I debated going to Washington for the Womens March today but for one reason or another, I decided to stay in Pittsburgh and go to the local Sister March instead that starts at 11am.
It turns out there are *two* womens marches in Pittsburgh today at the same time but in different locations. I would like to be at both but the egos involved have mandated that I make a choice. The first, the Sister March, is the blessed satellite version of the DC event:
Organizers of a Downtown “Sister March for Pittsburgh” have obtained a permit for a demonstration beginning at the City-County Building at 11 a.m. Organizers expect 400 participants. Among them will be City Council President Bruce Kraus, who said, “Part of the foundation of our democracy [is to] hold authority accountable. I’ll be there to do that.”
Across town, the “Our Feminism Must be Intersectional Rally/March,” also begins at 11 a.m., starting at the site of East Liberty’s Penn Plaza apartments, 5704 Penn Ave. The march, which will end at an all-day Summit Against Racism at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, stems from a dispute about inclusiveness with organizers of the Downtown march.
“There was no black woman leadership” even though “black women have been doing organizing work in this town for a very long time,” said Alona Williams, an organizer of the East Liberty event. “People talk about inclusiveness, but we get erased from the narrative a lot.”
After a heated dispute on social media and a fractious meeting, Ms. Williams said she and other organizers “decided we would take this moment to celebrate. … This has turned into something beautiful” — a chance to affirm black women and their allies.
Organizers of the Downtown march could not be reached for comment about the dispute Wednesday. The East Liberty march, for which the organizers have no city permit, is backed by groups including Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania.
So, to recap, these two groups of women’s activists can’t march together because they don’t feel that their own grievances are getting the priority attention they deserve. I was afraid this was going to happen.
Feminism is already intersectional by its definition. Feminism is about the equality of all women. I will never understand why we needed to slap adjectives on feminism. By dividing ourselves into african american feminists and hispanic feminists and lesbian feminists and pro-life feminists (is that an oxymoron?), we have diluted the strength of being the majority of people on this planet. Isn’t it enough to just be women?? Why isn’t that cause for solidarity all in itself?
So, here we are. Two marches in Pittsburgh. I hope the turnout is as good as the day the ERA died and I went to a protest at the Point with a 6 month old strapped to my back, clinging to me with her tiny fistfuls of my hair. I can’t remember different factions that day. We were all grieving together for what we were about to lose. Then came the backlash. Now we are divided and out numbers will look small even though we are many.
The Trumpests are laughing at us. This is why they refer to us as Snowflakes. Our own individual uniqueness will prevent us from presenting a united front.
And that’s a shame. Because we are The Majority. Even here in election day ground zero Allegheny County. Clear thinking, dedicated, hard working, patriotic Americans outvoted Donald Trump here by quite a lot. We bested Obama’s 2012 numbers by 14,000 votes. In fact, anywhere in America where people outnumber the antelope, Trump voters are outnumbered. They shouldn’t be getting too comfortable. They should feel very nervous.
So why are we doing this to ourselves?
Six years ago, Occupy Wall Street burst into fruition in a matter of a few days. Occupys sprang up all over the country with a very simple message: We Are The 99%. It was a very powerful memorable statement.
We are still the 99%. We are now going to be ruled by the 1%. We have given them the keys to every branch of government. There is nothing we can do to stop them until 2018. This is not the time to disintegrate into an aerosol of particles fighting for recognition. This is the time to coalesce and recognize that we need to stick together in order to be effective advocates for our own lives. Otherwise, they will eat us alive.
The clothes you wear are of little loss if you escape from drowning.
Good Morning! Today is the anniversary celebration for Occupy Wall Street. I am still at home this morning for various reasons. I have things that urgently need to be finished here. But my afternoon looks free so I might scoot up to NYC later. In the meantime, I’ll be finishing putting down a new floor in my basement and watching the events live. Anyone who wants to help let me know in the comments. Yeah, didn’t think so. {{sigh}}
You can watch all the #S17 events streaming live here and at several Ustream channels.
And for anyone who doubts whether I still believe in Occupy, listen up: I still believe. Not only do I believe but every day I see and hear evidence that the message, “We are the 99%” has grown and spread beyond the numbers of the bold individuals who risked arrest to protest in Zuccotti park and other places.
