. . . because much of the content relates both to Washington, D.C., and "outside the beltway" -- the heartland, specifically Iowa -- and because after going from Iowa to Washington via Texas and California I subsequently returned, From DC 2 Iowa.
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts
"Fear of the government, fear of kidnapping, fear of harassment and abuse. These fears had kept the [Egyptian] regime in power for three decades. . . . This all changed on January 18th, 2011 when Asmaa Mahfouz decided to face her fears and ask others to join her in protest. She posted a video of herself online . . . calling on others to join her at a protest in Tahrir Square on January 25." Moral Heroes. [more]
The rest, as they say, is history.
Amy Goodman's powerful and moving juxtaposition of that famous January 18 video with her own interview of 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz at the site of Occupy Wall Street, provided more than just a gentle reminder of this remarkable young woman's role in the news at the beginning of this year. It caused me to see her, what she did (and continues to do), what she stands for and represents, in a very much brighter, multi-faceted and awesome light.
Do watch this excerpt from Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now," of October 25, 2011. It runs from 12:00 minutes in, to 25:46:
(Actually, the cut begins 15 seconds before 12:00, with news from Occupy Oakland. And I apologize for not providing an embed here but, unlike YouTube (where the New York interview is not yet posted) it was not immediately clear how to embed the segment from Democracy Now into Blogger, other than the link it does provide for Blogger, above.)
The two videos that Amy Goodman has combined spark so many thoughts:
- This powerful, additional illustration of the insight I came to at least 35 years ago that I call "the natural superiority of women" (something Mahfouz demonstrates as well as espouses).
- I consider myself a feminist, in the dictionary sense of someone who is "advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men." As such, I think that men and women alike need to watch this video and reflect on what it represents.
- This young woman succeeded in shaming Egyptian men into joining in public protest: "If you think yourself a man, come with me on January 25th. Whoever says women shouldn't go to protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with me on January 25th. If you have honor and dignity as a man, come and protect me, and the other girls in the protest."
- I am just so proud of this young woman, whose eyes now look down upon me from my law school office wall, next to those of Dr. King, as inspiration and reminder of how little I have accomplished, how little I have sacrificed, in a life I profess to have committed to "the public interest," compared with what they have each done in far fewer years. Aside from an occasional assassination threat (usually drunken), all I ever did was to willingly "speak truth to power," and espouse positions, that I knew would prevent my ever being offered the most lucrative jobs in Washington -- because I felt that's what "public service" requires of one. But no one ever actually took a shot at me; I didn't have a lot of desire for what those jobs require you to do anyway; and I'd even written a book about the virtues of knowing the difference between "enough" and "more" (Test Pattern for Living).
- Both King and Mahfouz knowingly confronted death (and one was killed) for the causes in which they believed. Aside from our brave military men and women in combat, and the journalists who bring us their stories (such as Christiane Amanpour), most displays of what passes for male macho shrivels by comparison.
- Her historic launching of the 2011 "Arab Spring."
- How an idea like non-violent protest, and the the power of ordinary people in a democracy, can spread -- from Gandhi, to Dr. King, to Asmaa Mahfouz, who then brings it back again to America, to inspire and encourage us at Occupy Wall Street and throughout our country.
- There were (and are) many uses of cyberspace, the Internet, and social media in this year's global popular protests; but none with the drama and impact of Mahfouz' video on her Facebook page, copied to YouTube, inspiring millions of Egyptians to action, and now seen by probably hundreds of millions more.
- For those who mourn for our species' future, and especially those (such as parents and teachers) who work with, and hope for, the coming generation, Mahfouz is a beacon of possibility, a reminder that -- while there may be none exactly like her -- there are others coming along who have at least some of her smarts, her courage, her natural leadership qualities, her moral values, and her ability to articulate (in at least two languages) all of the above.
- The spark of hope that may be found in "the American fall" that has followed "the Arab spring;" our own, very much smaller and milder, "Occupy" movement. A spark that she reached out and helped to fan with her presence at Occupy Wall Street.
- And to think she doesn't even have a law degree! Just a B.A. in business from Cairo University. Amazing. :>)
Pete Seeger started singing Les Rice's "The Banks Are Made of Marble" in 1950. It's a song that might have been written 50 years earlier, or 100 -- or today.
Now back to the centuries-old history of these bank protests, and excerpts from Steve Fraser's article:
The only thing really surprising about the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it didn't happen sooner. The United States has a long history of friction over policies that enable an elite to thrive at the expense of ordinary people.
The earliest tensions emerged soon after the Revolutionary War, when Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the "moneycrats" and their counter-revolutionary intrigues. . . .
In the first half of the 19th century, followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States [and] feared the bank was part of a systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite.
That tradition was embraced again just after the Civil War, when the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties were formed out of a determination to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.
Later in the 19th century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street "devil fish." The tentacles of finance, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy but also corrupted churches, the press and institutions of higher learning, destroying the family and suborning public officials from the president on down. . . .
