Wednesday, November 2, 2011

A return to regular blogging and what is this Occupy all about

Dysfunctional governance 2009-2011
Depressed Malaise or was it simply writer's block?
I am reconstituting my bi-weekly (or so) blog because now there really is something to say. Certainly there is the upcoming Presidential race, but until recently there wasn't much to say but be more disappointed. There has been little Change and Hope fades each day the Lessor Depression sucks the economic life out of the society. Yet there appears to be a few flickers from the President, some movement or how about this word---change instead of obstruction or legislative gridlock. Could it be the President appears to be moving off his namby-pamby compromise at all costs approach. Is that because he has rid himself of the Clintonites like Rahm Emanual or Larry Sumners. He still has Bill Daley (the banker) but I hear also he is is being pushed aside---meaning Obama's Clinton-Triangulation Advisers who have shown to provide incorrect advice are fading.

Finally truly the ones who we have been waiting for!
Two, externally there is a second, unexpected, summer spawned, grass roots uprising currently flooding America's political landscape. This time however pouring in from the unaffiliated-Independent center, made up of mostly under 35 year-old's, though significantly partnered by economically disaffected Baby Boomers. The movement has already changed the national narrative running away from government austerity beyond the bone to jobs, debt forgiveness, corporate crooks and everything real about the Lessor Depression's economic and social injustices---It is called "OCCUPY".

First Occupy Protest Sept 17th
 Many of you, or possibly just a few, might be wondering what is this "OCCUPY" thing all about. Who are they? What are they actually doing? What are their aims? Their plans or agenda's? It this thing for real or another front group taking advantage of current events? Are those leading this populist grass roots cause, radicals, anarchists or worse, something we don't know?  These are merely a few common questions because I know in that over the last month a number of seemingly well-informed progressives and Democratic party leaders and party activists have personally asked me about it in person or on Facebook. My question to you is, if you don't know what "MIC CHECK...MIC CHECK"  is in Occupy's context you really don't know what Occupy really is all about. After reading this long blog post go and give yourself permission and get your own first-person knowledge. It truly is an extraordinary and politically spiritual phenomena. Further you are not going to get a fair or informed opinion about what Occupy is or the implications the movement holds for your future from the mainstream media or even from cable news---except for Obermann on one of those 100 numbered channels.

To start this is not your cookie-cutter political movement; it isn't crowds of "verticals"—that is, the sort of people who possess the idea of political action is to have followers march around with professionally made signs under the control of one or another in a superficial top-down protest movement. Across America and throughout the globe Occupy activists are mostly "horizontal" meaning people who are far more independent, sympathetic with anarchist principles towards organization, holding to  non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy, and direct action---think the power of a town hall or church congregational meeting or politically what constitutes the caucus process in Colorado or Iowa. For many especially in today's corporatist-styled, hierarchical oriented social organizing paradigm think, a horizontal or flat amorphous model is difficult to conceive. 

Just a few years back
Initially I had many of the same questions whether this seemingly spontaneous, political thing was all about, especially after the summer of 2009, when something called the Tea Party suddenly erupted onto the political landscape. I once described the Tea Party as like a flood of dandelions suddenly invading a once pristine grass lawn. Dandelions are voracious invasive species, originally brought over with the Pilgrims so they can make a salad. Ever eat a dandelion? It is worse than arugula, Dandelions are maddening, they have a tap root that dives up to a foot deep into your lawn, spreads its leaves at the base blocking out sunlight to adjacent plants, and thereby sucking in all the nutrients for itself at the expense of the surrounding species. Dandelions don't share. Once they flower things really get nasty in that if the flower is cut off, over night it quickly re-sprouts another fully germinated flower to spread its thousands of seeds to the vicinity. Getting rid of them is really a chore. You have to pry out the tap root with a special tool and also spread chemical warfare about to choke off anymore off-springs.

What we witnessed in 2010 was the their full flowering in the American political landscape where Tea Party candidates won scores of unexpected Congressional and State Races and have thrown the Republican Party into the radical reactionary right zone. The good news is that this is beginning to come to an end where the electorate, meaning the unaffiliated independents and some moderate Republicans are now expressing total displeasure for the Republican Congress. a recent poll by PPP states that:

Over the last few weeks national polling has increasingly showed House Democrats recovering from their defeat in 2010 and taking the lead back on the generic House ballot. An October 10th Reuters survey showed Democrats ahead 48-40 and an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll the same day found Democrats with a 45-41 advantage.


The national numbers point to the possibility for Democrats to reclaim a majority in the House next year, and a series of polls conducted by PPP in 12 individual Congressional districts last week backs up what the national numbers are showing.

