Has a Harvard Professor Mapped Out the Next Step for Occupy Wall Street?

Lawrence Lessig's call for state-based activism on behalf of a Constitutional Convention could provide the uprooted movement with a political project for winter

Observers and participants alike have interpreted the Occupy Wall Street movement as expressions of frustration with persistently high unemployment and underemployment, with the appearance of growing income disparity in the United States, and with the sense that the richest among us are disproportionately responsible for the current crisis.  But the fundamental problem, you could argue, is that we have simply not had meaningful financial reform in response to the crisis.  The Dodd-Frank Bill that was passed last summer was better than nothing, but it did not do what needed to be done to fix the problems that caused the current crisis:  We haven't punished anyone.  We haven't broken up banks to prevent them from being "too big to fail" in the future.  The banking system that's brought us the current crisis remains in power, barely chastened.  "Why?" ask the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Lawrence Lessig has an answer.  In his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It, he spends 20 pages reviewing the the 30 years of deregulation that led up to the financial crisis and outlining our present circumstances.  In fact, this book, published just before Occupy Wall Street began, is perfectly positioned to become the movement's handbook.  While few protesters will need convincing that the government is corrupted by money, the book lays out the case in a such a comprehensive and persuasive manner -- and proposes such specific and radical solutions -- that it seems tailor-made for the Occupy movement.  And it's ambitious proposal for state-based activism on behalf of a Constitutional Convention could provide the movement with a next organizing step as it nears its two-month anniversary Thursday -- and faces such questions as how to ride out the winter and how to respond to police crackdowns. 

* * *

Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor at Harvard Law School, spent 10 years fighting to reform the nation's copyright laws.  The effort produced a half-dozen books, led to the creation of the Creative Commons licensing system and a case before the Supreme Court, which ultimately failed.  Rather than dissuading him, Lessig concluded four years ago that this failure perfectly situated him to take on an infinitely harder challenge -- the reform of Congress itself.  The shift in focus led him to leave Stanford University and relocate his family to the east coast to teach at Harvard in 2008, where he began the research and activity that gave rise to his latest book.

His first congressional reform effort wasChange Congress, a grass-roots movement to gather pledges from elected officials to reform campaign financing, and pledges from potential donors to not give money to officials who hadn't taken such a pledge.  But as that movement failed to gain sufficient momentum, he's shifted focus towards more dramatic strategies, exploring the possibility of a Constitutional Convention at the September 2011 conference and in this book.

The strategy for non-fiction books of this type is well understood: it's anecdote-plus-conclusion.  A story, followed by the lesson the author wants us to learn from it.  As an academic, Lessig has the research chops to find the anecdotes that best fit the narrative case he's making, and to lay them out in wonderful detail.  But his real gift is in the art of stringing them together into a story.  That means that this book is as persuasive as it is enjoyable to read.  This is very good indeed, because if Lessig is to succeed, he'll need to persuade a great many people.

Lessig is most comfortable in the section where he describes government corruption, telling not the story of corrupt individuals, such as Rod Blagojevich and Jack Abramoff, but that of an entrenched set of incentives that skews the motivations of political actos -- the system itself.  Lessig, a liberal, takes great pains to extend a hand to Republicans, and makes arguments that are direct appeals to Republican priorities.  "The single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is not that it discriminates in favor of one side and against the other," he says, "it discriminates against all sides in favor of itself."  The corruption happens at the level of the institution, not the individual, he argues.

All along, we are reminded how difficult this problem will be to solve.  Not only is it rooted in the deepest part of the political system, but there are a host of interests who will fight any reform.  The businesses and individuals who make large contributions to government will oppose reforms because they are a threat to their power.  Politicians will oppose them because they threaten the system that allows them to stay in power.  And lobbyists will fight them because ultimately they threatens their entire profession.  At every point, Lessig points out counter-arguments to the case he's making, explains difficulties that may not be obvious, and generally reminds us that the problem is large and solutions will be difficult.

So his focus is not so much on the solutions, but on the first step: laying down the argument for why change needs to happen.  Seventy-five percent of the book is a deep examination of the problem of corruption:  what corruption means (from an almost philosophical perspective); the specifics of how corruption operates in our particular system; and an analysis of how our government will continue to fail us, given the present system.

The bulk of the first part of the book consists of detailed scenarios of government activities that seem obviously to put the interests of specific parties (read: corporations) ahead of the interests of the nation at large.  His telling of the lead-up and aftermath of the current financial crisis is worth the price of admission by itself.  (Fun fact:  credit for many of the key deregulations, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the decision that federal agencies should not regulate the growing derivatives market, goes to the Clinton Administration.)