Movements go through phases and have to figure things out. How to organize, who to trust, what they say and how to say it. This is what happened to the Jesus Movement, the most successful Occupy movement up until this point. This Occupy has the benefit of knowing what lays ahead for movements that are co-opted like the early Christians were, but it doesn’t know the future. None of us do. Occupy is a moral movement and it is a catalyst for many other movements.
Here’s what we do know. That all people and all work have dignity and worth. That there is more to life than screwing your neighbors out of their fortunes in order to hoard obscene gobs of cash for yourself. That there is nothing wrong with people who refuse to use their talents to exploit others. They are not losers. And that there’s nothing worse than insisting,unquestioningly and unwisely, that others kiss the whip of those who would exercise their power and authority over them. You are not a mindless automaton who takes orders and whatever your master throws at you. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
So, to those of you who are wondering whether I’ve abandoned Occupy Wall Street, think again. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and some of us need to finish other things that can’t wait. But if you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve written for most of my career here, you will know that I’ve *always* belonged to Occupy, long before it even came into being. And there are many others who are just beginning to understand the message, many of them formerly middle class professionals who have through no fault of their own have fallen into economic despair. Their careers and fortunes have disappeared. Every day that this little Depression goes on, new Occupy sympathizers are created. Yes, even among people who only a couple of years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning their authority figures are striving to understand where it is the 1% is trying to take us and are realizing that they need to resist it in their own way. In that sense, Occupy has succeeded and will continue to succeed.
You don’t need to go to Zuccotti Park to Occupy, although, I highly recommend it because it’s exhilarating. Just soap your car windows today, chalk a sidewalk, bang a pot. Let the 1% know you’re still here, everywhere, and you aren’t going away. Ever.
I do not believe this darkness will endure.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
Here’s what an Occupy event is like. This is my poor excuse of a video on the events from #N17 last year.
Bold Occupiers come in many flavors. This group of wheelchair Occupiers blocked Liberty and Broadway in Lower Manhattan and are being rolled off to jail.
So, you know, if you can run, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, roll. Occupy does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, disability, lifestyle, age, religion or national origin.
To say this portrait of the president is unflattering would be an understatement. I hate to blame the victims but you should have seen this coming for all of the reasons we have tried to point out in the past four years. Still, some of the examples of interactions with Obama have been downright pitiless. Take this exchange that Obama has had with immigration activists who have been alarmed by the step-up of deportations under Obama:
Bhargava, 43, an Indian American who came to the United States as a child, had spent much of 2008 registering minority voters. The rise of a fellow community organizer, a black man, delivered to office on the shoulders of a new ethnic coalition, “hit me on so many levels,” Bhargava would later recall.
So it was an uncomfortable moment when Bhargava looked in Obama’s eyes and told him that he was presiding over a “moral catastrophe” in immigrant communities. He asked Obama to use executive powers to stop many deportations, said it was time to “lean in” on revamping the country’s immigration system and listed a number of Republican senators he should lobby.
The president grew visibly frustrated as each successive advocate spoke. He said that the advocates, too, should be pressing Republican lawmakers, that he sympathized with their concerns but that he did not have the legal authority to stop deportations.
Tensions mounted when Obama argued that his administration’s policy was to focus on deporting criminals and others deemed to be security threats.
“No, Mr. President, that’s not what’s happening,” interjected Angelica Salas, the head of the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. She was seated directly across the table from Obama and leaned toward him as she spoke, her hands trembling and her voice rising. “You’re deporting heads of households, mothers and fathers.” She said that “young people are sitting in detention centers when they should be sitting in the best universities in the country,” according to meeting participants.
Obama looked taken aback by the direct confrontation from Salas and then turned to aides seated against the wall, according to several participants. The aides affirmed that, yes, criminals were the priority.
Turning back to Salas, Obama asked: “What do you want me to do, not enforce the law?” He explained that he could not just ignore laws he didn’t like.
The president spoke sternly. Several participants described him as defensive. One person said that, at times, Obama was “pissy.”
How about working to *change* the law so that it didn’t rip families apart, impoverish children and turn them into vulnerable international orphans? Just a suggestion.