The 12 districts we polled are all in states where redistricting has already occurred- Arkansas, California, Illinois, and Wisconsin. And in all 12 we found the same thing- voters would like to replace the Republican incumbent with someone else, and for the most part the new GOP House majority is proving to be extremely unpopular.
Beck loving Tea Bagger 2009
The Tea Party was originally identified as a reactionary political movement that manipulated a minority political opportunity and manufactured it into a psuedo-grass roots movement through an astute operative named Dick Armey. The former Texan Congressman, now political lobbyist and consultant funded by billionaire Koch Brothers and friends, partnered with FOX News changed the political landscape overnight nine months after Obama's sweeping political victory. The opportunity was made possible by two things; the fact that the Obama Presidency had miscalculated their own political strategy in trying to Triangulate with the Republican and conservative Democratic Congress, (Clinton style with Clinton folks) and two, the fact that the Lessor Depression had created such angst and confusion within the electorate.  Armey prayed on unspoken racial bias as in the birthers, national debt fear and old class divisions, especially in the ex-urban and rural districts. That was then, this is now.

Adbuster's Mag Cover
Now for the rest of Occupy's story not told by the news
So what is this OCCUPY thing all about. A short history that actually few people bother to look up is that Occupy Wall Street and its U.S. and global off-shoots began when a Canadian anti-consumerist magazine called Adbusters. It is described as an anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism and publishes a reader-supported, advertising-free activist magazine with an estimated international circulation of 120,000 that is devoted to challenging consumerism. In early June 2011 Adbusters registered a domain name OccupyWallsteet.org and a month later in July 2011 called for a peaceful demonstration to occupy Wall Street. On August 2nd the night of the Debt-Ceiling Deadline in Congress two small groups ("New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts" and a collection strategizing for Occupy Wall Street including including the NYC General Assembly and U.S. Day of Rage. The groups joined in a demonstration at the old Merrill Lynch "Charging Bull" sculpture, which stands in Lower Manhattan. After the demonstration the two groups gathered into working committees to plan for the September 17th event. Later in August the hactivist group called Anonymous encouraged its followers to join the developing September 17th Occupy Wall Street Event.

Occupy Poster for Sept 17th
On Saturday, September 17th, Occupy Wall Street gathered with an estimated 1000 persons. (NYPD) tried to prohibit protesters from erecting tents, citing loitering ordinances to no avail. Protesters marched up and down Wall Street while actress and comedienne Roseanne Barr addressed the protesters. Prior to the protest's beginning on September 17, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a press conference,

"People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we'll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it."
Occupy Wall St Sept 17th
Although it was originally proposed by Adbusters magazine, the demonstration is leaderless.The protests have brought together people of many political positions. Professor Dorian Warren from Columbia University has described the movement as the first anti-authoritarian populist movement in the United States. A report in CNN said that protesters "got really lucky" when gathering at Zuccotti Park since it was private property and police could not legally force them to move off of it; in contrast, police have authority to remove protesters without permits from city parks. Originally the protests were compared to "the movements that sprang up against corporate globalization at the end of 1990s, most visibly at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle". A significant part of the protest is the use of the slogan, "We are the 99%," which was partly intended as a protest of recent trends regarding increases in the share of annual total income going to the top 1% of income earners in the United States.

That is surface story but "the rest of the story" was published in Naked Capitialism by David Graeber; here is an excerpt:


So we gathered up a few obvious horizontals and formed a circle, and tried to get everyone else to join us. Almost immediately people appeared from the main rally to disrupt it, calling us back with promises that a real democratic forum would soon break out on the podium. We complied. It didn’t happen. My Greek friend made an impassioned speech and was effectively shooed off the stage. There were insults and vituperation's. After about an hour of drama, we formed the circle again, and this time, almost everyone abandoned the rally and come over to our side. We created a decision-making process (we would operate by modified consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach, action, facilitation) and then reassembled to allow each group to report its collective decisions, and set up times for new meetings of both the smaller and larger groups. It was difficult to figure out what to do since we only had six weeks, not nearly enough time to plan a major action, let alone bus in the thousands of people that would be required to actually shut down Wall Street—and anyway we couldn’t shut down Wall Street on the appointed day, since September 17, the day Adbuster's had been advertising, was a Saturday. We also had no money of any kind.

Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to put on our first flyer. Adbusters’ idea had been that we focus on “one key demand.” This was a brilliant idea from a marketing perspective, but from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at all. We put that one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental questions to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to? Who did we represent? Someone—this time I remember quite clearly it was me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a half dozen others had equally strong memories of being the first to come up with it—suggested, “well, why not call ourselves ‘the 99%’? If 1% of the population have ended up with all the benefits of the last 10 years of economic growth, control the wealth, own the politicians… why not just say we’re everybody else?” The Spanish couple quickly began to lay out a “We Are the 99%” pamphlet, and we started brainstorming ways to print and distribute it for free.

Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape. The core of the emerging group, which began to meet regularly in Tompkins Square park, were very young people who had cut their activist teeth on the Bloombergville encampment outside City Hall earlier in the summer; aside from that there was a smattering of activists who had been connected to the Global Justice movement with skills to share (one or two of whom I had to drag out of effective retirement), and, as mentioned a number of New Yorkers originally from Greece, Spain, even Tunisia, with knowledge and connections with those who were, or had been, involved in occupations there. We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do was something like had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, or Madrid: occupy a public space to create a New York General Assembly, a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as “democracy” by the US government. [emphasis added] The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone. Still, it was almost impossible to predict what would really happen on the 17th. There were supposed to be 90,000 people following us on the internet. Adbusters had called for 20,000 to fill the streets. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. But how many would really show up? Especially since we didn't have money or time to organize buses. What’s more, we were keenly aware that the NYPD numbered close to 40,000; Wall Street was, in fact, probably the single most heavily policed public space on the face of Planet Earth. To be perfectly honest, as one of the old-timers scrambling to organize medical and legal trainings, lessons on how to organize affinity groups and do non-violent civil disobedience, seminars on how to facilitate meetings and the like, for most of us, the greatest concern during those hectic weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldn’t turn out a total fiasco, with all the enthusiastic young people immediately beaten, arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, simply looked the other way. We’d certainly seen it happen before.

This time it didn’t. True, there were all the predictable conflicts. Most of New York’s grumpier hard-core anarchists refused to join in, and mocked us from the sidelines as reformist; meanwhile, the more open, “small-a” anarchists, who had been largely responsible for organizing the facilitation and trainings, battled the verticals in the group to ensure that we did not institute anything that could become a formal leadership structure, such as police liaisons or marshals. There were also bitter battles over the web page, as well as minor crises over the participation of various fringe groups, ranging from followers of Lyndon LaRouche to one woman from a mysterious group that called itself  US Day of Rage, and who many sometimes suspected might not have any other members, who systematically blocked any attempt to reach out to unions because she felt we should be able to attract dissident Tea Partiers. On September 17th itself, I was troubled at first by the fact that only a few hundred people seemed to have shown up. What’s more the spot we’d chosen for our General Assembly, a plaza outside Citibank, had been shut down by the city and surrounded by high fences. The tactical committee however had scouted out other possible locations, and distributed maps: around 3 PM, word went around we were moving to location #5—Zuccotti Park—and by the time we got there, I realized we were surrounded by at least two thousand people.
Occupy Sites Oct 4
Much has happened since that mid-autumn weekend in New York City. Neutral Wikipedia states that there are over 600 communities in the U.S. alone that possess some form of chapter representing Occupy. Internationally Wikipedia estimates that there are protests in 951 cities and 82 countries. Occupy Meetup states there are 2363 communities worldwide. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com fame, the statistical political and baseball blogger now with the New York Times estimates (October 27th blog entry) that there is a signficant presence 150 cities in the U.S ---including Colorado Springs, CO. Last Saturday, October 22nd it can be documented that 70,000 persons in the U.S. took an active role in an Occupy protest.

It is now 6 weeks since the 1000 or so people descended upon Zuccotti Park and the biggest impact is that it has single handily changed the national narrative from one continued government cuts and no tax increases even for the richest among us to of jobs, jobs, jobs and economic and social justice. Think Progess published a report on October 20th demonstrating the dramatic turnout in the media mentions between debt and jobs from the end of July to mid October. Think Progress:





Correlating in part economic policymakers' failure to address the economy with the news media's failure to cover the unemployment crisis, Think Progress observed how cable news coverage of the national debt at the end of July towered over any stories about jobs. Tracking CNN, MSNBC and Fox, Think Progress found 7,583 mentions of the word "debt," compared to 427 mentions of "unemployment" on all three networks combined.
With the debt ceiling debates behind the country and thanks partly to the pressure being brought upon politicians and the media by the 99 Percent Movement and the occupations taking place all over the country, it looks as if the press is finally focusing on the jobs crisis and the behavior of Wall Street instead. A ThinkProgress review of the same three networks between Oct. 10 and Oct. 16 finds that the word “debt” only netted 398 mentions, while “occupy” grabbed 1,278, Wall Street netted 2,378, and jobs got 2,738:


When it comes to the perceived social inequity that drives the Occupy Wall Street movement, most social media users blame the government, with many also casting responsibility on President Barack Obama and capitalism, according to NM Incite. The analytics firm looked at at 12,409 tweets with the hashtag #OccupyWallstreet from Oct. 6 to Oct. 12 to see what's driving the conversation. Here's what they found:

General support for the cause was the most prevalent theme, comprising 22 percent of all #OccupyWallStreet tweets. However, 11 percent of tweets used the hashtag to voice their complaints against the movement.The majority of social media users indicate they feel the government is responsible for social inequity, although many point to the president and capitalism as other sources of the problem.
Fnding's from Web analytic's company NM Incite and Think Progress, tracking "Occupy Wall Street" in blogs, boards, groups, videos and images, NM Incite registered a drastic spike on Oct. 6, with 13,133 messages across Internet forums on that day. As the chart below reveals, a comparable spike occurred on he following Monday, Oct. 10, accompanying news that GOP candidate Buddy Roemer and Ben &; Jerry's Ice Cream stated support for the movement.

