in the name of fiscal austerity. USM, a public university, is one of seven University of Maine institutions with plans to dismiss a total of 165 faculty and staff in 2014. USM President Theodora Kalikow insisted that a transformation of the University system was necessary to deal with a structural gap in expenses and revenue.

The first quote is from Lambert Strether’s recent post at Naked Capitalism. You can read his entire article here. In it, he answers questions about why colleges and universities around the country are so strapped for cash, why students are being asked to pay higher tuition, why tenured professors are being laid off and humanities departments closed. He points out that at the same time colleges and universities are enforcing “austerity” measures on students and faculty, they have triple A bond ratings and are building new facilities like crazy. So what’s going on?

You can gather from Strether’s sarcastic comments that the budget cuts and the “restructuring” of colleges and universities are not being carried out in good faith. What he describes are colleges and universities that have become a microcosm of the society at large, where the 1%, in this case the “administrators,” suck up the lion’s share of the resources that should be going to students and faculty. The misallocation of resources at the national level, where the elite take more and more wealth for themselves, has “trickled down” to our institutions of higher learning. The greed and corruption of the corporate and finance sector, aided and abetted by all three branches of government, has moved into the university, where neoliberal, corporate ideas increasingly dominate what used to be considered institutions of higher learning.

For a working definition of “neoliberalism,” we turn to Wikipedia:

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy whose advocates support economic liberalizations, free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and enhancing the role of the private sector in modern society.

Reflecting the neoliberal approach, which is to seek individualistic, free-market solutions to every social and economic problem, the administration at the University of Southern Maine now refers to students as “customers” as if the university was a “mall” where they “purchase” knowledge in different “profit centers” formally known as educational departments.  Strether quotes one of the student leaders of the protest (which is being carried out in solidarity with faculty):

And we want to look at the way money is being spent in the administration throughout the University of Maine system. I think we really see this whole supposed financial crisis as part of a nationwide trend of the corporatization of public higher education and the corporate war on public higher education. And so we’re interested in talking about it in those terms.

And what I see happening is people being told that they can no longer have a humanities education here, they can no longer have a thriving social sciences department. I think that this is what we’re moving towards . . .

And how is that money spent?   Lambert quotes a faculty member of USM who shows how money is being siphoned off to high-paying non-teaching jobs and bloated administrative departments that often provide cushy work for the well-connected. This is in contrast to the slave wages paid adjunct faculty.

The University of Maine System office in Bangor—where no one teaches anybody anything—spends $20 million a year, almost 10 percent of the state’s higher education appropriation.

Just take a look at the budget. The $20 million the system office spends not teaching exceeds the $14.95 million spent annually by the three smallest University of Maine campuses (at Fort Kent, Machias and Presque Isle). If it doesn’t teach, doesn’t grade, doesn’t create assignments or even talk with the faculty who do all these things, how does the system blow through 20 million bucks a year?

There are 291 people employed at the University of Maine System office, of whom 87 (30 percent) are administrators. One of the most senior, and expensive, positions in the system is that of the vice chancellor for academic affairs. That’s a provost, and there’s a provost on each campus. The system has a chief student affairs officer, as does each campus.

… Any claim that the system is in financial trouble, or that it’s broke, is absurd. If anything’s broken it’s the system’s priorities. The system devotes a mere 27 percent of total expenses to the core academic mission. Every year for the last five years the share of expenses devoted to education has declined while the share sucked up by the administration has increased.

Strether stresses that the corporatization of higher education is not unique to the University of Maine system. The starving of educational resources and the bloating of administrative functions is a feature in universities an colleges nationwide. He quotes a Johns Hopkins University professor, Benjamin Ginsburg who wrote The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. Ginsburg says, “US campuses have seen far more significant rises in administrators (85 percent) and professional staff (240 percent) than faculty (51 percent) between 1975 and 2005.”

A professor for over 40 years, Ginsburg argues that such data are commensurate with a calculated effort in college administrations to achieve neoliberal, profit-based goals such as erasing tenure tracks, reducing political speech, and increasing focus on student job placement rather than encouraging knowledge and critical thinking.