The funny thing is that this article highlights his interactions with immigration and gay rights activists. It says nothing about women’s groups, which makes me wonder if they were even able to get a meeting or were so discouraged that they didn’t even try. Isn’t it weird how in this year on the “War on Women” that womens’ advocacy groups are so invisible? I’m telling you, it’s downright creepy.
There is a danger for the party to look like it’s tied too closely with special interest groups but working people, who the White House blew off earlier this week, and women, who it has always blown off, are NOT special interest groups. The debacle in Wisconsin is particularly striking. The White House, in fear of looking like it was sitting next to the dweebs at the loser lunch table, left labor to twist in the wind. The worst thing that Obama did with respect to Wisconsin wasn’t that he avoided the state. It was that he made no attempt to argue in any speech to the state or the nation about how important it was to the future of the country, economy and all working people that labor was respected, protected and championed. There is a very good argument to be made there and Obama did not make it. Bill Clinton, who went to Wisconsin, had to do this. The 99% need to remember this because the differences between how the two presidents stand up for labor couldn’t be more illuminating.
But that doesn’t mean that the president isn’t passionate about things:
The Barack Obama who spars with liberals in private seems far different from the man most Americans have come to know for his even-keeled, cerebral presence. He drops the formalities of his position and the familiar rhetoric of his speeches, revealing a president willing to speak personally and candidly to his allies, and also one who can be thin-skinned, irritable, even sarcastic and hectoring if his motives or tactics are questioned. He talks about his own ethnicity, his immigrant roots, his political high wire as a black president with a Muslim middle name — and then seems surprised when advocates who took deep inspiration from his election nevertheless question his commitment to their causes.
Awwww, the poor man. It’s really hard to be half African America son of an immigrant with a funny middle name who is the most powerful person of the free world. He gets picked on. These activists, it’s all about them. They have no idea how hard it is to be Obama. First he campaigns as the first post-racial, post-partisan president and then people put unrealistic expectations on him to actually live up to his soaring, aspirational campaign rhetoric.
I think the people spoke in 2008. They were willing to give Obama a chance to rise above his humble means, his prep school background and Harvard pedigree, and lead and they were willing to do this because he ran as the Democrat and once upon a time, that meant something. Now, it seems like he didn’t really mean any of what he said. Either that or he’s not really all that into you, activists, and he’s falling back on being the aggrieved party to get you to back off. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll just be mean and pissy, reverting back to his “Can I just eat my waffles?!?” personality that was conveniently overlooked in 2008 by the very same groups he captured.
This is not a new Obama, it’s the same guy. But the smoke has cleared now. He got away with sidelining the activists in 2008 and now in 2012, they’re frustrated. Well, no one held him accountable before the 2008 election or asked him to show them his policies. He didn’t need policies back then because anyone who questioned Obama’s readiness, commitment or preparation was automatically bludgeoned with the “racists!” sledgehammer. They were all supposed to “Hang on a second, sweetie.” while he schmoozed them.
Of course, it isn’t too late to hold him accountable before he gets the nomination in September. He’s not the only game in town and there are real politicians out there with actual policy plans that would make suitable substitutes. The question is, do the various factions of the Democratic party have the courage to demand satisfaction?
You can’t complain later if he blows you off next year if you do nothing this year. And you can’t complain if he gets booted out of office because the general public is disgusted with the excuses while their lives are being ruined.
No one is forcing him to take four more years of abuse and name calling. If he really doesn’t want to deal with those people, ie his base, he can always join the speech circuit, or become the new CEO of Pfizer and hasten its demise. There are options. He shouldn’t worry about disappointing us if he decides not to stick it out and yields the spot to a better Democrat. We’ll understand.
The infamous “sweetie” clip looks completely different to the party activists this year, doesn’t it?
I heard that OWS retook Liberty Park (Zuccotti Park) last night.
Looks like fun! Wish I had been there. But I’m going to the January 17 Occupy Congress event so there’s plenty of fun coming up.