The reactionary Right reacts to direct democracy and the changing of their narrative
Cantor crying 'Mob'
All this underscores the threat that OCCUPY now poses to the establishment within the American Society, be it the government, the current power within the political parties, external political forces outside the political elite structure and especially the ex-officio political powers within the corporate world---namely the financial and banking sector. This is why the verbal attacks from numerous points on the establishment defender front, be it from elected officials, (Majority Leader Cantor calling Occupy a 'Mob'), or Rep King (R-NY) calling them a 'Rag Tag Mob and we can't let them get started'. But the propaganda smearing runs the gambit from the defenders of the status quo. Here are but a few: The fringe, lunatics, Unabombers, petulant little children, don't know what they want, Socialists, Marxists, Anarchists, anti-capitalists, Nazi's ,anti-Semitics don't pay taxes, not diverse enough, it is astro-turf, supported by Iran and Chavez, they don't shower and support the 53%'ers not the 99%'ers!
Fox News flashing Lunatics graphic
Who are they really?
Here is the problem for all these smears thrown wildly against the wall as if something was going to stick. None of it was actually true and worse, a researcher approached Occupy Wall Street to perform a survey of its following. City University of New York sociology professor the Héctor Codero-Guzmán, PhD conducted, and wrote a peer-review academicpaper  where he used visitors to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s website (http://www.occupywallst.org/) on October 5th. The paper was published online on the Occupy Wall Street website on Wednesday October 19, 2011 concluded the following:


Income
>$49,999
>$24,999
$25,000-49,999
$50,000-74,999
$75,000-149,999
<$150,000
71.5%
47.5%
24%
15.4%
11.1%
2.0%

 
Age
18-34 yrs old
35-44 yrs old
45-65 yrs old
< 66 yrs old
64.2%
15%
20%
2%

 
Employment

Employed

Unemployed
Employed Full Time
Employed Part Time
Enrolled in School
71%
28%
50.4%
20.4%
26.7%

Political Affiliation
Independent/Unaffiliated
Democratic
Republican
70%
27.3%
2.4%



Education
Some College + 
Graduate Degree
Some Graduate
College Degree
No Degree
H School
92.1%
21.5%
8.2%
35%
27.4%
7.9%

 
Gender and Ethnicity
Male        Female
White
African-Am
Hispanic
Asian-Am
Mixed
Other
67.1%      39.9%
81.3%
1.3%
7.7%
3.2%
2.4%
3.0%

This was of course the first time anyone published anything but anecdotal opinion as to the make up of Occupy Wall Street or any other community Occupy protest site. Dr. Codero-Guzmán's summary stated that this was a highly educated concentration of persons identifying with a social-political cause, underscored by two age demographics that two-thirds were made up of individuals under the age of 35 and one-fifth comprising those over the age of 45, coincidentally both age groups more adversely affected by unemployment by the Lessor Depression, yet only 13% state they were currently unemployed. Furthermore the weighted gender demographic also underscores the segment of society more affected by the unemployment by the Lessor Depression.
General Assembly in Colorado Springs


What surprised him the most was how highly educated the sample was and how many were making less than $25,000 and the fact that a 28% of the sample were also making over $50,000. Just over one-in-ten were making over $75,000 and 2% making over 150,000. Finally the sample is mostly composed of political independents who are unaffiliated and possibly novices or non participates. And yet it truly is a grass roots political movement. Regardless this wipes away any notion of the smears leveled against the movement by a chorus mostly from the right-wing media machines. So then the question who or what is this Occupy Movement that has exploded on to America's political landscape. 


Anonymous: "You know a revolution is just around the corner when PhD's are left to driving taxi cabs"



Colorado Springs Occupy Site Oct 8
So back on Tuesday October 4th, followed by Saturday October 8th, I personally visited our local local Occupy Site here in Colorado Springs, Colorado. First I made the visit as a quiet lurker, using modern blogosphere terms, where upon Tuesday evening on October 11th and then Saturday, October 15th I attended and participated in their General Assembly (GA).

