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Occupied Wall Street Journal

The vitality of the Occupy Wall Street Movement resonates deeply with many Americans who strongly identify with their choice of the target–Wall Street. After listening to lots of interviews with participants, it is clear that many who gather there have similar stories. They lost a low-paying job, have very heavy student loans, but still hope someday to get back on track with more education or just a better job, one that pays the bills and isn’t constantly under threat of elimination. We will have to generate a different kind of economy than the one we have had for the last thirty years if we are ever going to meet those kinds of needs. But aren’t those kinds of needs also a kind of freedom that we should be advocating, something derived from our constitution and available to all? Shouldn’t our evolving concept of freedom include the freedom of a good job, housing affordability, just like the freedom to worship and the freedom of speech? And while we are at it shouldn’t there also be freedoms that are not allowed? What about the freedom to exploit other human beings? Shouldn’t that freedom be off the table, specifically denied? There are all kinds of freedoms glaringly omitted from our culture that need to be articulated and added to our list. What about the freedom to have adequate health care, access to clean water, access to a nutritious food supply and a healthy diet? What about the freedom to be free of environmental contamination and toxic waste sites? What about the freedom to have our food supply safe from infectious organisms? These are the things that  our society once thought about, but has put far downstream on the list of priorities, largely because of privatization and the dismantling of our government through neoliberal advocacy. Privatization of public functions is only one force leashed upon society that prevents us from having control of these basic freedoms, those that should have been articulated more forcefully and openly.

While the geography for the movement seems right, uttering a few short words expressing the epicenter of the problem might be also appropriate, like “we are all victims of neoliberal capitalism.” It sounds far out and somewhat aloof from anything commonly expressed as a problem, at least among the Occupy Wall Street group. Capitalism itself is not going away anytime soon and most of the demonstrators are quick to disavow any hint that they want to bring down the Western World as we know it. But this Western World is pretty depressing and very repressive. Capitalism in its present form did not need to have the mean streak it regularly displays, but it turned out that way because we eliminated the economy as a tool to support our social engagement, not destroy it. Occupy Wall Street  is not a movement for anarchy, but an emphasis for a better life for them and for their families. But the true undercurrent of the problem they (we) face is the vicious form of our current neoliberal economic system  that replaced a more socially acceptable form of capitalism over the last thirty to forty years. Though this form of neoliberal capitalism is dead–it died from the economic meltdown when $600 trillion in risky investments went poof; since the world’s economy is only $ 55 trillion a year, you can see the magnitude of this loss and the virtual impossibility that this sunken treasure can ever be raised from the bottom, anymore than the third world countries will ever repay their debt, laid at their doorstep through the neoliberal policies mediated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO).  But the principles of capitalism and the need for compound growth of profits demand that, before we can predict a recovery for  tomorrow, we must figure out how to consume what we produced yesterday. That is why crisis capitalism is allowed to flourish, despite the massive financial dislocation it has brought to far too many people in America and around the globe. Though neoliberalism is dead, no one has yet driven a stake through its black heart and we still face a political party and a public commercial television channel (Faux News) that wants to keep neoliberalism alive no matter what the social cost. Though few people in Occupy Wall Street will articulate it, what they are really demanding, despite the avoidance of making demands, is to free our society of the neoliberal grip and the inhumane nature of our economy. The human cost of bringing neoliberalism back would be further enslavement of the American worker and that is what these young people on Wall Street are fighting against, but don’t yet use the right words to express it. Already we are seeing new Wall Street tools that represent another agent of potential  mass destruction of the market, in the form of leveraged exchange-traded funds or E.T.F.’s. This new “instrument” is apparently responsible for some of the high market volatility we have seen in recent months. Is the capitalist ruling class brewing another financial crisis? Capitalism cannot exist without an intermittent crisis–that’s the reset button on their computer.

What unifies the Wall Street demonstrators is the urge to meet and demonstrate with others whose gut reactions to our financial crisis forms the basis of an identity not represented within the political landscape of America. They coalesce today because they all have good bullshit detectors and know that something is deeply wrong with America. There is a flaw in our country that must be addressed and fixed. In times past, movements such as this would be derived from a politician who seemingly broke away from the mold of conventional politics and wandered off the ranch (remember Barack Obama), only to be swallowed  by the corporatist grip and be quickly co-opted by savvy political party leaders, or the deadly Koch brothers. We all witnessed the rapid conversion of the Tea Party movement (you might remember when the Tea Party first became a prominent news item they too were angry with Wall Street and the TARP bailout–but now they favor eliminating regulatory controls over banks and financial centers, i.e., they want to go back to 2000 and have another ground hog day) into a group of belligerent right-wing scarecrows.  But members of the Occupy Wall Street movement do not have to fear being co-opted by a political party because neither party is rushing into the street to embrace them.  Both political parties of today are far more conservative than the younger occupant demonstrators of Wall Street. In recent days we have heard Obama announce his support for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, though full endorsement is hard to visualize, since many of the occupiers are critical of his policies as a centrist. Although they differ in their positions, both major parties of today, Republicans and Democrats alike, support the capitalist ruling class who have assumed power and introduced a radical economic system that we have lived with for the past forty years–neoliberalism. What we must all get used to is the idea that this neoliberal economic system is a radical departure from how society functions in a historically healthy way. Going down the neoliberal road has produced massive poverty, job insecurity, high unemployment in our future and privatization of what should be public functions. The economy needs to be remade so that it contributes positively to the growth and stabilization of our society–it needs to be internalized again.

