A description of the current American civil war

This comes from over at Hullabaloo. It is a clear summary of the current American political situation.

Progressives must come to terms with the fact that the 35% or so of Americans who make up the conservative base have been radicalized far beyond the point of no return. They are activist class warriors on behalf of the top 1% of "producers." They are activist culture warriors against minority communities who will happily advance minority figureheads as exceptional standardbearers in order to prove their point.

We are now a nation hopelessly divided. On one side is a large faction of people who understand that the financial classes and the super-wealthy are mostly a parasitic class; that the middle class has much more in common with the poor than it does with the wealthy; that workers produce wealth, and that demand produces prosperity; that poor communities are disadvantaged not by the inherent failings of their people but by the oppressive nature of their circumstances; and that we humans and creatures of this earth are all in the same boat together.

On the other side is a large group of people who believe that over half of Americans are parasitic dead weight who should not be allowed to vote; that the interests of the middle class are aligned with the interests of hedge fund managers; that only a select few very wealthy people produce society's goods; that poor communities are poor through their own moral failings; and that the society's "producers" should behave however they please to people and creatures unfortunate enough to find themselves at their mercy.

And in the middle are about 20% of Americans paying too little attention to have much of an opinion either way.

This is the "Two Tribes" Digby has been writing about for the last decade. I am going to write more about these two tribes in the near future but until I do, I strongly recommend Francis Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order.

Fukuyama writes of the shift from tribal government to the national state. The national state is based on bureaucracy, which is an impersonal rational organizational structure of the type which is required to achieve control over large populations and especially to field large professional armies. Once a state exists, then history has shown it becomes unified when the king provides justice to the population and protects them from the predatory behavior of the aristocracy. But this protection only occurs in a strong state. A weak state cannot provide as much protection and cannot afford to field large professional armies over long periods of time.

Fukuyama describes the characteristics of tribally governed organizations and compares those characteristics of nation states which are based on bureaucracies. But he also points out that historically nation states have broken down, and when they do the default form of governance is tribal. The aristocrats prefer tribal governance because they are predators and such tribal governance allows them to plunder the population.

The aristocrats of France from three centuries ago are today's moneyed elites. Keep in mind that the working classes create value. The modern moneyed elites do nothing but collect rent without adding value to the society. Their rent is based on their positions of power, not on their economic value. Since the Great Depression the federal government has protected the working population of America from the predatory behavior of the moneyed elites, but with the rise of Reaganism that protection has broken down. Today Wall Street banks, large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses and inherited wealth all conspire to weaken the federal government so that they can plunder the working population.

They are far along on their effort, but the Occupy Wall Street movement has begun to react to their predations. It's time for America to regain control over the financial predators who are attacking us.

Are the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street very similar?

Trust Digby to get it right.

I suppose it was inevitable that the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement would be compared with the Tea Party, but the level of misunderstanding and myth surrounding the latter's "populist" bona fides is surprising to even the most cynical observer.

There may be surface similarities between the two uprisings, but they actually represent two opposing populist worldviews, whose only philosophical resemblance to one another is their belief that they speak for "the people" against the elites. While both movements are mainly concerned with economic issues, their beliefs about the causes and solutions they propose couldn't be more different.

One of the central myths about the Tea Party is that it came about as a reaction against the Wall Street bailouts. It's true that there were some scattered "Tea Parties" around the Ron Paul campaign in 2008, but virtually everyone agrees that the movement was really galvanised by a famous rant from CNBC anchor Rick Santelli from the trading floor of the Chicago commodities exchange.

Only one month into the Obama administration, Santelli called for a "new Tea Party" to be held on tax day, April 15, and it became an instant YouTube sensation and rallying cry for the right wing.

He was mad about bailouts alright, but not the Wall Street bailouts. What sparked his fury was the proposed plan to help average homeowners in trouble with their mortgages. Santelli raved: "Do we really want to subsidise the losers' mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbour's mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It's a moral hazard."

"Do we really want to subsidise the losers?"