Jason Warf holding coffee
The local group is led by a core group of passionate Thirty-Something professionals. The group maintains a strict horizontal leadership structure meaning there are no proclaimed hierarchies, each person who participates is considered a leader and each person willing to speak and volunteer has an equal voice. It is by structure and action the anti-thesis of the current corporate hierarchical structure that permeates our society regardless of any organization be it in your local church, big or small or workplace or even some social club. It doesn't matter, the modern 21st Century Industrialized America has been so indoctrinated into employing this structure that all organizations follow this footprint where the same people end up leading the and making the same mistakes with the same presumptions. That said there are naturally individuals who take up a leadership role, but let me underline role. In Colorado Springs' case Jason Warf is the chief spokesperson and he is pictured here.

Colorado Springs Occupy booths
Occupy Colorado Springs has roughly 30 or so active participates who are willing to show up each day and night, where a half dozen or so hold the fort each night on the corner of Tejon and Bijou Streets in downtown Colorado Springs adjacent to Acacia Park. Colorado Springs is only one of two communities in the U.S. to obtain a permit to Occupy a site 24/7. The underlying reason is that Occupy Colorado Springs unknowingly took up space on the public right-a-way between the wide sidewalks along the park and the street, measuring about eight feet. Therefore they are not in the park boundaries even though their GA meets in the park at Wilbur's Fountain. This precluded the city using the camping or park curfew ordinance against their gazebo shelters. The city tried to bully and interpret a stretch but if this went to court the city would lose because of earlier ACLU freedom of speech and assembly decrees and the fact that the city provides permits to other groups using the right-a-way spaces for similar shelters in the summer. 

How this came about is an interesting twist of fate. Originally the police began to threaten and escalate the matter where tents were erected over night. The group led by Warf approached the city attorney about securing a permit where the city actually agreed to a meeting. Then the city attorney reneged and had the group meet with the police where that meeting was recorded and published You Tube below. 

Jason told me that: "We were confronted by officers telling us that we needed to take the pop-up tents down."

"We [then] approached the city with the premise of meeting with the city attorney and police. We attended but our press was kept out. The city attorney backed out at the last minute so the meeting was just with police and sort of a waste of time."

He continued: "We were then turned over to the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT). They visited us on Saturday and posted no camping signs. During this time we were trying to contact the Mayor for a meeting and the HOT was helping us."

The HOT then came back on Sunday morning and wrote 8 warning tickets. Then on Monday one of the officers returned with a city planner to offer a permit. We turned in the app[lication] on Wednesday and we were approved on Friday.

Naturally Colorado Springs is not like many other communities across the U.S., in a major way because there has been no authoritarian initiated violence on peaceful protesters. Whether it is the constitutionally protected (in theory, practice is always a relative thing) civil right in the U.S., or an insurgent cry out within despot-led dictatorship, violently attacking unarmed, peaceful petition. There would have been no shot heard around the world in Lexington and Concord Massachusetts without the Boston Massacre. Protests are a legitimate reaction to a government and its social elite who remain unresponsive and unaccountable to the needs of their people. When those voices are squelched or oppressed, especially through violent overwhelming and unjustifiable force towards peaceful, unarmed citizens, it usually results in an escalating reaction by its citizens. 

Girls Peppered Sprayed

 

Violent reaction to non-violent peaceful protests

Mohandas Gandhi learned this as a young lawyer in South Africa and then fully employed the strategy in India following World War II. Martin Luther King Jr., copied Gandhi's strategy in leading the civil rights movement in the 1960's and so did the the students protesting the Vietnam War later that decade. Authoritarian violence immediately puts the establishment in the position of illegitimacy because already protests were calling into question the establishment's responsiveness and accountability. Thus with each succeeding violent reaction in New York City, (the pepper spraying Bologna, the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, the swinging bully club cop, the ambush in Boston, the scooter cop running over the lawyer, Oakland California's frontal assault, San Diego, Nashville, Chicago, Cleveland and our Denver CO), with each unjustified use of dishonorable force, it lights the fire on more law abiding citizens to join up and be active. 

Former CO State Rep Mike Merrifield

Last Wednesday night however someone who I felt was quite informed inquired what the essence of this OCCUPY thing was really about. The person then cut in saying that the local Democratic Party leadership had told them that the local Occupy leadership was a Paul Ryan guy. When I responded that "I am certain there are Paul Ryan supporters in the midst as there are about ten people in this room right now, people you might consider to be our local "usual suspects", you know the radical always anti-establishment personalities." The respected Democratic Party establishmentarian seemed unmoved, where upon I told them that "in fact I am suspect that whomever told you that rumor knows anything genuine about the movement in that if they did they would have known that no one is actually the leader---it is a horizontal organization without any hierarchy". That seemed to get their attention, then I added that I personally had told Pete Lee (State Representative-CO, HD-18) to stop by, which he did. Furthermore, I added this to the party benefactor, "Mike Merriflield, the former State Representative forced out because of term limits was holding a placard on the corner on Saturday, October 15th."  The reaction was astonishment, and he followed as he was being pulled away, "I don't understand, may I call you?"  

