Bill O’Reilly declares the end of the Occupy Movement:
“They have been overrun by thugs, anarchists and the crazies who intimidate….
So the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is dead, finished as a legitimate political force in this country. And that’s a good thing.”Bill O’Reilly
Bill O’Reilly Talking Points Nov. 17, 2011
in Truthdig.com/ Nov. 15, 2011
 |
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.
The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.
The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression. (continued)
Read the entire article here: This Is What Revolution Looks Like
A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
Robert Reich
from Occupiers Occupied: The Hijacking of the First Amendment, Nov. 15, 2011
image: http://msb1959.wordpress.com/
Editors Note: As usual, Reich makes some great points in his article. If protesters simply protest the usual way, i.e. picket signs and marching, they can more easily be ignored and marginalized. The Occupy movement has proven the media will pay attention only when protesters occupy and inconvenience the powerful, and even more when police attempt to break up the protest. So don’t expect the occupy tactic to disappear anytime soon. The harder the crackdown, the larger the attention, and the farther the spreading of the message.
|
This speech by Ron Paul is almost a year old, but well worth watching. Why can’t other Republicans think more like Paul? In fact, when it comes to foreign policy, why can’t Democrats think and speak out like Rep. Paul? –Arlen
New York Times, Nov. 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.
Read the rest of the article here The New Progressive Movement
Strange as it might seem, the 2010 midterm election helped trigger the Occupy Wall Street movement and weaken the clout of the Tea Party.
Remember what a funk those of us on the left side of the political spectrum were in at this time last year? The Republican Party had just kicked butt in the 2010 midterm elections and the Tea Party was dominating the political conversation.
One year later, the Tea Party is losing steam, while the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread all over the country. Rather than solely focusing on the conservative issues of cutting taxes and slashing government programs for the middle and lower classes, Americans are paying attention to and discussing our vanishing middle class, the huge disparities of wealth, and the ways our system is rigged in favor of the top one percent.
How does the 2010 election factor into these welcome trends? Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, which was exactly what happened after the GOP took control of the House last year.
First of all, when one party–no matter which one–takes control of every branch of government, it almost never works out well for that party. Whenever anything goes wrong, there is only one party to blame. After 2008, the scapegoat, by default, was the President and the Democratic Party. The right-wing media machine went on full attack mode, and as the economy continued to sour (in large part because of Republican obstruction), Democrats were blamed and then soundly defeated in the 2010 election.
But the good news for those of us on the left was that since Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, they had to do some actual governing, as well as take some share of responsibility for the outcome. Since the GOP has done all it can to block President Obama’s agenda, tepid though it has been, and haven’t come up with a viable plan of their own, they cannot believably claim innocence for the country’s economic problems.
It’s not hard for Americans to see that the Republican Party has no serious plan to fix the economy, just their tired, old messages of lower taxes, deregulation, and smaller government, and the first two at least were contributing factors to the growing national debt problem and the 2008 financial meltdown.
Suppose the Democrats had hung on and kept control of the House in 2010? President Obama and Congress could conceivably gotten more legislation passed and made strides to reverse the economic downturn and made things a little better for the average American. That could have released some pressure from the growing frustration and economic despair that would ultimately spark the Occupy Wall Street uprising. The structural unfairness of our political and economic system would still be in place, just slightly less onerous. The prospects of Tea Party and Republican gains in 2012 would look better than ever.
But that scenario didn’t happen. Democrats were soundly trounced in 2010 and the economy continued to flounder. Conservative policies of austerity, resisted only weakly by the White House and Democrats, caused hardship for many, most notably young people with few job prospects, many of them unemployed college students and graduates with back-breaking student loan debts.
Without realistic hope for change, with more people losing jobs and homes, the economic pressures mounted. The example of Arab Spring uprisings encouraged a few young American activists to try something similar at ground zero of the most egregious wrongdoing, Wall Street. That spark started an occupy conflagration that continues to spread across this country and the globe.
The black cloud of major Republican gains in the 2010 election turned out to have an unexpected silver lining. The One Percent and their Republican and Tea Party allies overreached and a large segment of the American people hit their breaking point. More Americans are starting to open their eyes to the serious institutional dysfunction that characterizes our political and economic system, and are starting to take action against it. We are all awaiting the ultimate outcome.
“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”