William Jennings Bryan . . . during his campaign for the presidency in 1896 . . . was taking aim at Wall Street, and everyone knew it.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the antitrust movement . . . worried most about . . . "the money trust" . . . skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposes of "muckraking" journalists and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.
[T]he new century . . . included reformers in statehouses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists and antiwar activists. Financial interests were blamed for . . . pillage and labor exploitation while practicing imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by "the Street."
[D]uring the [1930s] Depression . . . as now, there was no question in the minds of the "99%" that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country's crisis.
In addition to rallies and marches of the unemployed, there were hundreds of sit-down strikes . . ., foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors and occupations — even seizures — of private property. There was a pervasive sense that the old order needed to be buried. . . . President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his determination to unseat "economic royalists" who were growing rich off "other people's money" while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War.
1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression.
2. At the same time, corporate profits are at an all-time high, both in absolute dollars and as a share of the economy.
3. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. In other words, corporate profits are at an all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of their revenue to employees than they ever have.
4. Income and wealth inequality in the US economy is near an all-time high: The owners of the country's assets (capital) are winning, everyone else (labor) is losing. Three charts illustrate this:
(1) The top earners are capturing a higher share of the national income than they have anytime since the 1920s. Top decile income share in France and the United States [20th Century; roughly equal until 1980; in 2003 about 43% in U.S., 32% France]
(2) CEO pay and dcorporate profits have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, "production worker" pay has risen 4%
(3) After adjusting for inflation, average earnings haven't increased in 50 years; Average Hourly Earnings, 1964-2008 (in 2008 dollars) [e.g., 1979: $18.76/hour; 2008: $18.52/hour]
By now, "Occupy Wall Street" has not only spread across America, it has gone global. As the New York Times reports, "Buoyed by the longevity of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan, a wave of protests swept across Asia, the Americas and Europe over the weekend, with hundreds and in some cases thousands of people expressing discontent with the economic tides in marches, rallies and occasional clashes with the police." Clara Buckley and Rachel Donadio, "Buoyed by Wall St. Protests, Rallies Sweep the Globe,"New York Times, October 16, 2011, p. A4.
And yet the bankers -- along with most elected officials and candidates -- still refuse to take it seriously, or understand what it's all about.
Publicly, bankers say they understand the anger at Wall Street — but believe they are misunderstood by the protesters camped on their doorstep.
But when they speak privately, it is often a different story.
"Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll," said one top hedge fund manager.
Iowa's own Senator Charles Grassley's reaction is illustrative and consistent with the Times' report: "I assume that it’s a lot of unemployed young people looking for some dates.” Quoted from KCCI-TV in Graham Gillette, "One Helping of Irony s Now Being Served,"Des Moines Register, October 16, 2011, p. OP 3.
As he so often does, "Tom Tomorrow" captures the Establishment's response to the Business Insider's statistics, above:
It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.
Freedom, justice, dignity and equity have seldom, if ever, been beneficently granted. They have almost always required a struggle, and too often required bloodshed. And they take time. It took us awhile, and the Civil War, to begin the process of releasing African-Americans from the bonds of slavery -- longer still to grant women the right to vote, and provide African-Americans the benefits of the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Public Accommodations Acts. There are gains, and there are setbacks. There are swells of popular participation, and retreats into apathy, resignation, despair and depression.
No one can know, can predict, where Occupy will go and when. It could fizzle. It could grow into marching millions. It could become a third party.
And, of course, there is always the possibility that not every participant will always react to police and national guard tanks, excessive brutality, pepper spray, tasers -- or Kent-State-style shootings and deaths -- with the near-universal non-violence we have seen from Occupy participants so far.
[John Filo's iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, kneeling in anguish over the body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after he was shot by the Ohio National Guard; from Wikipedia "Kent State Shootings" link, above.]
How likely is violence?
As Chris Hedges has written elsewhere,
The death of liberal institutions that once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, which once could respond to the suffering of the poor, the unemployed and working men and women, which once sought to protect the Earth on which we depend for life, means the last thin hope for reform is embodied in acts of civil disobedience. There are no established institutions that will help us. The press ignores the cries of the underclass and the poor. The labor movement is atrophied and dying. Public education is degraded and being rapidly dismantled. Our religious institutions no longer engage in the core issues of justice. And the Democratic Party is on its knees before Wall Street. The most basic government services designed to ameliorate the pain, including Head Start and Social Security, are targeted by our corporate overlords for destruction. The Kyoto Protocol, which was not nearly ambitious enough to prevent environmental collapse, has been gutted so companies like Exxon Mobil can continue to amass the largest profits in history. . . .
Those of us who demand a return to the rule of law and remain steadfast to nonviolence will find ourselves cast aside—the useful idiots Lenin so despised. I watched this happen in the social and political implosions in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Palestinian territories, Algeria, Bosnia and Kosovo. I watched the same cocktail of despair, economic collapse and callousness from a corrupt power elite mix itself into potent brews of civil strife. I watched the same untiring efforts by those who detested the violence and cruelty of the state, and the nascent violence and intolerance of the radical opposition. I covered as a reporter the disintegration that tore these societies apart. Those who held fast to moral imperatives, including Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo, were thrust aside and replaced with killers on both sides of the divide who embraced violence.