 The Conversation

Today the person who wants to remain anonymous called and we talked. His question was:

"[w]here does all this lead? What is the end game? What net effect will this phenomena have on the 2012 elections?"

These are all valid questions and as 2012 is about I am unsure. My entire beef with President Obama is that he has not unequivocally standing with the ordinary 99%'er, or politically identified with fighting not negotiating for the ordinary citizen. That was and continues to be a a political liability. Today, November 2nd the polls keep climbing to his favor as job approval is now up from 41% to 47%, a direct reflection that he has begun to tack towards aligning with the 99%'ers. Another report from Open Secrets Blog stated that members of Congress' personal wealth increased 16% despite the Lessor Depression. My conversational partner agreed, where I said, Occupy Movement is a wild card in that if a genuine 3rd Party Independent suddenly appears on the political landscape this will change the voting dynamic, just like Perot did in 1992. There was deep discontent then and there is much deeper discontent now. 

But as Ari Berman, when he visited Colorado Springs last week, where he pointed out the Republicans have 

"deep divisive dynamics within their own spectrum as well.  In fact the same dynamics that split the Colorado Republican Party in 2010 and the gubernatorial election." 

The thing is Hickenlooper was elected without much of a challenge and now we see his lack of responsiveness to issues of the 99'ers while Senator Bennet who barely scratched for every vote in a contested primary and general election, his approach has been far different.  But I think the end game is a long process of actually working through our society. I said to my phone friend: "In reality Occupy is about fundamentally changing the social and economic contract with both our own nation's citizens and also the world's citizens." 

This is where my phone friend had some trouble, he being a generation older and is I suspect close to the 1% class or at least part of the investor class---what Marx called the bourgeois. The 21st Century will have to deal with unregulated and unrestrained capitalism that has gone beyond its social justification, no different than how the world had to deal with feudalism and royalty. Ultimately what brought down feudalism was that the system only served the nobles and did nothing for the rest of society---it served its own selfish ends. Corporatism has befallen that fate as well. The end-game is something that has been evolving with the conscience of Global Warming and a social-economic system that understands the Earth has limited resources for all living things, one example is being called "Resource-Based Economic Model"  

 

Political Science meets the Political Economy AKA Economics 101

A steadfast American Imperialist author and strategic consultant commentator,  Geroge Friedman writing in May 2010 for John Mauldin's electronic newsletter, "Outside the Lines", a publication whose intended audience is decidingly for the 1%'ers to the 1%'ers provided a decidingly clinical assessment of the big picture of the Lessor Depression:

The financial and economic systems are subsystems of the broader political system. More precisely, think of nations as consisting of three basic systems: political, economic and military. Each of these systems has elites that manage it. The three systems are constantly interacting - and in a healthy polity, balancing each other, compensating for failures in one as well as taking advantage of success. Every nation has a different configuration within and between these systems. The relative weight of each system differs, as does the importance of its elites. But each nation contains these systems, and no system exists without the other two.

Consider the capitalist economic system. The concept of the corporation provides its modern foundation. The corporation is built around the idea of limited liability for investors, the notion that if you buy part or all of a company, you yourself are not liable for its debts or the harm that it might do; your risk is limited to your investment. In other words, you may own all or part of a company, but you are not responsible for what it does beyond your investment. Whereas supply and demand exist in all times and places, the notion of limited liability investing is unique to modern capitalism and reshapes the dynamic of supply and demand.

It is also a political invention and not an economic one. The decision to create corporations that limit liability flows from political decisions implemented through the legal subsystem of politics. The corporation dominates even in China; though the rules of liability and the definition of control vary, the principle that the state and politics define the structure of corporate risk remains constant.

In a more natural organization of the marketplace, the owners are entirely responsible for the debts and liabilities of the entity they own. That, of course, would create excessive risk, suppressing economic activity. So the political system over time has reallocated risk away from the owners of companies to the companies' creditors and customers by allowing corporations to become bankrupt without pulling in the owners.

The precise distribution of risk within an economic system is a political matter expressed through the law; it differs from nation to nation and over time. But contrary to the idea that there is a tension between the political and economic systems, the modern economic system is unthinkable except for the eccentric but indispensible political-legal contrivance of the limited liability corporation. In the precise and complex allocation of risk and immunity, we find the origins of the modern market. Among other reasons, this is why classical economists never spoke of "economics" but always of "political economy."