But consider the case of food subsidies and tariffs.  These manipulations began during the Great Depression, when the cost of actual staple foods -- flower, rice, etc. -- was high enough that starvation was not unheard of.  The government introduced tariffs to protect domestic farmers, and subsidies to lower the costs of food.  But the system has now been in place for close to a century and political money has twisted it into shapes that have no hope of being justified by any actual utility.  We place tariffs on sugar, so that sugar in the U.S. is two to three times as expensive as in other countries.  And we subsidize corn production: the US government spent $73.8 billion between 1995 and 2009 subsidizing corn, driving its price close to zero.  One result of these policies is that High Fructose Corn Syrup was nonexistent in 1980, but accounted for 41 percent of all sugar consumed by Americans by 2006.  Another result is that cattle raised in the U.S. are now fed almost entirely corn, which they don't digest well, requiring antibiotics on a massive scale and producing poorer quality meat.  And even though the subsidies account for huge outlays for the federal government and the tariffs make products more expensive for Americans (the sugar tariffs cost the overall economy an estimated $3 billion per year, while providing $1 billion of extra profits to domestic sugar producers), they've proved impossible to eliminate under the current system.  Every time a politician floats the idea of reforming or eliminating the farm bill, they're reminded that a small percentage of the money the beneficiary companies make is allocated to campaign contributions, and crucial for the reelection of a large number of senators and representatives.

Again, Lessig takes great pains to point out that eliminating these influences is in the interests of both Republicans as Democrats.  Reform of the tax code and the education system can't happen under the current system.  The government has grown wildly under every Republican president in memory.  Folks on the right want a smaller government, a simplified tax code, and efficient markets.  How the current system has blocked those reforms just as much as those of the left is also explained in the book.  But the point is that this effort can only succeed by finding common ground between these two groups, and finding a way for them to come together on the central issue that prevents everything else from being addressed.

* * *

The subtitle of the book promises solutions, and in the last 50 pages it delivers.  But it's complicated.  To be taken seriously, a solution must be presented with a strategy for how it's going to be brought about.  It must deal with the realities of a relatively disengaged electorate, an entrenched political system, and the boundaries set by Supreme Court decisions.  And so what we get is actually nine pages of solution, and 41 pages of strategy.

The central part of the solution is elections funded through small-dollar contributions. Several states have systems that encourage this, which are opt-in.  Candidates pledge to limit their fundraising and spending, and in return the state gives them a chunk of money to run their campaign.  The broad outlines are similar to the system of public funding for presidential elections.  Lessig has a slightly different proposal, known as the Grant and Franklin Project.  Under this system, the first $50 of every person's tax contribution goes into a pool to be distributed to congressional candidates.  Each tax payer then receives a voucher to be distributed to the candidate of their choice or split up between several candidates.  (The actual proposal is more complicated -- for instance, the voucher can be accompanied by cash contributions of up to $100.)  To be eligible to receive funds through the vouchers, a candidate agrees not to raise any funds outside the system.  This would raise approximately $3 billion per year, or $6 billion per election cycle, which would make it competitive with the current funding system and provide candidates with a strong incentive to opt in.

The proposal addresses several of the concerns that threaten to have other solutions declared unconstitutional.  It doesn't allow for anyone's money to be used to support a candidate or position they don't want to support.  And it doesn't limit anyone's speech.  But Lessig points out its weaknesses.  It doesn't do anything about the type of spending permitted by the recent Citizens United decision, for example.

Lessig points out another problem with this, or any similar system: For every type of reform that's been tried in the past, money has continued to find a into the system.  "Block large contributions from individuals, and they become soft contributions to parties.  Block soft contributions to parties, they become bundled contributions coordinated through lobbyists.  And on it goes," he writes.

Calls for constitutional conventions have served an important function in pushing Congress to pass reforms.

But I don't think this is intended to be the be-all end-all solution so much as a starting point for a larger discussion.  And in fact, Lessig recognizes that a large-scale debate is a necessary step in reform.

There are four strategies presented for getting the necessary laws passed, but the first three are presented and dismissed as being impossible or extremely improbable.  It's only when we arrive at "Strategy 4:  The Convention Game" that we see what Lessig has had in mind all along.  Article 5 of the United States Constitution describes how the constitution can be amended.  Congress proposes amendments, and the states ratify them.  This is how all the existing 27 amendments have been passed.  But there's another way -- states can ask Congress to call for a constitutional convention.  The convention proposes amendments instead of Congress, though they also have to be ratified by the states.

It sounds a bit like shooting for the moon:  we'll get the states to call for a Constitutional Convention, which will then propose an amendment to the Constitution that'll transform how congressional elections are financed, and will then be ratified by three-quarters of the states.  But it does address three important obstacles to any solution.  First, it harnesses the intelligence and creativity of a great many people to a problem that Lessig himself admits he hasn't quite found the perfect solution to yet.  Second, it bypasses the usual means of reform (Congress, presidential elections, etc.) which the lobbyists and other interested parties have learned so well to manipulate.  And lastly, such a convention would be free to propose solutions that would otherwise be subject to be striken as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Now, we haven't had a Constitutional Convention since the one that wrote the original constitution.  (And never mind that since the Articles of Confederation were in effect at the time, making that one technically illegal when it happened.)  But we've come close.  The Seventeenth Amendment, which changed the election of Senators to be by popular vote, was proposed by Congress when 27 states had called for a convention and it seemed imminent that more were about to.  In fact, there have been over 700 such calls in our history, and they've served an important function in pushing Congress to pass certain reforms.