- Rick Santelli, CNBC anchor

Here's how his colleague Lawrence Kudlow characterised the outburst: "Santelli called for a new Tea Party in support of capitalism. He's right."

Support for capitalism - and antipathy toward government interference in it - is the very essence of Tea Party populism. There wasn't much talk about the moral hazard of a "too big to fail" banking system but there was plenty of fulminating about government interference in "the market" and righteous anger about the stimulus plan and what they characterised as the "government takeover" of the healthcare system.

It was never about corporate greed, but was about the usual right wing resentment at the government spending their tax money on people they don't think have earned it. These are not billionaire bankers - they are the people on the lower rungs of the ladder. Unsurprisingly, this attitude turned out to be useful to corporate interests looking to allay any real populist impulses among the citizenry, and they soon moved in through various means to help the "movement" organise itself.

Contrary to various accounts surfacing lately ostensibly to warn the Occupy Wall Street supporters of the dangers of being similarly "co-opted" it was a very happy love match, not a marriage of convenience.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, while being endlessly harrangued by wags and pundits about its alleged lack of goals and lists of grievances, is actually focused pretty clearly on the same thing as the populists of the Gilded Age - those whom Teddy Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth".

Their rallying cry is "we are the 99 per cent" which represents the huge number of those of us who have been treading water or losing ground over the past 30 years, while and the upper one per cent of the population swallows up more and more of the nation's wealth. This shocking income inequality is finally reaching a critical mass that is animating the OWS movement.

Indifference of the rich

This movement wasn't catalysed by a wealthy commentator issuing a cri de guerre on a stock market show on TV. There has been a growing anti-corporate populist critique on the left for nearly 20 years, first in the form of the anti-globalisation movement and more recently in the more mainstream response to a series of assaults on workers' rights, notably in Wisconsin and Ohio.

The arrogant indifference of the very rich to the carnage they left behind in the wake of their spectacular meltdown in 2008, and the apparent impotence of democratic institutions to hold them to account, has finally mobilised the masses.

Click Here to read the rest.

Compare the OWS demonstrators to the Tea Partiers; They each represent the elites fighting over Washington, D.C.

Todd Gitlin explains the Occupy Wall Street movement - at least in part - in today's New York Times. He briefly states how the OWS movement resembles the early Tea Party movement. Both are rebellions against the domination of American politics by unelected elites who are out strictly for their own gain at the expense of the middle class - and in the case of the OWS, the working class.

Then he explains how the two movements differ - the Tea Partiers are a strongly hierarchical movement which finds the elites it follows are out of power.

The Tea Party, for all its apparent populism, revolves around a vision of power and how to attain it. Tea Partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, graying, married and comfortable; the political system once worked for them, and they think it can be made to do so again. They revile government, but they adore hierarchy and order.

The OWS individuals in contrast show:

Deep anger at grotesque inequities extends far beyond this one encampment; after all, a few handfuls of young activists do not have a monopoly on the fight against plutocracy. Revulsion in the face of a perverse economy is felt by many respectable people: unemployed, not yet unemployed, shakily employed and plain disgusted. A month from now, this movement, still busy being born, could look quite different.

And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the “occupation” three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists.

[...]

IN this recent incarnation, anarchism, for the most part, is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of Lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves.

[...]

This new protest style is more Rousseau than Marx. ... It likes government more than corporations, but its own style is hardly governmental. It tends to care about process more than results.

And oh, how it loves to talk. It is no surprise that it makes fervent use of the technologies of horizontal communication, of Facebook and Twitter, though the instinct predated — perhaps prefigured — those tools. Not coincidentally, this was also the spirit of the more or less leaderless, partyless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt that are claimed as inspiration in Lower Manhattan. An “American Autumn” is their shot at an echo of the “Arab Spring.”

OCCUPY Wall Street, then, emanates from a culture — strictly speaking, a counterculture — that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline. ... Such movements hope to remain forever under construction, fluid, unfixed. They slip laughingly through the nets of journalism, which prefers hard-and-fast answers to the question “What do you people want?”