In fact, I see signs that many people are starting to feel their Cheerios this year. The VastApostateArmy of former Jehovah’s Witnesses have an event planned in February that I will tell you more about later because it deserves it’s own post. If you are a former JW, you won’t want to miss this one. The thing that set it off is an upcoming lesson in the February 2012 Watchtower and it will make your blood boil. Heads up New Agenda, The Feminist Majority and Freedom from Religion Foundation, this is a protest worthy of publicity.
I’m really enjoying the VastApostateArmy direct action videos. For years, apostates and disfellowshipped members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been told they’re mentally diseased because their consciences choked on false dogma and coercive compliance techniques. They recently have taken to youtube after years of shame as if to say, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re not insane. The Watchtower really is a greedy cult pretending to be a religion” (More on that angle later as well) They have banded together on a rescue mission and seem to have taken inspiration from the Occupy Movement. So, good job, OWS, it’s working.
As the 1% seem determined to keep a stranglehold on our money and our lives, the 99% are pushing back. Jane Caro, Australian writer and former advertising creative said recently, what we are seeing is “a struggle between authoritarianism and small “l” liberalism”. I find it very interesting that both Caro and the guy who started the Occupy movement, Kalle Lasn of AdBusters, were formerly in the ad business. But this makes perfect sense because they recognize the campaign against us. The ad business is all about persuasion and emotion and the authoritarians have the money to conduct a massive ad campaign to make us eat a high control culture. They’ve been at it for decades now and they are pretty close to achieving their goal. This may be the pivotal year where we either band together and push back hard to reassert the principles of the Enlightenment or we submit to authority once and for all and the opportunity never comes up again.
Maybe the Mayans were right. But if they are, let’s not go down quietly.
No, precariat is not a misspelling of a group of single celled organisms. It’s a very disturbing word, an ominous word, a word that has already arrived here in the United States and is slowly moving up the food chain:
Precariat- a social group consisting of people whose lives are difficult because they have little or no job security and few employment rights
It’s a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat”. A precariat is a person who doesn’t have a reliable job. Precariats initially were service workers who may have been working a 40 hour work week, but maybe not. A precariat could be called in to work a 6 hour shift, every other day and one long 12 hour day at some other point in the week or come to work expecting a full 8 hours but sent home after 2. The amount of work can vary from day to day, week to week. This worker typically has no benefits.
I think most of us can see right away the limitations of the precariat world. If you can’t say for sure how many hours you’ll be working each month, can you afford to rent a nice apartment or buy a house? Can you buy a new car? If you have children, how do you schedule and pay for their child care? Can you depend on your paycheck to feed them? Work and living become precarious. Here is a video about the precariat from The Precariat: the New Working Class:
Precariats usually spring up in countries where workers are not protected by unions or strict labor laws. Right now, the UK is starting to come to terms with the precariat but in a way, the Welsh precariat has it good compared to the American version. Here in the US, there is no national health care system or reasonably priced, government subsidized schools of higher education. So, the land of opportunity in America is starting to look like the last place you want to live if you are forced into precariatism.
Another feature of precariatism is the appearance of the middle man hiring agency. That agency stands between the employer and you. The employer hands off responsibility of hiring and paying the worker. The worker becomes a true human resource to be hired when needed and laid off when not. Benefits and risks are born by the employee. The hiring agency takes a cut of the worker’s pay, I hesitate to call it a salary because that would imply some kind of security and regularity.
A couple of years ago, we who were salaried employees would have looked down on the precariat with pity. Now, we are one. From my vantage point, this is the way the pharmaceutical industry has decided to handle its well educated, experienced workforce. We are now service workers. More and more of us can only find contract work. The work is parceled out in 3, 6 or 12 month contracts. There are no benefits. In some cases, the worker pays both sides of the social security tax. It is hard to plan where to live because you don’t know if you’ll be able to pay the rent. You can’t make any major purchases on credit because there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to afford the car payment.
One of the reasons I suspected that the McKinsey reports of employers dropping health insurance coverage for their employees after the passage of the Affordable Care Act was true was because it fits so well with the precariat worker norm. Since a universal mandate meant that workers would be legally compelled to spend whatever the insurance companies could charge for health insurance, the employer could cut this benefit out of their compensation packages guilt free. To escape the employer mandate, all the employer would have to do is make many of its permanent employees into contractors. The number of layoffs would be expected to increase. Responsibility and risk would now be transferred to the employee. You don’t have to be a highly paid consulting company or economist to see how this would work. All you have to do is think a couple of steps ahead. Mandatory universal coverage without a public option or a single payer system that requires employers to pay in puts much of the American workforce at risk of falling from the middle class into the precariat.