So how do we begin a popular movement that might end with states petitioning for a convention?  Lessig calls for mock conventions to happen all across the land:  assemblies of regular people to think of these, and other, problems, and come up with solutions that might work.  Not only would these conventions come up with a spectrum of solutions which could be evaluated and selected from, but they'd build national support for the idea that a convention like this could work.

It sounds unlikely to happen.  But this is where Occupy Wall Street comes in.  Properly leveraging its support, it could generate enough energy to do what Lessig, while writing this book, couldn't quite picture.  In fact, the original call for Occupy Wall Street, from Adbusters, called on president Obama to "ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington."  Already, "The 99 Percent Declaration" is calling for "a NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY beginning on July 4, 2012 in the City Of Philadelphia" to address the influence of money in politics and other issues.

Properly presented, the strategies and aims of Lessig's book could make it the handbook the protesters have been looking for -- and provide a pathway for them to ride out the winter ahead.

FAIL: Super Committee Comes Up Empty

Brian Beutler  November 21, 2011

A whirl of last minute meetings and shuttle diplomacy weren’t enough to help the 12-member deficit Super Committee reach agreement on anything.  Late on Monday, co-chairs Jeb Hensarling and Patty Murray put the panel to bed in an official statement.
 

“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve.  We remain hopeful that Congress can build on this committee’s work and can find a way to tackle this issue in a way that works for the American people and our economy.


“We are deeply disappointed that we have been unable to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement, but as we approach the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, we want to express our appreciation to every member of this committee, each of whom came into the process committed to achieving a solution that has eluded many groups before us.  Most importantly, we want to thank the American people for sharing thoughts and ideas and for providing support and good will as we worked to accomplish this difficult task.


“We would also like to thank our committee staff, in particular Staff Director Mark Prater and Deputy Staff Director Sarah Kuehl, as well as each committee member’s staff for the tremendous work they contributed to this effort.  We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Douglas Elmendorf and Mr. Thomas Barthold and their teams at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, respectively, for the technical support they provided to the committee and its members.”

The Super Committee itself was part of the tarnished legacy of this summer’s debt limit fight — a GOP-initiated legislative debacle that harmed the country’s economy and further soured voters on their dysfunctional Congress.  Much of the bad will that fight created between Democrats and Republicans — and the stain it left on the institution as a whole — bled through to the negotiations that failed today.  For days before it became official, members of both parties were parceling out blame, both to each other, and to the various interest groups that helped stymie progress.  Republicans’ favorite culprit has been President Obama, whom they now fault for failing to involve himself in the process, after asking him to stay out of the process when the Super Committee was first put together.

But the actual root of the failure lies in the GOP’s strict unwillingness to increase taxes on wealthier Americans.  Over the course of the negotiations, Democrats have put forward multiple proposals that include fairly significant cuts to programs like Medicare — but conditioned on the idea that the GOP would agree to similar dollar figures in new tax revenue from top earners.  One GOP counter proposal reportedly did include modest new tax revenues — about $250 billion over 10 years — but those would have been taken largely from middle income Americans, while providing tax cuts to the rich.

Monday’s outcome doesn’t exacerbate the country’s debt forecast, which may explain the ratings agencies’ silence in the days leading up to the deadline.  But that will change if and when Congress takes steps to exacerbate deficits — something scores of members have already pledged to do.  The catch is that Democrats and Republicans will now have to fight through the regular, ugly order — through filibusters and amendments — to protect their interest and pursue their goals ahead of a number of hard budgetary and economic deadlines.

In about five weeks, a payroll tax holiday for workers, and extended benefits for long-term unemployed Americans are both set to expire.  So is a temporary patch to prevent Medicare physicians from taking a big automatic pay cut.  At the end of next year, all the Bush tax cuts are set to expire, and, simultaneously, the penalty for the Super Committee’s inaction — across the board cuts to security programs and Medicare providers — is set to kick in.  Members of Congress from both parties are deeply invested in preventing all of those things from happening.  But in almost all cases, they don’t agree with each other about how.

These fights will loom large in 2012, and will provide openings for any inclined members or group of members to pursue their own 10-year deficit reduction plans — to create room in the budget to prevent all of the consequences of inaction from happening.

But that will be an excruciatingly heavy lift.  There’s little appetite in the Republican-controlled House for any deficit plan that includes higher tax revenues.  And until that changes, Congress will gridlock every time it turns its attention to fiscal issues.  President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders say they will resist any effort by the GOP to dismantle or alter the penalty between now and January 2013 — a strategy meant to pressure Republicans to come to terms with the unsustainable nature of their anti tax pledges.