[Can] ... the inchoate quality of the Occupy Wall Street movement ... continue[?] Probably not, since an evolving alliance demands concrete goals, strategies and compromises. But perhaps something of the initial free spirit can flourish. There is plenty of public sentiment to nourish it. It doesn’t take public opinion polls to detect American anger at the plutocracy and the impunity with which it lords it over the country.

The culture of anarchy is right about this: The corporate rich — those ostensible “job creators” who somehow haven’t gotten around to creating jobs — rule the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party as well, having artfully arranged a mutual back-scratching society to enrich themselves. A refusal to compromise with this system, defined by its hierarchies of power and money, would be the current moment of anarchy’s great, lasting contribution.

Until now, fury at the plutocracy and the political class had found no channel to run in but the antigovernment fantasies of the Tea Party. Now it has dug a new channel. Anger does not move countries, but it moves movements — and movements, in turn, can move countries. To do that, movements need leverage. Even Archimedes needed a lever and a place to stand to move the world. When Zuccotti Park meets an aroused liberalism, the odd couple may not live happily ever after. But they can make a serious run at American dreams of “liberty and justice for all.”

I like Gitlin's distinctions between the OWS demonstrators and the tea partiers. Both are angry at the disaster the elites have heaped on America and on most Americans. One major difference between the two groups, as Todd Gitlin points out, is that the OWS are anarchists and the tea partiers deeply love hierarchy and order (even to the point of approaching fascism though they will never admit that.)

But another major distinction Gitlin does not discuss is the distinction between the groups of elites the two groups each oppose and support. The OWS is an organization in opposition to the Wall Street elite bankers and to the wealthiest families in America who are trying to carve out tax exemptions and regulation exemptions for themselves at the expense of the rest of the people in the economy. Add the top executives of the largest oligopoly and monopoly firms in America who want the same exemptions from taxes and regulations and who also want to destroy all workers' institutions starting with unions.

The "elites" the tea partiers oppose appear to be governments in general when not Republican dominated, unions, Democratic and Socialist politicians, Secular Humanists/Atheists/Muslims/etc., and intellectuals of all types, particularly those who claim that Global Warming exists, is largely man-made and is getting worse. They are also angry at government which rejects their desire to carry firearms anywhere and any time they wish. To a great extent the elites the Tea Partiers support caused the Great Recession which all Americans (except the wealthy elites themselves) currently are suffering from.

Where there appears to be a strong anarchist element in OWS, there is clearly a strong Libertarian element mixed with a strong Christian religious fundamentalist element in the Tea Partiers. Both strongly oppose certain elites. But the elites each oppose are quite different.

It's the battle between those elites which is behind the current paralysis in Washington, D.C. The two different groups of elites are battling over control of government and much of the battle is now centering over the refusal of the conservatives (for whom the tea partiers are surrogates) to let government function at all if they cannot control it. The level of dysfunction has clearly reached the point where political professionals on both sides are speaking out.

The differences between the demonstrators in the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Partiers mirror the competing factions currently paralysing Washington, D.C. and preventing the government from functioning.

The run-up to the 2012 election is going to get very interesting. We've seen nothing yet.

More from Jesse LaGreca

This guy has got his shit together!




FOX - Run the damned video!

or is FOX "Fair and Balanced like a thumb on the scales?"

Krugman on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations

Paul Krugman has written about the Occupy Wall Street Protests. Here's what he wrote:

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

[I have reformatted what Krugman wrote into bullet points but this remains an exact verbatim quote.]

• In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending.
• In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins.
• And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

[...]

I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer.

[...]

It would probably be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to see enacted. But we shouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.

Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I’ll second that, because such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover. I’d suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment — not more tax cuts — to help create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.

And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans, who instinctively side with those Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of great wealth.” Mitt Romney, for example — who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than many middle-class Americans — was quick to condemn the protests as “class warfare.”

But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously as they deserve to be taken.