We are at a point in our depressed culture and economy where jobs are being lost and a permanent state of high unemployment has been produced. This underclass,  based on high unemployment, will keep the wages of all employed workers much lower than they would otherwise be. Wage freezes will be common, just as they have been over the last decade or more. It seems the major critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement is to ask them to specify their demands and present a more coherent set of objectives.   In the past, the American protest movement was largely centered around our national election cycles and most of us supported more political power for the Democrats. Whatever success we have had in achieving those goals, such as the victory of 2008, did not get back the country we had hoped for, nor did we see much in the way of an effort to help move us in that direction. Today, we do not have the country that the majority of Americans tell pollsters they want.  Corruption has always been at the heart of the American political system, where 20% of the population (acting through the Senate) can control the laws passed for the rest of the country. But, getting  excited about each election cycle seemed like the only way we could express our will and influence the country. Usually, we voted for Democrats and often we were disappointed, largely because too much money is needed to run a campaign and most good candidates stop short because denouncing Wall Street practices or the neoliberal economy can’t be done, because  that’s where candidates must go to raise the money needed for the high cost of a political campaign. It’s a vicious cycle which proved highly frustrating because too many Democrats were Republicans in sheep’s clothing and they were influenced by money from corporate profits and the financial interests of Wall Street, often mediated by well-paid lobbyists.  There is now so much money in our political system that something miraculous needs to surface to begin a new therapeutic trajectory towards a less corrupt electoral process.  But the Wall Street Movement is one which, at least for the moment, bypasses politics and speaks directly to a cause with which most Americans can identify. And, their numbers are growing, not just on Wall Street, but through the internet and social networking. One website, “we are the 99 percent” shows images and notes that people have written in describing the hardship they are going through. These problems should never happen to any American–we have torn the safety net apart and don’t seem capable or willing to repair it. There is surely something that resonates with all Americans when Wall Street demonstrators emphasize that they represent the 99% of the American population left out of the financialization of America that now has a death grip on our politics, our economic future and the very future of our planet.

One has to give enormous credit to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and we should do all we can to help stimulate and nourish its growth–that’s the key–growth. Don’t worry about demands or principles until you are big enough to appear on Faux News. The organizers, if there truly are any such people, are right in their thinking that they need to grow until they have a size and the attention of the nation before articulating what they want for political and economic reforms. And ultimately they will not agree on every issue, but the fundamental demand for change will be the theme that broadly unites them into the future. In many ways the demands of this movement are a repetition of something they once heard in a recent national political campaign–we demand change!  Finally, this is America’s Arab Spring!

While it may not resonate with those carrying the torch for demonstrations, neoliberalism is the root cause of our current problem and the source of our current crisis. Few people articulate this set of issues better than David Harvey, whose books “A Brief History of Neoliberalism“; it’s available on Kindle. If you finish that one, you might want to go on to a more current explanation of our economic meltdown described in his more recent publication “The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism“; also available on Kindle. Harvey points out the transition that we made from having capitalism embedded in our culture and thus working for the benefit of society to the more virulent and radical form of neoliberalism that we have today, in which capitalism has been taken out of our culture in such a way that society is now supposed to serve capitalism and the ruling class. Our democracy turned into a neoliberal oligarchy. This is unnatural and it cannot exist for long, for this form of capitalism tries to make commodities out of everything it touches, including human labor and nature. In the near future, I will be writing more on this topic of neoliberal capitalsm and its structural deficiencies. Suffice to say that all societies that have gone down the neoliberal road have created job insecurity, high unemployment and more poverty and greater disparity in wealth distribution. And, the wealth that is created through this mechanism filters up to the top as it is removed from the bottom. The development of our social structure and social freedoms was purposely interrupted by the Cold War and we were made to feel that our system was locked in a titanic death struggle against a repressive system that wanted to enslave us all. No matter how you feel about the Cold War, a war we started in order to achieve  global American hegemony, you must feel that the absence of that struggle today means that we can get back to the business of building a more just and equitable society and the beginning of this movement is visible in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose growth we must insure and whose vitality we must borrow if we have to just to infuse ourselves with a commitment for change–and not the kind of change that Obama promised. We need economic deliverance from a very bad experiment and a very bad economic model.

The arch enemy of neoliberalism  is labor and the process itself needs to generate a periodic crisis that allows resetting of the labor relationship. Making everything into a commodity, including human labor, wild animals, land, forests, water and nature in general, has been the objective of neoliberalism and it has largely succeeded or is on the verge of announcing a complete victory. But this fight is not just one of articulating freedoms that should have been granted decades ago, but it is also a fight for the future of the planet.

RFM

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