Tuesday, November 22, 2011

In Reply to Comments on ....

Why Occupy Wall Street Will Keep Up The Fight--Kalle Lasn & Micah White 
Great piece.

IN RESPONSE TO THIS COMMENT:

COMMENT

A new left-right hybrid party forming based largely upon an anti-business political platform?

The idealism is cute. I have to wonder, though, who from the right would be interested in a scheme for higher taxes that would risk seizing up our capital markets. The vision is a left-right hybrid, but the platform is far-left progressive. At the end of the day, I suspect that the Occupy people will remain in their current position in the American political landscape, as the always-disgruntled (but sometimes more disgruntled than others) far-left flank of the Democratic Party. An Occupy candidate is not likely to win an election, and, since someone has to win, most of the Occupy crowd will continue looking for idealistic messiahs within the Democratic ranks, by whom they will continue to be disappointed.

It is good to see someone involved in Occupy starting to think about real policy proposals that could change the system. Ultimately, though, there isn't much here that is very different from anything I've heard from Democratic and progressive voices for the last several years.


RESPONSE


As any "occupations" have historically had as an aspiration--and this would include the 11th hour Republicans who saw the leverage inherent in the debt-ceiling intransigence, and Nordquist's tax-pledge, etc.-- this movement is, maybe not yet as well, all about forcing the issue.

The OWS needs to hope for, strive for, some sort of leverage to up their octane. The divide of inequality and available resources is much too wide to be bridged or narrowed by rhetoric and moral platitudes.

The vision of a higher-tax induced "seizing up" of our capitol markets is threat-like, and therein the arm-twisting is already in play, front loaded.

Since when has the market NOT been about risk? When things were greasing right along, the markets apparently didn't feel such risk while they ventured and bundled and default swapped and frittered hundred of billions of private $$ away. Who was risking what then?  Heretofore, the pattern in place is to privatize gains while socializing losses. Now who's seized up?  

Policy change is good, only when new and/or improved policies are implemented. Yes, there need to be legislative leaders to work toward that end. There are such elected officials and respected erudite and reasonable voices (Ron Paul, Bernie Saunders, Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) sitting at their desks and standing in the wings. We need to force them up onto the stages and out onto the floors.

OWS is NOT merely "kids" in the parks, and the movement will increasingly become more difficult to ignore as it morphs and assimilates to find traction and force some results.

And we shouldn't fool ourselves: it won't all be peaceful, and it won't be all be pretty. Or cute. It will be hard and cruel, much as it has become for jobless, the poor and the hopeless in the US and elsewhere.


~JC

 

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