Let us, please, do more than just hope and pray this will not become America's path. Let us act to assure it. For although Occupy's ranks may decline and grow again, perhaps even with a different name and generation of participants, it will not stop. Ultimately, the legitimate grievances born of greed will be addressed, whether with brutality and bullets, or compassion and creativity.
Each of us can choose our favored option; ultimately, each of us will have to. The question we must answer, as the old labor song put it is, "Which side are you on?"
There was a lot of newspaper commentary about the "Occupy" movement once the local media finally recognized that the story could no longer be ignored. (The New York City version of "Occupy Wall Street" quickly morphed into "Occupy" places all across the country, including Iowa and Iowa City -- plus Des Moines, Mason City, and Fairfield, among other cities in Iowa.)
Many of those reader comments were critical of Occupy, from wild rants and charges of "Communist!" to critiques regarding the lack of specific demands and leadership. (This from critics who failed to recognize that the existence of movement "leaders" and "specific demands" in a movement's beginning often contribute to its downfall.)
Senator Grassley elaborated on Donald Trump's line, saying these protesters are "just a bunch of unemployed college students looking for dates" -- a disparagement he may come to regret. [Arrests at Occupy Des Moines; thanks to BlogForIowa.com.]
A common question, seemingly reflecting genuine bewilderment on the part of the relatively well off, was a variant of "What do these people want?"
My response, in newspaper comments, was a variation on "if you have to ask you haven't been paying attention":
More and more Americans over the past 30 years have come to the realization that, as the "silent majority" bumper sticker had it, "The Majority is not Silent, the Government is Deaf." They come from all regions of the country, slices of the political spectrum, religions (and no religions), ages, and occupations.
There is a perception that when corporations and the ultra rich are not getting away with violating the law it is because they have written the law, that the ever-escalating gap in income between the 1% and the 99% is at least in part the result of money in politics (not just differences in enterprise, intellectual and entrepreneurial ability), and that ours has become a "government of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" -- a government that has for the most part rebuffed and ignored our polite requests.
Historically, when those perceptions begin to register with the people, they take to the streets. That's how our nation began -- as the Declaration of Independence put it, "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations . . .." It's how women got the right to vote, and African-Americans got civil rights. It's what it took to get the right to unionize, and bring the Viet Nam war to an end.
"This is what democracy looks like." Get used to it. Support it. Nothing could be more "American."
So I was especially pleased to see the New York Times' editorial yesterday striking a similar theme. [I am taking the unusual step of reproducing here the entire editorial. I encourage you to subscribe to the Times, as I do: http://www.nytimes.com; they offer a special deal on a combination Sunday edition in Iowa City plus unlimited online access. But if they would like me to remove the editorial from this blog entry, along with my personal endorsement, I am quite willing to do so.]
As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.
At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.
The jobless rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.6 percent over the past year; for young high school graduates, the average is 21.6 percent. Those figures do not reflect graduates who are working but in low-paying jobs that do not even require diplomas. Such poor prospects in the early years of a career portend a lifetime of diminished prospects and lower earnings — the very definition of downward mobility.
The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.
The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.
Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.
When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal society. Before the recession, the share of income held by those in the top 1 percent of households was 23.5 percent, the highest since 1928 and more than double the 10 percent level of the late 1970s.
That share declined slightly as financial markets tanked in 2008, and updated data is not yet available, but inequality has almost certainly resurged. In the last few years, for instance, corporate profits (which flow largely to the wealthy) have reached their highest level as a share of the economy since 1950, while worker pay as a share of the economy is at its lowest point since the mid-1950s.
Income gains at the top would not be as worrisome as they are if the middle class and the poor were also gaining. But working-age households saw their real income decline in the first decade of this century. The recession and its aftermath have only accelerated the decline.
Research shows that such extreme inequality correlates to a host of ills, including lower levels of educational attainment, poorer health and less public investment. It also skews political power, because policy almost invariably reflects the views of upper-income Americans versus those of lower-income Americans.
No wonder then that Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for discontent. There are plenty of policy goals to address the grievances of the protesters — including lasting foreclosure relief, a financial transactions tax, greater legal protection for workers’ rights, and more progressive taxation. The country needs a shift in the emphasis of public policy from protecting the banks to fostering full employment, including public spending for job creation and development of a strong, long-term strategy to increase domestic manufacturing.
It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.
Amy Goodman's powerful and moving juxtaposition of that famous January 18 video with her own interview of 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz at the site of Occupy Wall Street, provided more than just a gentle reminder of this remarkable young woman's role in the news at the beginning of this year. It caused me to see her, what she did (and continues to do), what she stands for and represents, in a very much brighter, multi-faceted and awesome light.