The new middle man hiring agency becomes the new growth sector. Expect to hear more horror stories of foreign students brought to the US by a hiring vendor promising that they will learn English only to spend their summer in a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania doing manual labor for subsistence wages. Expect Hershey the company to deny all responsibility. Or Amazon. Or {{your company name here}}
It’s hard to say whether Barack Obama was onboard with this or whether he was so overwhelmed by his job that it never was evaluated properly. But I think we can say pretty unequivocally that the acceleration of the expansion of precariatism within the American culture is related to the measures that were or weren’t taken in the wake of the financial collapse. So much attention was focused on shoring up the banks at taxpayer expense that homeowners were allowed to foreclose, jobs were allowed to disappear and healthcare reform was rushed through to score political points without much thought of how those reforms would affect the workforce. In fact, hardly any thought at all has been spent on the workforce. Well, Elizabeth Warren was thinking about it for years but as Adam Davidson pointing out in that blistering Planet Money interview from 2009, Warren’s opinions didn’t really count because she wasn’t a “serious” person. Did Davidson see the rise of the precariat? Does he know that free lancing is going to appear at an NPR station near him someday?
If the US economy is in a slump right now, it may very well be because there are so many more precariats where once there were college educated salaried people. In my own sphere, precariatism is the norm these days, not the exception. It wasn’t like this before 2008. But now, if you’re a precariat, you can not plan for the future. There IS no future. Everyday is a struggle and stress about where the next mortgage payment will come from, what will happen if the car breaks down, how to pay for the plumbing that keeps getting backed up or the last of the orthodontic appointments. It’s the reason why so many grocery stores are shuttering their stores and why Lowes is laying off workers in the northeast and why people are hoarding their money instead of spending it. And it will get worse until more working people realize what is happening to them. The people who are kissing the whip today are going to be tomorrow’s precariats.
We have been subjected to years of politicians relaxing the rules for the 1% and tightening the rules for everyone else. The rise of the number of precariats can be attributed to the politicians who let this happen. We need to replace as many of them as possible. Because it wasn’t too long ago that Americans were pretty cool with capitalism. When we were all making money and productivity gains went to the middle class, we had a vibrant, robust economy. But when the rules went out the window and labor came under attack from the superwealthy and the whip kissers who brainlessly listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News, an opportunity arose to force many of us to live on the edge of a knife. Now, those of us who didn’t necessarily want to be rich but wanted to work for its own sake are considered losers. And the infection of the precariat is bound to spread. There is no profession that is safe. Once the public unions are broken, precarianism will be the norm, not the exception. Your degrees cannot protect you. Even senior citizens are not sheltered from the effects of precariatism because as the salaries disappear to be replaced with lower, precarious wages, the tax base will continue to shrink. It won’t be that we don’t want to pay for social security. It will be that we just can’t anymore.
The 99% don’t want to live a precarious life. We know who was responsible for the ruination of the American middle class. We focus on the robber barons of Wall Street now but come November 2012, with a handful of notable exceptions in Congress, they ALL have to go, Obama included.
What the OccupyWallStreet protestors object to is the increasing economic injustice forced on the precariat and what they demand is that it stop.
OccupyWallStreet is befuddling the “experts”. It defies categorization. Are they Democrats? Radical Marxists? A new generation of hippies? Naive? Or the true brilliant 11 dimensional chess players that Obama could only dream to be? What? WHAT??