The state both invents the principle of the corporation and defines the conditions in which the corporation is able to arise. The state defines the structure of risk and liabilities and assures that the laws are enforced. Emerging out of this complexity - and justifying it - is a moral regime. Protection from liability comes with a burden: Poor decisions will be penalized by losses, while wise decisions are rewarded by greater wealth. Because of this, society as a whole will benefit. The entire scheme is designed to increase, in Adam Smith's words, "The Wealth of Nations" by limiting liability, increasing the willingness to take risk and imposing penalties for poor judgment and rewards for wise judgment. But the measure of the system is not whether individuals benefit, but whether in benefiting they enhance the wealth of the nation.

The greatest systemic risk, therefore, is not an economic concept but a political one. Systemic risk emerges when it appears that the political and legal protections given to economic actors, and particularly to members of the economic elite, have been used to subvert the intent of the system. In other words, the crisis occurs when it appears that the economic elite used the law's allocation of risk to enrich themselves in ways that undermined the wealth of the nation. Put another way, the crisis occurs when it appears that the financial elite used the politico-legal structure to enrich themselves through systematically imprudent behavior while those engaged in prudent behavior were harmed, with the political elite apparently taking no action to protect the victims.

In the modern public corporation, shareholders - the corporation's owners - rarely control management. A board of directors technically oversees management on behalf of the shareholders. In the crisis of 2008, we saw behavior that devastated shareholder value while appearing to enrich the management - the corporation's employees. In this case, the protections given to shareholders of corporations were turned against them when they were forced to pay for the imprudence of their employees - the managers, whose interests did not align with those of the shareholders. The managers in many cases profited personally through their compensation system for actions inimical to shareholder interests. We now have a political, not an economic, crisis for two reasons. First, the crisis qualitatively has moved beyond the boundaries of a cyclical event. Second, the crisis is rooted in the political-legal definitions of the distribution of corporate risk and the legally defined relations between management and shareholder. In leaving the shareholder liable for actions by management, but without giving shareholders controls to limit managerial risk taking, the problem lies not with the market but with the political system that invented and presides over the limited liability corporation.

Financial panics that appear natural and harm the financial elite do not necessarily create political crises. Financial panics that appear to be the result of deliberate manipulation of the allocation of risk under the law, and from which the financial elite as a whole appears to have profited even while shareholders and the public were harmed, inevitably create political crises. In the case of 2008 and the events that followed, we have a paradox. The 2008 crisis was not unprecedented, nor was the federal bailout. We saw similar things in the municipal bond crisis of the 1970s, and the Third World Debt Crisis and Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s. Nor was the recession that followed anomalous. It came seven years after the previous one, and compared to the 1970s and early 1980s, when unemployment stood at more than 10 percent and inflation and mortgages were at more than 20 percent, the new one was painful but well within the bounds of expected behavior.

The crisis was rooted in the appearance that it was triggered by the behavior not of small town banks or third world countries, but of the global financial elite, who took advantage of the complexities of law to enrich themselves instead of the shareholders and clients to whom it was thought they had prior fiduciary responsibility.

This is a political crisis then, not an economic one. The political elite is responsible for the corporate elite in a unique fashion: The corporation was a political invention, so by definition, its behavior depends on the political system. But in a deeper sense, the crisis is one of both political and corporate elites, and the perception that by omission or commission they acted together - knowingly engineering the outcome. In a sense, it does not matter whether this is what happened. That it is widely believed that this is what happened alone is the origin of the crisis. This generates a political crisis that in turn is translated into an attack on the economic system.

The public, which is cynical about such things, expects elites to work to benefit themselves. But at the same time, there are limits to the behavior the public will tolerate. That limit might be defined, with Adam Smith in mind, as the point when the wealth of the nation itself is endangered, i.e., when the system is generating outcomes that harm the nation. In extreme form, these crises can delegitimize regimes. In the most extreme form - and we are nowhere near this point - the military elite typically steps in to take control of the system.
Summarizing Friedman back in the late spring of 2010 he identified a growing or impending problem that a genuine political crisis might or inevitably would arise if the political elites---meaning the Obama Administration and Congress, did not affix accountability to the banks for harm done to the wealth of the nation at the expense of their gain. This apparently provides the natural introduction to the Occupy Movement that has now sprung in the succeeding summer of 2011 and now our Autumn 2011 across the U.S. and worldwide. What were his words?
"In extreme form, these crises can delegitimize regimes."

Returning back to the conversation
Back to the End-Game of this Occupy Movement and my conversation with my liberal or at least Democratic Party friend who I suspect is part of the 1%'ers or at least bordering near the 5%'ers, I know he is comfortable. When broached the subject of a new economic system he reacted as if I was re-promoting Marxism or something. Where I interjected; "I had studied Marxism quite deeply in the 1970's as part of a curriculum concentration involving the Soviet Union, my reading or theories regarding Resource Allocation is not the same, although concepts of private property for the sole sake of unbridled commerce development at the expense of the wealth and health of the planet is challenged. But let me say that outcome or some other derivative is way off for now, the issue is our current state of unregulated capitalism as it is harming our own nation, its persons and the world at large."

He replied:
"Harm is correct, I fear that right-wing is going to slash and burn my Medicare and possibly gut Social Security something I paid into for over fifty-five years!"
"Ironically the Tea Party are correct in many of their observations", I recall responding. "But their solution of adjunct, blind austerity measures is like burning down a house because you don't emotionally want to trouble yourself in repairing and fixing it up again. Problem is you won't have another house when you done burning it down."

He inquired:
"What observations?"
"Specifically, if you do the math and add up all the personal debt of Americans including the burgeoning college loans, the home mortgage, business debt, local, state and Federal government debt against the GDP projected profit it does not reconcile---not even if you take our best era. Trouble is austerity doesn't do the trick either, the only way out is debt forgiveness or wholesale debt restructuring. In short this accumulation of debt since, 1980 or so till now, has transfered wealth from the middle and working classes to the top 20%, and the biggest winners are the top 1%. The problem is this winning is now going to go into hyper drive." I concluded.

His reply is that then:

"Occupy is anti-capitalist. I knew it all along.

He replied;


"Of course not, you and I both know the little investor has always worked at a disadvantage but I look for long term growth, I believe in capitalism and just think we have to regulate it better. My question how do you see this playing out?
" Not sure, but it will take time. I actually seeing this turning into an economic-cultural civil war, possibly played out globally as well as in the U.S. Each reaction will insure the establishment is morally unjustifiable and insure its eventual defeat, that I can see."He was getting quite agitated, with many things I presume, but I think knowing me for one, or at least respecting me. So I concluded the conversation by saying: "I doubt that even the 95% of even those highly educated Occupy participates or protesters actually understand these concepts on any level, except that all they know is that they have been getting fucked for over a quarter of a century and that fucking continues unabatted. But the reality is we don't actually have a capitalist system right now---we have a monopolistic crony system that we call capitalism or it uses the superficiality of capital markets to serve a few insiders."  I paused and then asked; "Your personal investment activities, when you trade, do you really think you are getting the same fair opportunity as the investment houses or hedge funds or other institutional traders who are now using micro second e-trades to game the system?"

 
He then asked what I meant as an economic war? "As Goldman Sachs is now causing institutional problems with the Community Bank that is servicing Occupy Wall Street's organization by dropping their corporate accounts that is economic war. When Citibank and Bank of America refuse to service demand deposit retail customers when they seeking to close their accounts and furthermore either have them arrested or threaten them by saying you can't be a protester and bank customer at the same time. That is economic war. When Occupy seeks to have people close their bank accounts at the top six banks in the U.S., (combined controlling 35% of all bank accounts in the U.S.) When Occupy Oakland is calling for a general strike that is all economic warfare. It will not deescalate either---this is a political crisis and now the people are looking to provide retribution though direct action. The banks and big corporate are not going to lay down either, they will retaliate punitively attempting to hold on to their current power position."

My friend then said thank you for the insightful perspective, and said this thing could turn out to be like the Vietnam War.  My response was, "Vietnam was a symptom or colinary to this, but Vietnam was not about the very nature of our system or way of life as it constitutes assigning value to scarcity of commodities, or values of labor and work. I think it is as visereal as the moral question of slavery in 1859. Then as now the question was what society constituted a moral society, which economics were moral, slave or free, which politics were moral, pro-slave or abolishionist?  Which system harmed a nation or people and which system sought to enhance and create better welfare and justice? That appears to be the same questions now, is our corporate system moral?" With that he said he had to go and said good bye.

So back to the original question posed in this blog post; "What is this Occupy all about?" It is direct political action because the political and financial elites have proven to be unresponsive to the welfare of our nation. It is that simple. Occupy has smartly found the real culprit, actually the unholy partnership pointing figures at those who benefited [greatly] for a recklessness and manipulation at the most extreme levels where we, most of the rest of Americans and Global citizens are now paying an obscene price and if nothing is done, will continue to pay a burdensome cost.  It is about ordinary citizens, mostly younger, under the age of 35, many others older than 50, middle class but many making under $25,000 but most of all well educated and politically independent or even disenfranchised. Most of all, almost to a person, screwed by the current economic system. Because it is direct political action where many are beginning to perceive that the present political system is broken, fixed and systemically corrupted and therefore illegitimate, it is also legitimately calling into question the underlying economic system. And all this before I even discuss the inflammatory events regarding police or authoritarian violence that is a dynamic filling the ranks of those occupying. Occupy as it stands is the primal scream of the 99%'ers who have come to realize that: 

OR is it simply Americans reaffirming what democracy actually is...the will of the people, not some artificial person.





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