That assures a brutal political fight over the possibility that the defense budget will be slashed — automatically and indiscriminately — while the country remains at war.  Simultaneously, Republicans are threatening to block all significant job-creation measures — including the payroll tax and unemployment extensions — unless they’re paid for with program cuts elsewhere in the budget.  With unemployment at 9 percent, these are high-priority initiatives for Democrats and President Obama and both will keep hounding Republicans for blocking economic growth measures — indeed, for allowing an automatic tax increase on workers — until something gives, or voters decide for themselves at the polls.

Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics

Rep. Deutch Unveils OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment
Bans Corporate Money in Elections and Declares Corporations Are Not People


Washington, DC, Nov 18 - Today, Rep. Ted Deutch (FL-19), a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, introduced the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Constitutional Amendment. The OCCUPIED Amendment both overturns the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that wrongly awarded the Constitutionally-protected free speech rights of people to corporations and totally bans corporate money from America’s electoral process.

“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,” said Rep. Deutch. “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 must end. It is time to return the nation’s capital and our democracy to the people.”

Though several amendments aimed at overturning Citizens United have been introduced in recent weeks, Rep. Deutch’s OCCUPIED Amendment is the only proposal that: 

• Makes 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.
• Reaffirms 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.
• Overturns 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.

The introduction of Congressman Deutch’s amendment was applauded by several public interest leaders dedicated to stopping corporations from buying elections to pad their profits:

“Public Citizen enthusiastically applauds and endorses Representative Ted Deutch’s proposed constitutional amendment, which would comprehensively repair the damage done to our democracy by Citizens United,” said Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen. “It would clarify that constitutional rights are intended for real, live, breathing human beings. It would end corporate spending on elections. And it would give Congress authority to adopt a sensible campaign finance system. It would make American stronger, more democratic and more just.”

“We join Americans across the nation in applauding Congressman Ted Deutch for affirming fundamental truths self-evident to almost everyone except five guys on the Supreme Court:  For-profit corporations are not people and thus are not entitled to the same constitutional rights as people,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media Democracy, publisher of PRWatch.org and ALECexposed.org, and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General. “No other congressional effort has so directly confronted the twin problems created by judges who have arrogantly granted rights to corporations, without democratic consent, and overturned bipartisan laws that limited the corrupting influence of money in our elections.”

“The problems caused by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United must be addressed – and we’re delighted to see Representative Deutch offer a comprehensive solution to stop the flood of corporate money in our electoral system,” said Marge Baker, Executive Vice President of Policy and Programs for People for the American Way. “Our democracy belongs to all of the people, not just the wealthy, and not to large and powerful corporate interests. Amending the constitution is the best tool we have to protect that democracy for the American people.  Rep. Deutch’s amendment is a positive step toward ensuring that our elected officials remain accountable to the people they are in office to serve.” 


Click here for a backgrounder on the amendment.






Click here to read the OCCUPIED amendment.

The New Progressive Movement

By JEFFREY D. SACHS 

November 12, 2011  

OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

Washington still channels Reaganomics. The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.

Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression. Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose to restore democracy and shared prosperity.

The first age of inequality was the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era quite like today, when both political parties served the interests of the corporate robber barons. The progressive movement arose after the financial crisis of 1893. In the following decades Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson came to power, and the movement pushed through a remarkable era of reform: trust busting, federal income taxation, fair labor standards, the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage.

The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. The pro-business administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover once again opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess, this time culminating in the Great Depression. And once again the pendulum swung. F.D.R.’s New Deal marked the start of several decades of reduced income inequality, strong trade unions, steep top tax rates and strict financial regulation. After 1981, Reagan began to dismantle each of these core features of the New Deal.

Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.

None of this will be easy. Vested interests are deeply entrenched, even as Wall Street titans are jailed and their firms pay megafines for fraud. The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old.

The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days,  will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.  

The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.

Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.


Jeffrey D. Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.”

Too Big to Fail: The Movement -- And Everybody Needs One, Every Day

A Movement Too Big To Fail 

Chris Hedges, TruthDig 
October 17, 2011


There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn.  The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant.  Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking.  So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi.  So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.

Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises.  These protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional “liberal” establishment has steadily refused to do-fight back.  And it was deeply moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street.  It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase “too big to fail.”

Tinkering with the corporate state will not work.  We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands.   This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart.  But the liberal class has no credibility left.  It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars.  The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along.  Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests.  The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment.  The union bosses, in short, had no choice.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters.  It proposes something new.  It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power.  It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost.  It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility.  It is not interested in formal positions of power.  It is not seeking office.  It is not trying to get people to vote.  It has no resources.  It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements.  All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back.  It has no other way of defying the corporate state.  This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one.  It affirms our dignity.  It permits us to become free and independent human beings.

Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices.  King too was a radical.  He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or justice.  He understood that movements-such as the Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women’s rights, the labor movement and the civil rights movement-have always been the true correctives in American democracy.  None of those movements achieved formal political power.  But by holding fast to moral imperatives they made the powerful fear them.  King knew that racial equality was impossible without economic justice and an end to militarism.  And he had no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal establishment that called on him to be calm and patience.  “For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King said shortly before he was assassinated.  “Now I feel quite differently.  I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.”

King was killed in 1968 when he was in Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers.  By then he had begun to say that his dream, the one that the corporate state has frozen into a few safe clichés from his 1963 speech in Washington, had turned into a nightmare.  King called at the end of his life for massive federal funds to rebuild inner cities, what he called “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” a complete restructuring of “the architecture of American society.”  He grasped that the inequities of capitalism had become the instrument by which the poor would always remain poor.  “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” King said, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”  On the eve of King’s murder he was preparing to organize a poor people’s march on Washington, D.C., designed to cause “major, massive dislocations,” a nonviolent demand by the poor, including the white underclass, for a system of economic equality.  It would be 43 years before his vision was realized by an eclectic group of protesters who gathered before the gates of Wall Street.

The truth of America is understood only when you listen to voices in our impoverished rural enclaves, prisons and the urban slums, when you hear the words of our unemployed, those who have lost their homes or cannot pay their medical bills, our elderly and our children, especially the quarter of the nation’s children who depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are marginalized.  There is more reality expressed about the American experience by the debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all the chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the airwaves.

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line?  What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters?  What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates?  What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators?  What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens?  What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”

“The black vote mean [nothing],” the rapper Nas intones.  “Who you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan? In the hood nothing is changing,/ We aint got no choices.”

Or listen to hip-hop artist Talib Kweli:  “Back in the ’60s, there was a big push for black … politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our communities are so much worse.  A lot of people died for us to vote, I’m aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at all.  Politics is not the truth to me, it’s an illusion.”

The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve.  It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact.  It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible.  This is what happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism.  Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is King, especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader.

The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class.  It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no impediments.  Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite.  And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets.  Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater.  But that game is over.

Human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded.  The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power.  And as the engines of corporate power pollute and poison the ecosystem and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded by both the corporate state and radical dissidents.  The best it can do is attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising up to replace it.

An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope of a correction or a reversal through the formal mechanisms of power.  It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression now in these protests that lie outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.  By emasculating the liberal class, which once ensured that restive citizens could institute moderate reforms, the corporate state has created a closed system defined by polarization, gridlock and political charades.  It has removed the veneer of virtue and goodness that the liberal class offered to the power elite.

Liberal institutions, including the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions, set the parameters for limited self-criticism in a functioning democracy as well as small, incremental reforms.  The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess.  Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation.  They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

But the liberal class, by having refused to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite.  The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance.  All hope lies now with those in the street.

Liberals lack the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies.  They have no ideological alternatives even as the Democratic Party openly betrays every principle the liberal class claims to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy to a demand for quality and affordable public education to a return of civil liberties to a demand for jobs and welfare of the working class.  The corporate state forced the liberal class to join in the nation’s death march that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Liberals such as Bill Clinton, for corporate money, accelerated the dismantling of our manufacturing base, the gutting of our regulatory agencies, the destruction of our social service programs and the empowerment of speculators who have trashed our economy.  The liberal class, stripped of power, could only retreat into its atrophied institutions, where it busied itself with the boutique activism of political correctness and embraced positions it had previously condemned.

Russell Jacoby writes:  “The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane.  The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious.  The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist.  The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound.  We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism comes with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class, language that defines this new movement.  This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed.  We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good.  They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money.  They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women.  They worship money and power.  And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.  The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state.  It is part of the same nightmare experienced in postindustrial mill towns of New England and the abandoned steel mills of Ohio.  It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, living in terror and mourning their dead, endure daily.

What took place early Friday morning in Zuccotti Park was the first salvo in a long struggle for justice.  It signaled a step backward by the corporate state in the face of popular pressure.  And it was carried out by ordinary men and women who sleep at night on concrete, get soaked in rainstorms, eat donated food and have nothing as weapons but their dignity, resilience and courage.  It is they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation.  And if we join them we might have a chance.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Coming Demise of Crony Capitalism

Tuesday 11 October 2011

by: Ravi Batra, Truthout | News Analysis

In 1978, to the laughter of many and the derision of a few, I wrote a book called, "The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism," which predicted that Soviet communism would vanish around the end of the century, whereas crony or monopoly capitalism would create the worst-ever concentration of wealth in its history, so much so that a social revolution would start its demise around 2010.  My forecasts derived from the law of social cycles, which was pioneered by my late teacher and mentor, P. R. Sarkar.  Lo and behold, Soviet communism disappeared right before your eyes during the 1990s, and now, just a year after 2010, middle-class America, spearheaded by a movement increasingly known as "Occupy Wall Street (OWS)," is beginning to revolt against Wall Street greed and crony capitalism.  Will the revolt succeed?  It surely will, because the pre-conditions for its success are all there.