While the pollsters and pundits try to figure that out by using their standard questionnaires that neatly files the subject into bins that can be mined later, Mike Konzal at Rortybomb took a different approach and analyzed what the 99% had to say about themselves without the filter. He wrote a script to parse the data from the “We Are the 99%” tumblr entries. I think you can do this using python, regular expressions and the natural language tool kit (NLTK) if any enterprising Conflucians want to do it themselves (I might ask the kid to teach me). Then he tallied up the most frequently appearing words, minus the promiscuous ones, and peered at the entrails. What he found was a bit of a shock because we joke around about how the country has changed but when you see it in the data, it’s not so funny anymore. Here are his initial findings:
So if the 99% Tumblr was a PAC, what would its demands look like, and what ideology would it presuppose? Freddie DeBoer is discouraged after reading the 99% tumblr. He’s concerned it reflects a desire for restoration of the glory days of the 90s-00s, which concerns him because “this country cannot be fixed by wishing to go back to the economics of 2005.” Concerned that the solidarity is one that, at most, is a I-got-mine-you-go-get-yours form of neoliberalism (as he imagines it, “I went to college and I don’t have the job and the car and the lifestyle I was promised”), DeBoer is worried that We Are the 99% isn’t “a rejection of our failing order. It is an embrace of it in the most cynical terms.”
With all due respect to DeBoer, the demands I found aren’t the ones of the go-go 90s-00s, but instead far more ancient cry, one of premodernity and antiquity.
Let’s bring up a favorite quote around here. Anthropologist David Graeber cites historian Moses Finley, who identified “the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class.” And think through these cases. The overwhelming majority of these statements are actionable demands in the form of (i) free us from the bondage of these debts and (ii) give us a bare minimum to survive on in order to lead decent lives (or, in pre-Industrial terms, give us some land). In Finley’s terms, these are the demands of a peasantry, not a working class.
The actual ideology of modernity, broadly speaking, is absent. There isn’t the affluenza of Freddie’s worries, no demands for cheap gas, cheaper credit, giant houses, bigger electronics all under the cynical ”Ownership Society” banner. The demands are broadly health care, education and not to feel exploited at the high-level, and the desire to not live month-to-month on bills, food and rent and under less of the burden of debt at the practical level.
The people in the tumblr aren’t demanding to bring democracy into the workplace via large-scale unionization, much less shorter work days and more pay. They aren’t talking the language of mid-twentieth century liberalism, where everyone puts on blindfolds and cuts slices of pie to share. The 99% looks too beaten down to demand anything as grand as “fairness” in their distribution of the economy. There’s no calls for some sort of post-industrial personal fulfillment in their labor – very few even invoke the idea that a job should “mean something.” It’s straight out of antiquity – free us from the bondage of our debts and give us a basic ability to survive.
It’s awful that it has come to this, but it also is an opportunity. As was discussed in the monetary debate from earlier, creditors aren’t bosses; their power is less coercive and much more obviously based on socially-constructed fictions, laws and ideas. As Peter Frase pointed out:
Indeed, widespread and large debt loads are one of the most important ways in which my generation differs from those that immediately preceded it…This has direct implications for the left: more than once, older comrades have noted to me that it has become much more difficult to live in the kind of bohemian poverty that sustained an earlier generation of young radicals and activists…
And there may be some advantages to a politics centered around debt rather than wage labor. The problem confronting the wage laborer is that they are, in fact, dependent on the boss for their sustenance, unless they can solve the collective action problem of getting everyone together to expropriate the expropriators. Debt, on the other hand, is just an agreed-upon social fiction denoting an obligation for some act of consumption that has already occurred. The only way to make people respect debt is through some combination of brute force and ideological legitimacy–a legitimacy that we can only hope is starting to slip away.
Upon reflection, it is very obvious where the problems are. There’s no universal health care to handle the randomness of poor health. There’s no free higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. Our bankruptcy code has been rewritten by the top 1% when instead, it needs to be a defense against their need to shove inequality-driven debt at populations. And finally, there’s no basic income guaranteed to each citizen to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay.
We have piecemeal, leaky versions of each of these in our current liberal social safety net. Having collated all these responses, I think completing these projects should be the ultimate goal of the 99%.
So, how will OccupyWallStreet and the 99% turn these problems into policies that will address the reality of day to day life for the average American serf beaten down by debt? This is a good question and, in part, also relates to the insistent demands from the naysayers and right wing noise machine that OccupyWallStreet define itself, right this very minute! And put together a list of demands that you want fulfilled so we can tell you how unrealistic they are and make you go back to your sorry little lives, you losers. Isn’t that right, you Tea Party lurkers and Glenn Beck fans? You want instant answers so you can shoot them down.
Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government. Conservative “democracy” is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model.
Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media, and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues.
…
I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.
It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.
We Love America. We’re Here to Fix It
I see OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country – a patriotism that it is not just about the self-interests of individuals, but about what the country is and is to be. Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That’s what love of America is about. I therefore think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing, and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.
This sounds pretty close to what we’re seeing, I think. It also explains why Elizabeth Warren, while sorting through the data on why Americans go bankrupt, was converted from a Republican to a Democrat earlier in her career. Well, that’s back when Democrats actually gave a shit. She says that when she first starting sifting through the cases from bankruptcy courts, she had a built in confirmation bias and was sure she was going to find people who lived the high life and spent too much or lazy people or hedonists or whatever the Glenn Beck types think. But what she found was that many of these people were undone by sudden unemployment, changes to their family lives or chronic and severe illnesses. They hadn’t done anything differently than millions of their fellow Americans. They had just hit a patch of really bad luck and found that there was no real safety net for them. They got sick, they lost their jobs because they got sick, they lost their health insurance because they lost their jobs, they lost their savings because they had to pay for their healthcare, they lost their houses because they lost their savings.
When Elizabeth Warren speaks to people, they know that she understands what they’re dealing with because she’s seen their lives in detail. It also explains why Barack Obama is so completely unsuited for his role right now. If this is a battle between two moralities, then using the approach of compromise is doomed to failure.
As Lakoff says, “A populist movement starts with people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.”
The 99% are all of us who just a few years ago were living what the right would consider righteous lives. We are good citizens, we are taxpayers, we are loving parents, we are dedicated employees. And through no fault of our own but the speculation and moral failures of the financial sector and the politicians that serve it, we are thrust back into a subsistence kind of existence that was familiar to our ancient ancestors. We are burdened with debt, servants to a moneyed class, beaten down, tired and looking for a break from the endless cycle of always having to sell ourselves to make next month’s rent or COBRA payment, heating bill or food for our kids. Now that the pain has bubbled up to the middle class, where professionals with advanced degrees and years of experience find themselves working far from home on contracts with low pay and no benefits, the chant, “We are the 99” has real meaning. We are all in the same boat and we must take on the oligarchs.
Which reminds me of Exodus. The bible tells us how Moses lead his people out of Egypt but archeology tells us a different story. Back in the day, in 13th century BC or so, Egypt was a superpower whose reach stretched over the Levant area. The ruling class in the Canaanite cities was Egyptian ruling over the locals and using them as slaves and the artisan underclass. At some point, the underclass decided it had had enough and a rebellion ensued, ending Egyptian reign and, with the collapse of other Bronze Age cultures, plunging most of the Mediterranean into a dark age. There may have been a Moses but what the archeological record looks like is a spontaneous and leaderless uprising that spread from city to city. Egyptian rule ended in Canaan and, along with the collapse of other Bronze Age cultures, the Mediterranean region plunged into a dark age. When the Israelites took up their pens a few centuries later, they were writing from a culture where the former slaves had made the laws.
This one hit especially close to home. I have a degree in chemistry and there are zilch jobs in NJ for what I used to do. This person should look into relocating to Massachusetts or California, although, without a MS or PhD, she won’t even have the privilege of doing grunt work in the lab, which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. If you have a PhD, for most jobs, you’re overqualified. But she looks young enough to emigrate. I hear Canada is taking sciencey types in and tonisllectomies are covered by single payer health insurance. Think about it, biochem major.
Hmmm, NYC is only an hour by train from my house and I haven’t been there in about 6 months…
I debated going to Washington for the Womens March today but for one reason or another, I decided to stay in Pittsburgh and go to the local Sister March instead that starts at 11am.
Good Morning! Today is the anniversary celebration for Occupy Wall Street. I am still at home this morning for various reasons. I have things that urgently need to be finished here. But my afternoon looks free so I might scoot up to NYC later. In the meantime, I’ll be finishing putting down a new floor in my basement and watching the events live. Anyone who wants to help let me know in the comments. Yeah, didn’t think so. {{sigh}}
The Washington Post has an article about 
The Confluence 