There are a lot of people who are really angry/upset over the Wall Street Crisis of 2008 and its aftermath and who don't think anyone has done anything about it. That's the source of the nationwide anger at Wall Street and at the wealthy slackers who are refusing to do anything except exploit the less wealthy. The Occupy Wall Street demonstration is their expression, and it's beginning to have an effect.

When will the Wall Street criminals pay for their crimes?

A new study is being reported on showing that Americans have the lowest opinion of Wall Street Banks and financial institutions in a long time. Lindsay Owens looks at how Americans perceive the honesty and ethical practices as trends over 40 years.

Recent scandals involving Wall Street banks and financial institutions, headed by some of the world's most well-paid managers, executives and analysts, have many Americans asking themselves whether this game is rigged. It is this sense of injustice, coupled with economic insecurity, that animates changes in Americans' attitudes toward Wall Street. It's not just a small number of Americans, those who are actually "occupying" Wall Street, who feel such injustice. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

[...]

Americans have never exactly loved Wall Street stockbrokers or bankers—but we certainly didn't always hate them. Why this increasing hostility? The answer is a "perfect storm" of financial turmoil and a series of major scandals on Wall Street.

[...]

According to ... Harris Interactive, the percent of Americans with a great deal of confidence in the people running Wall Street had already reached an all-time low of just 4 percent by February of 2009. These figures are not just a reflection of Americans' dissatisfaction with the size of their bank accounts — they also reflect the increasing belief that Wall Street is playing a game that only the bankers can win.

Economic hard times, such as global recessions, do tend to bring about small, but noticeable drops in the public's confidence in Wall Street, just as we might expect falling confidence in a military that is losing a war.

But when economic downturns coincide with major scandals, as in the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s and our current dilemma, the biggest changes in public confidence result — changes that may have contributed to the protests we are seeing on Wall Street today. In other words, Americans really begin to get angry when there is evidence of systematic foul play.

To be sure, material hardships such as unemployment rates in the 9 percent range and the continuing high levels of foreclosures and bankruptcies undoubtedly set the stage for a public outcry. But this outcry has a distinctly moral tenor. The sentiments of the Occupy protestors holding signs reading "Blame Wall Street Greed," "People not Profits" and "Wall Street was the Real Weapons of Mass Destruction" certainly echo the wider American public's sense of moral indignation.

Just 26 percent of Americans in an April 2011 Harris poll thought the people working on Wall Street were "as honest and moral as other people" (for a point of comparison, the percentage was 51 in 1997). In that same poll, 67 percent of Americans agreed that "most people on Wall Street would be willing to break the law if they believed they could make a lot of money and get away with it."

It was perfectly obvious by 2009 to the public that the financial collapse that occurred in the fall of 2008 was the direct result of extreme and reckless risk-taking by Wall Street bankers. It soon became equally clear that those banks considered themselves too big to fail, so they had been free to take insane risks with other people's money. They would get the winnings and the American taxpayers would take the losses.

This was all clear to the Wall Street bankers long before the financial collapse they created. The accuracy of their beliefs became very clear when, after they were bailed out, not a single criminal case was brought against the criminal bankers who had created the disaster. Instead by 2010 their bonuses were reaching record levels never before seen, even as the world economy was struggling to dig out of the economic rubble those bankers left in their wake.

Is the "Occupy Wall Street" a social movement that expresses the anger of the rest of us who have watched those economic criminals commit their crimes and then skate without any retribution? No doubt. And if it is not effective then there will be another to follow until the Wall Street criminals pay for their crimes.

How does a social movement succeed? Hard, skilled work.

Ezra Klein has posted an article by skilled organizer Rich Yeselson describing what is required to make a movement succeed. What it takes is meetings - meetings - meetings and more meetings along with the motivation to make the time to conduct the meetings. Here is a little more from the article which he entitles The Four Habits of highly successful social movements:

• the work of skilled organizers;
  
• the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again;
  
• whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and
  
• the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

Anyone who wants to see the Occupy Wall Street Movement succeed needs to read this entire article.