The first question is this: Why does rising wealth disparity create poverty?  My answer is that it causes overproduction and hence unemployment and destitution.  It is all a matter of supply and demand.  Inequality goes up when official economic policy does not allow wages to catch up with the ever-growing labor productivity, so that profits soar and rising productivity increasingly raises the incomes and bonuses of business executives.  I have detailed this process in an earlier article.  Then money sits idly in the vaults of bankers and big-business CEOs and restrains consumer demand, leading to overproduction and hence layoffs.  The toxic combination of mounting layoffs and absent job creation raises poverty, which, according to official figures, is now the highest in 50 years.

The next question is:  how has the government either restrained wages relative to productivity or made the rich richer and the poor poorer?  It is easy to see that almost all official economic measures adopted since 1981 and contained in the following list have devastated the middle class.  The list includes: 

1. The Reagan income tax cut of 1981 that benefited the rich, but made it necessary to sharply raise all other federal taxes, paid mostly by the poor and the middle class, to finance that tax cut.

2. Unenforced antitrust laws, leading to mergers among large and profitable firms, but killing high-paying jobs in numerous industries.

3. Permitting the oil industry mergers in the 1990s that are now preventing oil prices from falling in the middle of the worst slump since the 1930s.

4. Permitting relentless mergers among pharmaceuticals and health insurance companies, so that America, far more than any other nation, now spends almost 15 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care that is mediocre by European and Japanese standards.

5. Unchecked use of outsourcing that kills high-paying jobs in manufacturing and services.

6. Ignoring the growth of the trade deficit that has destroyed our manufacturing base.

7. The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act under President Clinton that led to reckless lending by banks and an unprecedented housing bubble, which collapsed in 2007 to trigger the ongoing slump.

8. The Bush tax cuts and bailouts that further benefited the rich while nearly doubling the government debt.

9. And finally, the decimation of the real minimum wage by President Reagan and other Republicans.  (In 1981 the hourly minimum wage bought $8 worth of goods compared to $6 by the end of Reagan' presidency in 1988,  and to mere $5.15 in 2006 under Bush.)

Looking at this nine-point list, is there any government program that a big business CEO would hate?  Stated another way, is there any measure that has helped the middle class?  I can't think of any.  Thus, over the past three decades whatever the government did, ostensibly to help the people, actually ended up hurting them.  Mergers, outsourcing and free trade raise productivity, but also lower wages, whereas the other provisions of the above list directly enrich the wealthy.  The nine-point list is really a list of exploitation.

Let us now look at President Obama's record since January 2009 when he took office.  The president's first act was to engineer another bailout, à la George W. Bush.  The idea was that the $800 billion package of assisting banks and faltering industries would save or create some four million jobs.  Did the measure succeed in its avowed purpose? 

According to the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget office, the bailout created nearly 1.5 million jobs.  Even if we accept the administration's claim of four million, the bailout was extremely wasteful and enormously enriched the rich.  Dividing 800 billion by four million yields 200,000.  In other words, the government spent $200,000 to create one job.  When the average wage is less than $50,000 per year, where did the other $150,000 go?  This suggests that companies that hired those four million people received $150,000 for each job they created.  Thus, three-fourths of the bailout, or $600 billion, went to businesses, and a mere one-fourth benefited the unemployed.  This is the best case for the Obama measure.  It is clear that the bailouts, Bush's and Obama's, were extremely wasteful and hugely enriched the opulent.

The fact is that government deficits are not working and have always benefited the wealthy.  Not surprisingly, the fastest and the sharpest rise in income and wealth inequality has occurred since 1981, when the culture of mega-deficits first began.  Lasting prosperity occurs only when wages rise in proportion to productivity, as was the case through much of American history, especially from 1940 to 1980.  Whenever wages trail productivity, debt and profits soar, only to be followed by overproduction and soaring poverty and misery for the middle class.  Such was the case in the 1920s and the 1930s and such again has been the case since 1981.

If President Obama really wants to create millions of jobs, then all the economic measures adopted since Reagan's presidency must be abandoned.  Of course, the Republicans would oppose him tooth and nail in this resolve; they would scream about the president hurting job creators, who in fact are job destroyers.  Big business has decimated American jobs through mega-mergers, outsourcing, oil speculation and by shifting factories to Mexico and China.  The nation can only prosper if the destructive ability of job destroyers is restrained through increased taxes or the creation of free markets.

When the government bails out mega banks and Wall Street firms, it amounts to shooting the economy in the foot.  Our president seeks to bring about change, which was his campaign slogan.  But once elected, he got sidetracked by thinking that change is possible through compromise.  This has never happened before.  Never in history have the exploited prospered by cooperating with the exploiter.