Ginsburg says “deanlets”—administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience—are setting the educational agenda. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience—one defined by intellectual rigor. 

My hope is that the student/faculty protest at the University of Southern Maine sparks a new national student movement, one that challenges tuition hikes and also ties the unfair austerity measures to the deeper issue of the neoliberal takeover of education, government, and society at large, and the silencing of political dissent.  If we’re lucky, students will take over where Occupy Wall Street left off.

The post Will the protests at the University of Southern Maine spark a national student movement? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The title of Noam Scheiber’s November cover story in the New Republic is: “Hillary’s Nightmare: A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies with Elizabeth Warren.” The Democratic Party lost its soul a long time ago, but voters may force it to find it . There are growing signs that voters are waking up to what leftist writer Paul Street describes as:

. . . the richly bipartisan nature of the U.S. corporate, neoliberal, state-capitalist, hierarchical, classist, sexist, imperial white supremacist eco-cidal police surveillance and security state, and the total captivity of the dismal Dollar Democrats and their fake-progressive figureheads and office-holders to the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money.

He goes on to warn liberals that they are being manipulated by a ruling elite;

“Blue-state” campus-towns, lakefront liberals and upper west side Dems need to think harder about how they are being played by the ruling class and its two party game, which is all about making sure that, at the end of the day, people don’t really focus on Goldman Sachs and the rest of the corporate and financial plutocracy.

Paul Street never minces his words. If you think his negative assessment of our political process too extreme, consider that the most recent Gallup poll put Congressional approval at an all-time low of 9%. The reasons for that disapproval may not be as specific or ideological as Street’s, but the electorate is clear about two things—their elected officials are not serving them well, and, the 1% is sucking the life out of the country.

Scheiber says the debate in 2016 will focus on the power of America’s wealthiest and how they are systematically destroying the economy, the environment, and our democracy. Younger voters, who are suffering most at the hands of the elite, are going to demand more than vague promises of hope and change. According to Scheiber, Democratic voters are more angry, disaffected and populist than they have been in decades. This emerging political consciousness will present serious difficulties for Clinton who has deep ties to Wall Street. Wall Street, on the other hand, hates and fears Warren, which will make her more attractive to a young generation. They get the connection between corporate friendly legislation and the fact that they can’t find a decent job. Simply put, Democratic voters, weary of a drawn out, lack luster recovery, are less naïve than they were in 2008.

Scriber writes:

They are more attuned to income inequality than before the Obama presidency and more supportive of Social Security and Medicare.¹ They’ve grown fonder of regulation and more skeptical of big business.² A recent Pew poll showed that voters under 30—who skew overwhelmingly Democratic—view socialism more favorably than capitalism. Above all, Democrats are increasingly hostile to Wall Street and believe the government should rein it in.

On the other side is a group of Democratic elites associated with the Clinton era who, though they may have moved somewhat leftward in response to the recession—happily supporting economic stimulus and generous unemployment benefits—still fundamentally believe the economy functions best with a large, powerful, highly complex financial sector. Many members of this group have either made or raised enormous amounts of cash on Wall Street. They were deeply influential in limiting the reach of Dodd-Frank, the financial reform measure Obama signed in July of 2010.

I would add that on top of a watered down Dodd-Frank, corporate Democrats gave us the deeply flawed, health insurance industry giveaway known as the Affordable Care Act.

The media has already anointed Hillary as the inevitable Democratic candidate, but if Warren decides to run, she will present a formidable challenge. For decades, Warren has been driven by her deep concern over the shrinking middle class. Her authenticity and clear talk about the source of our economic problems, and her common sense solutions, may be a better match for the mood of the country.

In 2016, Scheiber says, voters will be looking for a candidate who understands their struggles and will reject anyone who has deep ties to banks and finance. He points to a leftward trend in the country and cites several examples starting with Bill de Blasio who won the New York mayoral election on a platform of addressing inequality. De Basio beat Christine Quinn, who had close ties to Bloomberg and the financial sector, in the Democratic primary. He went on to win against a Republican opponent by a landslide. He held his victory party at a YMCA rather than a fancy downtown hotel.

More progressive Senate Democrats, angry about Summer’s role in deregulating the banks, forced Larry Summers, Obama’s his pick for Federal Reserve chairman, to withdraw his name. Bill Daley, former Obama chief of staff and JP Morgan executive, recently withdrew from the Democratic primary for governor of Illinois after polls showed him trailing current governor Pat Quinn. His decision to drop came on the heels of repeated populist attacks from Quinn, who portrayed him as a member of the same wealthy banker class that had caused the recession.

I’m sure Hillary, a brilliant politician, sees the writing on the wall. The country, feeling burned by both parties, including the so-called Tea Party, is moving left. Unfortunately, like Bill Clinton and current president Obama, Hillary’s economic advisors are the same Wall Street crowd that caused the Great Recession. She’s great on women’s issues, and gay issues, and can talk convincingly about the struggles of working families, but her financial and political ties to banks and corporations represent a conflict of interest, and could make her less attractive and trustworthy in the eyes of the electorate.

Scheiber describes the ideal candidate to take on Hillary Clinton:

Which brings us to the probable face of the insurgency. In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need several key assets. The candidate would almost certainly have to be a woman, given Democrats’ desire to make history again. She would have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.

Contrary to popular opinion, Scheiber thinks Warren has a chance to defeat Clinton in the primary. And, as we all know, it won’t be the first time a younger, political newbie has won the nomination from an older, seasoned member of a political dynasty. If she chooses to run, Warren will be running, not for her own ambition, not because “it’s her turn,” but on behalf of a battered middle class and for the restoration of the soul of the Democratic Party.

The post Dear Senator Warren, we need you to be president appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Chrystia Freeland’s October 13th, New York Times opinion piece, “The Self Destruction of the 1 Percent” compares the rise of the oligarchy in 14^th century Venice to what is happening in the United States today. She concludes that, despite the Obama administration pulling us back from the brink, we remain on a fundamentally dangerous path.

In this essay extracted from her book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else,” Freeland argues that we have traveled down this road before, where the rich get richer as the middle classes and the poor decline. Then and now, it’s a capitalist story that doesn’t end well.

The story goes like this: The rich, driven by greed, use the power of the state, grab everything for themselves, and by doing so, impoverish the nation that allowed them to flourish. In their stupidity and short sightedness, they destroy the open, inclusive system that enriched them. The nation goes into decline, never to recover its former power and wealth.

In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. . . . The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally.

Freeland’s insightful historical analysis points to the present day corruption in Washington D.C. She calls out both Democrats and Republicans for funneling money to the wealthy at the expense of the majority. She reminds that it was a bi-partisan, government enabled, corporate feeding frenzy, in a deregulated environment, that caused the economy to melt down in 2008.

Unfortunately, the current administration and Congress have not done enough to seriously mitigate the danger of another global economic meltdown. Oligarchs like Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein have never been held responsible for the economic wreckage they caused, and they continue to take financial risks that endanger us all. Growing income inequality threatens the United States in the same way it threatened 14^th century Venice. As in historical Venice, the wealthy use government to rig the system leaving the working and middle classes out in the cold. Freeland writes:

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

Case in point: Freeland notes that at a time of severe economic crisis, both Democrats and Republicans rewarded our present day oligarchy, the top 1 percent, with a huge percentage of the economic gains from the 2008 economic bailout. She also calls the subsequent weak economic recovery a “crony recovery” because it has benefited corporations more than individuals.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s.

The American people know very well the deck is stacked against them—more now than in 2008. They are aware the Citizen’s United SCOTUS decision allows billionaires to buy elections. They have given Congress a well-deserved approval rating in the single digits. Despite premature announcements of its death, the Occupy movement is alive and well, regularly fielding its representatives to cable talk shows. We even have a genuine oligarch running for president, one who dismisses 47% of the population as irrelevant slackers, and, if elected, would fast track the funneling of money upward.

It feels to me like we are at a tipping point. Either the United States will go the way of 14th century Venice, with increasing poverty and a declining middle class, or Progressives of all stripes, inside and outside of government, will begin to fight back.

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Republicans like to refer to former Florida congressman Alan Grayson as “stupid.” If you put “Alan Grayson is stupid” in Google, you will get 2,140,000 hits—everything from Fox News to right wing blogs all declaring that Grayson is the equivalent of a dimwitted buffoon.  But we all know that Republicans inhabit an Orwellian World where the top 1% income earners are job creators, Elizabeth Warren is a tool of Wall Street, and Barack Obama is an African born socialist.

A long time ago, Karl Rove, Dick Armey, and the Koch Brothers discovered that repeated lying is an extremely effective method for duping working families into voting against their best interests, and they and the rest of the Republican Party have never looked back. They spend a lot of time branding Grayson as stupid because they are afraid of his impressive intelligence. They are also afraid of his blunt, colorful, yet truthful characterizations of their policies. Grayson is running for Congress again, and they don’t want him back in office.

Alan Grayson’s impressive bio and resume 

The following biographical information on Grayson is distilled from a September 2010 article in the Jewish Daily Forward and from Wikipedia.

Grayson’s immigrant grandparents came from Silesia and Lithuania early in the past century, and it was his father who changed the family name to Grayson. Grayson grew up in high-rise public housing in the Bronx. His parents were a public school teacher and a principal, and both were active in the United Federation of Teachers union.

In 1975, Grayson graduated from Bronx High School of Science and worked his way through Harvard College as a janitor and night watchman. He graduated in 1978 in the top two percent of his class, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with an A.B. in economics. After working three years as an economist, he returned to Harvard for graduate studies. In 1983, he earned a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a Masters of Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Additionally, he completed the course work and passed the general exams for a Ph.D. in government.

After earning his J.D., he clerked for some judges then started his own law firm specializing in government contracts. He brought the only successful prosecution of those who profited illegally from the Iraq War. In 2006, a Wall Street Journal reporter described Grayson as “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq” and as a “fierce critic of the war in Iraq” whose car displayed bumper stickers such as “Bush lied, people died”

Grayson then made his fortune as the first president of IDT Corporation (International Discount Telecom), which pioneered competition and discount pricing in the long-distance telecommunications industry and became a $2-billion-a-year Fortune 1000 company.

Unlike many Democrats, Alan Grayson is a true progressive. Also, as a Harvard trained economist, he understands the world of business, the cooked books of Wall Street and the backroom deals of the Fed. In one famous congressional hearing, his probing and knowledgeable questioning caused a defensive Ben Bernanke to break out in a sweat. So, naturally, the right wing has pulled out all the stops to brand him as “stupid.” To have Grayson back in Congress is dangerous for the 1%.

An articulate spokesman for working families

A recent edition of Bill Maher’s “Real Time” featured a panel of three Republicans and one Democrat, but the Democrat was Alan Grayson. The panel was mocking and belittling the Occupy Wall Street movement but Grayson eloquently schooled them and the audience on its meaning.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism had this to say about Grayson’s October 2011 appearance:

The efforts to discredit OWS are intriguing and reveal a deep-seated sense of vulnerability among the powers that be. Despite the high level of press coverage, relatively few people have yet to participate in these gatherings. But this effort is applying pressure on the deepest fault line in American society, is not going away and continues to gain ground. Even if OWS does not mature into a political force, it is already having an impact, by shifting the nature of discourse and unearthing rotting corpses that the top 1% and their allies in the chattering classes hoped to keep buried: the fact that ordinary citizens have been on the wrong side of the greatest transfer of wealth in history, and virtually all of their supposed protectors stood by or had their hands in the till. No wonder those at the top of the food chain feel so threatened.

Alan Grayson does an effective job of kneecapping one of these typical attacks, this one from P.J. O”Rourke:

Although the media keeps pushing the idea that the message behind Occupy Wall Street is unclear, it took Grayson just seconds to explain what Occupy Wall Street is about. To the delight of the audience, he continued to knock holes in the standard Republican arguments coming from the other guests.

For these reasons and a host of others, we need Alan Grayson back in Congress.

The post Alan Grayson: Why we need him back in Congress appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the many disturbing trends since 9/11 is the steady militarization of our domestic police. Thanks to loads of money and equipment funneled through Homeland Security to local communities, local police are increasingly using military weaponry designed for “combating terrorism” for everyday police work.

According to Rizer and Hartmann writing for the Atlantic, before 9/11, small-town police officers had a standard shotgun, and possibly a high-powered rifle, and a surplus M-16, for use by the supervising officer. But now, police officers “routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms.” Both large and small police departments have “acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even mini-tanks for use in domestic police work.”

Besides local police departments stocking up on military weaponry, military training is causing the police to exhibit more aggressive behavior. One recent example is the assault with military grade pepper spray, by a member of a university police force, on peaceful student protestors who were exercising their first amendment rights. Another is the Tampa police rolling out a tank-like vehicle at an Occupy encampment in a park in downtown Tampa.

The Tampa police deployed the massive 12-ton vehicle—one that is supposed to be used for rescuing people in a natural disaster or during a terrorist attack—to intimidate people at a small-scale peaceful protest. This vehicle was purchased from the military and paid for with a Federal security grant, according to the City of Tampa website. It was also underwritten by local corporations. (The city also purchased another smaller amphibious, bulletproof military vehicle equipped with a rotatable 360-degree platform, which can be used to mount a weapon.)

Instead of walking the beat and communicating with residents, police are wearing bulletproof vests, riot gear, dark goggles, and masks even for routine work. S.W.A.T. teams are no longer used for extreme situations, but are used for everyday policing, including serving warrants. Instead of connecting with the community, the police are separating themselves psychologically from the communities they serve. As they become more like the military, they take on a dangerous mindset reserved for soldiers—one that is focused on killing an enemy.

Rizer and Hartmann report that we are witnessing a fundamental change in the nature of law enforcement. When a police officer takes someone into custody, they  consider him or her innocent until proven guilty. They are expected to protect the civil liberties of all citizens, even the vilest of criminals. Lethal violence is an absolute last resort.  Soldiers, on the other hand, are trained to identify two groups—the enemy and the non-enemy. Once identified, they kill the enemy. The blurring of the line between police and military is influencing, in a negative way, how the police engage with people in their communities.

This blurring also opens up the country to other dangers. With local police being given military equipment, weapons and training, there is little difference between them and the military itself. Thus, it makes it easier for an administration, if it so choses, to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 effectively eliminating the need to declare martial law. This is not a good trend. In mid November, 18 cities coordinated attacks on Occupy encampments. The origin of those coordinated attacks is not known at this time.

Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon, sees a relationship between the growing militarization of the police and the growing economic unrest in the country:

It was only a matter of time before a coordinated police crackdown was imposed to end the Occupy encampments. Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future). A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life expectations, devote itself to the interests of its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle class without triggering sustained citizen fury.

The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution. As Madeleine Albright said when arguing for U.S. military intervention in the Balkans: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” That’s obviously how governors, big-city Mayors and Police Chiefs feel about the stockpiles of assault rifles, SWAT gear, hi-tech helicopters, and the coming-soon drone technology lavished on them in the wake of the post/9-11 Security State explosion, to say nothing of the enormous federal law enforcement apparatus that, more than anything else, resembles a standing army which is increasingly directed inward.

Chi Birmingham and Alex S. Vitale, in a recent art Opinion piece in the The New York Times, provide a visual diagram charting the evolution of police uniforms over the last decades. To view it, click here. The days of “Officer Friendly” visiting a local grade school appear to be over.

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As a testament to the growing influence of the Occupied movement, on November 18, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a constitutional amendment that would ban corporate money in politics and end corporate personhood once and for all.

According to Rep. Deutch’s website, his amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Amendment, would do four things:

• Make clear that free speech and other constitutionally protected rights are those of natural persons and not corporations or entities formed to promote their business interests.
• Reaffirm that corporations are formed under the laws of Congress and the States and are thus subject to laws enacted to protect the environment, ensure public health, and other safeguards for the people.
• Overturn Citizens United by ending corporations’ ability to spend unlimited amounts of their general treasury funds in elections.
• Sets the stage for real campaign finance reform by reasserting the authority of Congress to regulate all election contributions and expenditures, including those of individuals and groups funneling money anonymously to influence elections.

Rep. Ted Deutch had this to say:

No matter how long protesters camp out across America, big banks will continue to pour money into shadow groups promoting candidates more likely to slash Medicaid for poor children than help families facing foreclosure. No matter how strongly Ohio families fight for basic fairness for workers, the Koch Brothers will continue to pour millions into campaigns aimed at protecting the wealthiest 1%. No matter how fed up seniors in South Florida are with an agenda that puts oil subsidies ahead of Social Security and Medicare, corporations will continue to fund massive publicity campaigns and malicious attack ads against the public interest. Americans of all stripes agree that for far too long, corporations have occupied Washington and drowned out the voices of the people. I introduced the OCCUPIED Amendment because the days of corporate control of our democracy. It is time to return the nation’s capital and our democracy to the people.

For a copy of the amendment, click here. For a detailed explanation, click here.

Public interest groups praise Rep. Deutch’s amendment:

The organization, Public Citizen, enthusiastically applauded and endorsed Representative Ted Deutch’s proposed constitutional amendment, which, it feels, would comprehensively repair the damage done to our democracy by Citizens United. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy supports the amendment and reiterated that for-profit corporations are not people and thus are not entitled to the same constitutional rights as people. Marge Baker, Executive Vice President of Policy and Programs for People for the American Way praised Representative Deutch’s amendment calling it a positive step toward ensuring that our elected officials remain accountable to all of the people, not just the wealthy, and not to large and powerful corporate interests. She feels amending the constitution is the best tool we have to protect that democracy for the American people.

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Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and went bang in the noonday sun.

Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

Artists and novelists are our canaries in the coalmine. They often draw their inspiration from a keen observation of human behavior and the current events in the world around them. In Vonnegut’s case, he saw clearly that we were living in a world of illusion. Forty-six years later, as if waking from a bad dream, we are finally realizing the truth he observed in his 1965 novel God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. The American Dream—the naïve notion that with hard work anyone can achieve great wealth—is basically over. The myth of the U.S. as the land of opportunity still persists, but it is clearly mistaken. A 2010 study by the OECD confirms that the United States now has less social mobility than the Nordic countries and Canada.

After decades of dubious political policy decisions, and financial manipulation by the 1% that left the rest of us with stagnant wages, high unemployment, and crumbling infrastructure, the United States has crashed to the ground with a thud. And the good news is that the old notion of the American Dream based on hyper individualism and materialistic values may have crashed with it. It may be that this old notion of the American Dream has kept us from creating a workable economy that serves everyone.

Having been drained of our resources by the wealthy and powerful, with the eager participation of shortsighted, self-serving politicians of every stripe, we are finally waking from what appears to be a decades long drunken stupor. We may feel hung over, but finally we are sober. Whether we like it or not, the era too big houses, too big SUVs, binge consumption, and massive credit card debt is over. Collectively, we have tremendous anxiety about the future, but many of us are breathing a sigh of relief. All that spending and real estate/stock market speculation really didn’t make us happier or improve our quality of life, and the wars that have taken our sons and daughters have not made us any safer.

Greed is not Good

Our binge lasted decades because as a nation we bought into the “greed is good” religion pushed by corporations, Wall Street, Fox News, and the prosperity-focused mega church movement. Our political system, awash in corporate money, enabled the systematic dismantling of economic protections, such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Finally, government regulating agencies turned a blind eye to the dangerous practices of banks and the financial markets. Wall Street ran amuck. The economic meltdown of 2008 was inevitable.

Three years later, the Occupy Wall Street movement is gaining momentum because most Americans now understand that the American Dream is only for the wealthy and well connected. But, the Occupy movement is demanding more than equal opportunity. We are questioning the American religion of free market capitalism, and the extreme individualism that fueled the corporate takeover of America. We are exploring a new morality, one that acknowledges our interdependence with each other, and insists, no matter how much the right screams ”socialism” that the least among us deserve to have their basic needs met. We are acknowledging that we are always indebted to others for what we have, and that we have mutual responsibilities to each other as neighbors and citizens. We are challenging the insanity of letting our economy be determined by a tiny group of self-serving individuals and their political minions, who care nothing about the rest of us—the 99%. Finally, we are exposing and challenging the pervasive corrupting influence of big money in government. Whether K Street knows it or not, the writing is on the wall. Americans are fed up with their influence drowning out the needs of ordinary people.

As Vonnegut observed, the old individualistic American Dream has been dead for decades, yet the PR machine of the 1% continues to reanimate its dead corpse to push through policies that benefit them, like lowering their already low taxes. Always willing to take a government handout, or a bailout, they demonize any government expenditure that does not benefit them directly.

The Occupy movement, on the other hand, has initiated a grown up conversation about what our values really are and whom our government is meant to serve. It is seeking to define a new American Dream, one that is grown up, responsible, and serves the needs of the 99%. Unlike the old individualistic American Dream, we are envisioning a new one that ties our personal prosperity to the wellbeing of everyone else.

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Now what? Now that the political establishment has succeeded in physically removing Occupiers from several cities, what direction should the movement take? Many have vowed to return to the camp-out mode, and that’s one route. But it may be time to think outside the tent and broaden the movement.

The protesters who have physically occupied Wall Street and other central city locations have succeeded in many ways: They’ve brought attention—in a way that can’t be ignored—to the economic inequality that has become entrenched through official policy and legislation written for and by the one percent. They’ve changed the conversation from the bogus debt-ceiling “debate” to a discussion of the death of the American dream, the plight of the middle class, and the recently invisible and taboo topic of poverty in America. They may have awakened a sleeping giant—the vast numbers of Americans who are sinking financially, but who have been fooled by the cynical, politico/corporate propaganda machine that has convinced them to vote against their own economic self-interest.

Those successes are worthy of celebration. They’ve captured the attention, imagination and support of a lot of people. But they’re just the beginning. The 99% movement is more than an occupation of city parks. It’s a concept that touches—well—99% of Americans. The movement has a compelling message and purpose that should not fold with the tents and encampments.

So, where should we go? How about if the 99% Movement fans out into legislatures, state commissions, local city councils and board meetings of civic groups—and perhaps even corporations? I’m aware that the un-leaders of the movement have resisted focusing on specific pieces of legislation, and there’s a good reason for that. They don’t want to be picked apart one bill, one amendment, one article, one-subhead, one sentence at a time.

Fine. There’s a much bigger message behind the 99% movement, anyway. It’s a policy message, rather than a legislative program. And that’s why I’m suggesting that 99 percenters start making their presence known in forums and hearings where policy is being discussed—to point out the ways that current and proposed policies promote economic injustice. They could stand up and ask, “Who really will benefit from this policy?”   And they could  push for alternatives that address the underlying inequalities.

I’m not proposing that 99 Percenters disrupt meetings, as the Tea Partiers did in 2010. Yes, action and confrontation get attention. But the movement has already been stereotyped and falsely portrayed as just another hippie rerun, populated by the great unwashed. And even though those images are wildly distorted, the 99 Percent movement might benefit from a style change.

Maybe the 99 Percent movement can gain attention and credibility by becoming a recognizable and unstoppable force that can’t be easily dismissed. What if the movement adopted some kind of an identity [even if it’s something as simple as T-shirts], became a reasoned, knowledgeable presence at policy meetings, and started exerting pressure from within? [There. I said it. “Within.” Do I hear groaning out there? I’m not surprised.]

The strategy I’m envisioning would require a level of conventional organization that many in the movement might find antithetical to the image they want to project of being outsiders. It might seem like a sell-out to the system.  It would demand long-term commitment and in-depth knowledge of issues that would not lend themselves to slogans. But it would not obviate marches and demonstrations or even bumper stickers, if it came to that. In fact, the two prongs of an inside-outside strategy might even feed and strengthen each other.

I’m not pretending to have the answers, here. Just an idea I’d like to toss out. I think the 99 Percent movement has touched a nerve in America, and I’d like to see it continue and grow. The question is how best to achieve that goal.

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Out of sight, out of mind. That’s been a major problem for poor people in the United States. When John F. Kennedy was a candidate for president in 1960, he traveled to West Virginia to see Appalachian poverty (and campaign for votes). He was appalled at the extent of poverty in America even though he had previously read Michael Harrington’s The Other America.