Compromise is what produced the government's nine-point list of measures described above.  The Republicans were able to impose these measures whenever some Democrats compromised with them.  When Reagan raised the gasoline tax and excise taxes in 1982, it was through the cooperation of the Democrats, who cooperated again in 1983 when Social Security and self-employment taxes went up sharply to pay for the massive income tax cut of 1981.  The repeal of the Glass-Stiegel Act, the Bush tax cuts and bailout were all the handiwork of Republican lawmakers and right-wing Democrats.

America does not need another dose of increased government spending, but a rational economic policy that generates free-market capitalism to take the place of the current monopoly capitalism.  In 1776, the nation declared independence; coincidentally, the same year Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, demonstrated how small businesses generate lasting prosperity for all, not just a privileged few.  That is what we need again.  It is well known that small firms have created the bulk of American jobs in recent years.  This is then the best argument for breaking up business conglomerates not only to create jobs, but also to lower the oil price and the cost of health care.

The government should also adopt strong, not toothless, measures to eliminate the trade deficit, which is now running at $500 billion per year.  This alone will create five million manufacturing jobs.  Eliminating the trade deficit will raise US GDP by the same amount, and to produce that much output, new workers will be needed.  Suppose it costs a business $100,000 to hire a worker, including salary, benefits and profit.  Dividing 500 billion by 100,000 yields five million.  In other words, eliminating the trade shortfall will generate five million new jobs, paying the average wage and benefits.

The trade deficit can be eliminated by setting up a low export-exchange rate, the way China and other Asian nations have done.  But first, the government must see the value of balancing our trade and then proper economic policy can be devised to reach the goal.

Outsourcing is now the biggest job destroyer.  The government should impose a hefty tax on this practice.  This way, if a company has to outsource some work, it will compensate the nation for creating joblessness in the economy.  Finally, we need to eliminate the federal budget deficit.  This can be done by repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and by enacting a small tax on financial transactions, while preserving crucial programs for the retirees.  There is no reason to cut Social Security and Medicare, because President Reagan raised taxes sharply to guarantee the benefits to retiring baby boomers.  In short, President Obama should do away with the nine-point list of exploitation mentioned above.  He will then be able to bring about the change that he promised during the election campaign in 2008.

Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  By now, we should know that excessive government spending is one such insanity.  It creates very few jobs and primarily benefits the rich.  In fact, I have shown mathematically to some audiences that, under reasonable assumptions, increased government debt goes completely into the pockets of the opulent.  As the latest piece of evidence, from September 2010 to September 2011, the deficit rose $600 billion, but only 400,000 jobs were added.

I call upon the OWS movement to demand that the above nine-point list of exploitation be repealed, so that a free-market capitalism of small firms is reborn.  This will strengthen the president's hand and enable him to face Republican lies and tactics that are only meant to further weaken the economy and force the president out of power.  We need to make sure that Mr. Obama is re-elected, provided he accepts the repeal agenda, because the Republicans always do the same thing over and over, namely make the rich richer and the poor poorer.  Additionally, we should also work to defeat Republican incumbents and rightist Democrats who will compromise to maintain the status quo and possibly cut Medicare.

Our efforts are bound to succeed.  I am an economist and historian and made many forecasts in the past about the economy and social change.  While 5 percent of my economic forecasts have been wrong, to my knowledge I have never made an error about forecasting a revolution.  My latest estimate is that monopoly capitalism will go the way of Soviet communism by 2016.

O' brave protesters of the OWS movement, your effort will not only shape the 2012 elections, they will also end, once and for all, the brutality of the rich and powerful, who are responsible for the sorry state you are in.  The change that you are about to bring will be glorified as what Abraham Lincoln did for black Americans.  I hope that, with your support, Mr. Obama will be the harbinger of that change.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. 

________________________________
Ravi Batra is a professor of economics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. This article is based on his two books, "The New Golden Age" and "Greenspan's Fraud." His web site is http://ravibatra.com.  

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous when Economic Democracy is established.   Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE   How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity?  Learn more HERE  http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

The Future of the #Occupy Movement: Solidarity and Escalation

Mark Engler - October 21, 2011

A month after it began with a few hundred people marching on Wall Street, the #Occupy movement has grown to include tens of thousands of participants throughout the country and has captured headlines around the world. If it has not yet succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, that’s only because its participants have dreamed big: imagining a sustained popular uprising that could force fundamental changes in our political and economic system—ones that could end corporate dominance and promote real democracy. 

The movement can, in fact, propel significant changes. But #OccupyWallStreet and its allied occupations still have a ways to go before realizing their potential. The two issues most pressing as they chart their next steps: solidarity and escalation. 

 “Co-optation” or Flattery? 

Despite great success in capturing the public eye, the actual number of people camped out at the various occupations around the country remains relatively small. While there are several hundred people camping in hubs such as New York City and Los Angeles, overnight participants in smaller cities number in the dozens. What bolsters the power of these encampments is that they are representative of a much wider discontent. Far greater numbers of sympathizers turn out for mass meetings, marches, and online shows of support. And, importantly, more established political bodies—unions, advocacy organizations, and community groups representing large constituencies—have offered endorsements of the growing #Occupy effort. 