Eight years later, Kennedy’s brother, Robert, had a similar experience when campaigning in Mississippi. Combined with his visits to inner urban neighborhoods in Detroit, Indianapolis, and elsewhere, he made the eradication of poverty one of the key planks of his platform.

As he was doing this, President Lyndon Johnson was fighting his “War on Poverty.” He didn’t have to learn about poverty; he grew up poor in rural Texas. He knew that the New Deal was incomplete and he wanted to provide economic opportunities for all Americans.

The focus of economic dialogue in the U.S. now is economic distribution. As the rich have become richer, the middle class has lagged. On Nov. 1, 2011, the Congressional Budget Office reported that over the past thirty years, the rate at which income grew for the top 1% was nine times that for the middle 60%.

 The CBO released an analysis of America’s distribution of wealth over the last three decades. Their findings were shocking: Among the top 1% of households, income grew by an amazing 275% over the last 30 years. In the same period, the middle 60% of households saw their incomes increase by less than 40%.

This analysis confirms what has been the central component in recent American dialogue about the economy. The middle class is getting hammered economically in relation to the top 1%.. Each political party feels that it has a corner on wisdom as to how to jump-start economic growth for the middle class. This is an area where progressives clearly have the moral and logical high ground because their proposals involve creating new jobs for those out of work and thereby directly increasing the incomes of middle income families.

But what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is that it’s all about the middle class. That’s a legitimate concern, but it says nothing about America’s poor. The poor are not only out of the sightlines of many Americans, they are invisible in most of our political dialogue.

One of the more appalling facts is that in his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama used neither the word “poor” nor “poverty.” You may not find that omission significant until you recognize that President Obama was the first president to not use either of these words in a State of the Union Address since Harry Truman, in 1948. Since 1948, every president, including Republican stalwarts like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have all made commitments, or at least offered platitudes towards concerns for the poor. President Obama, who cut his professional teeth as a community organizer on Chicago’s south side serving the needs of the community’s poor, felt that it was more important to address the needs of the satisfied wealthy and the struggling middle class. It’s as if the poor didn’t exist.

He wasn’t the only leader in Washington to do so. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if class warfare was brewing between the rich and the poor. She said that wasn’t her main concern; her priority was the well-being of middle-income families.

The bottom line is that it’s one of the worst periods in modern American history for an individual or family to be poor.

On November 3, 2011, the Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times reported:

The number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew by a third over the past decade, according to a new report, erasing most of the gains from the 1990s when concentrated poverty declined.

More than 10 percent of America’s poor now live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in the beginning of the decade, an addition of more than two million people, according to the report by the Brookings Institution, an independent research group.

That evening, the CBS Evening News lead with a story that one in fifteen American now rank as the poorest poor, meaning that they live on incomes half that of the official poverty level.

It may be that the Occupy movement will have to make a distinction within the 99%. After all, that 99% includes all the very wealthy people in the U.S. besides the top 1%. It would undermine the simplicity and clarity of the argument if the 99% were excessively sliced and diced. However, at the risk of sounding too much like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 proposal, we might look for a new moniker that recognizes that poverty is omnipresent in our society, and that the increasing burdens of the middle class should not overshadow the presence of the poor.

All of this lends itself well to “what-if” games. What if Lyndon Johnson had chosen to not mire America in the Vietnam War? Is it possible that his War on Poverty could have been a success?

What if President George W. Bush had focused on quick and effective action in Afghanistan and not engaged in his quixotic adventure in Iraq? Would the American economy be stronger, providing more jobs for middle and low income families?

What if President Barack Obama had gotten out of Iraq in one year rather than three, and his surge in Afghanistan had been to get out rather than to increase American military presence? Would he have been in a better position to protect middle- and low- income people by fashioning structural changes on Wall Street rather than band-aids?

Some Americans have the luxury of playing these games. Others are mired in poverty or struggling on the low end of the middle class. Their focus is on survival today rather than hypotheticals from the past or into the future.

What is important is that we recognize that the level of poverty in the United States is unacceptable and easily could have been preventable. It’s also correctable. As we work to strengthen the position of the middle class, let us not forget those who suffer the most, the poor.

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