As more have signed on, some activists have been wary of outside expressions of support. Particularly as Democratic Party officials (including President Obama and Vice President Biden) have said positive things about the movement, some have voiced concerns about “cooptation.” They have argued that outside liberals, “while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement,” could instead “undermine it from within.” 

How big of a danger “cooptation” actually represents is a matter of dispute. In a recent interview, Chris Maisano asked veteran social movement theorist Frances Fox Piven about this issue. (Piven is author, among many other books, of the landmark Poor People’s Movements and has considered the issue of cooptation at length in her work.) I believe she struck the right tone in her response: 

Maisano: [As] recent comments by even the president and vice-president have showed, a lot of the more institutionalized forces on the left like the unions and MoveOn and the Van Jones American Dream Movement are trying to latch on to the protests and turn them into what some people have called a liberal version of the Tea Party. How do you think their involvement will effect the movement? How should the activists at the core of the movement relate to them?  

Piven: They should be friendly. They should ask them to do things; they should give them assignments. And not adopt the insignia of these groups as their own. In other words they should maintain considerable autonomy, but nevertheless they should treat these groups as allies, as they treated the unions as allies. But they shouldn’t ever let unions tell them what to do, they shouldn’t let Van Jones tell them what to do. Partly because they seem to know better, really. 

So I don’t think that’s their biggest problem, how to deal with their erstwhile supporters.

The danger of cooptation should be put in context. There have been some clearly opportunistic instances of Democrats trying to capitalize on the movement, such as the none-too-radical Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attempting to build its mailing list through a “I Stand with #OccupyWallStreet” petition. But is it really possible that the Democratic Party would somehow swoop in and “take control” of the #Occupy movement? It doesn’t seem like even a remote possibility. 

 Moreover, Peter Drier has made the important point that, when it comes to social change, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The fact that mainstream figures attempt to co-opt and advance watered-down versions of movement demands (as they did with once-impossibly-radical calls for “a progressive income tax, the eight-hour day, the direct election of Senators, old age insurance, and voting rights for African Americans”) is not a defeat, but a sign of victory. Of course, if activists use this as an excuse to call it a day, that is a problem. But if we treat it as an occasion to push for even greater changes, it is a very positive thing. 

 Joining Forces, Gaining Power 

One problem with the rhetoric of “cooptation” is that it casts the need to expand the movement’s reach in a negative light. It leads figures such as Chris Hedges, in a more-radical-than-thou cri de coeur, to adopt right-wing talking points denouncing allies as “union bosses,” rather than to approach coalition-building in a constructive manner. This is unfortunate. For, while cooptation is something to be avoided, a much more pressing and ongoing need for the #Occupy movement is fostering solidarity. 

Before #OccupyWallStreet ever existed, there were lots of people working to fight banks, reverse foreclosures, and challenge corporate power. The problem was that their efforts were isolated and almost universally ignored by the media. The #Occupy movement has created a great opportunity for many of these campaigns to see themselves as part of a unified fight and to receive an added jolt of energy. In return, the more groups that sign on and see themselves as part of the #Occupy effort, the more that movement is able to sustain its status as a growing and dynamic force. It gains greater numbers of participants, more diversity, and heightened credibility. 

Many actions that different local occupations have embraced have grown out of solidarity with groups that were already organizing to advance the interests of the 99 percent. As just one of many examples, #OccupyLA joined up with an anti-foreclosure action against several banks and successfully compelled the reversal of at least one foreclosure decision. This action—wonderfully militant and effective—did not emerge out of the occupation itself. Instead, it had already been organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), an LA community organization. But the fact that the #Occupy movement joined in solidarity was a great boon to all involved. It added a ton of energy to ACCE’s direct action. And, for the #Occupy folks, the positive media attention created by the action generated greater excitement about the City Hall encampment and helped bring a wider range of people to the occupation’s assemblies. 

 When Piven argued that cooptation is not the #Occupy movement’s biggest problem her interviewer replied, “What do you think their biggest problem is?” 

Piven gave a prescient answer: “Spreading the movement. Thinking of second, third, fourth, fifth phases. Other forms of disruptive protest that are punchier than occupying a square.” 

She is right. If the #Occupy movement is to remain in the media spotlight and continue gaining momentum, it must escalate. That could involve many steps, including occupying banks, continuing to use direct action against foreclosures, and embracing further international days of action. Solidarity will be an important part of all of these. 

Within the call of “We Are the 99 Percent” is the idea that, while no one can take over the movement—no single individual or group can declare it over or announce that its ambitions have been satisfied—the coalition of those invited to take part is vast. The movement draws power from its reach. And that is no small part of its brilliance.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous when Economic Democracy is established.   Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE   How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism?  Explore the answers HERE What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity?  Learn more HERE  http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability