Occupy Wall Street movement resonates with others, including William Blum
Power Generation in Liberty (Zucotti) Park
William Blum has a lot to say about the conduct of American foreign policy and the deceit with which we communicate our international behavior to our citizens. To say we are duplicitous does not quite explain the true situation. We describe how we are doing God’s work abroad and then hide the numbers and details of those who have died and suffered as a consequence of carrying out His wishes–but it’s all in the best interests of “spreading democracy.” Blum has an excellent bullshit detector and that’s why I read his blog with some regularity. Ordinarily, you don’t go to his website if you are searching for an uplifting message about America, but in his most recent blog, he actually has one! It’s all about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and, as explained therein, Blum is pleasantly surprised and uplifted by their message and their persistence in delivering it. My son and I had a similar experience when we visited Zucotti Park a few weeks ago (now renamed by the OWS movement as Liberty Park–its original name) and absorbed the culture of those promoting these ideas.
When you think about the major protest activities we have historically engaged in, against the wars we have entered, beginning with the Vietnam war, they have all been time-limited by the event that initiated them. When the war ended, protests stopped and everybody went home–issue over, if not forgotten, though that event in particular left a deep national scar. Sometimes, as in the case of the war in Iraq, we don’t even wait for it to end before putting it out of our mind–we simply don’t have a way of dealing with wars we start without a good reason. Bury it in a file but in which file cabinet does it belong? The OWS movement is different; it addresses another kind of issue, something that is more inter-generational, more longitudinal in scope and more fundamental, like the backbone to our culture. Yet it began with too much subtlety for us to detect and it remains an insidious force waiting to be full fleshed out. Yes, it’s neoliberalism that we are against, and while it may have started as an economic change of course, it has become far more than an economic blueprint for a more divisive future–it has crept into every pore of our cultural being and has overtaken the central values of our society. And the politics of neoliberalism are draining to our culture–we get exhausted too easily imagining what the country was like before. Multinational corporations now effectively run governments, in fact they own them.
With the current economic meltdown, we’re beginning to perceive the real core of the problem as an encompassing social, spiritual and economic disaster–a long national nightmare of sorts. The financial disaster that led to the “Great Recession” (let’s face it, for young people the unemployment picture is at depression levels) was initially viewed as something we could do nothing about–we were too “financialized” to confront the political and social power that controlled our government and made the rules. But the OWS movement has been courageous enough to put up the first STOP sign and begin the process of inoculating the country against this festering contagion of corruption and economic despair. We can all hope that the movement will continue to grow until its mass reaches a critical threshold such that the majority of Americans will recognize we cannot continue with a system that dehumanizes us with too much poverty and too few opportunities to develop and grow as humans–there must be a better way. And so there is! But as the long struggle begins to right our ship, it is only beginning to take shape in our brains and not through identifiable objects around us.
It may have started off as a lack of good paying jobs and high unemployment, but, like the Populist movement of the 1870s, it will hopefully grow until we create a more democratic country, something like the one we quit on in the 1970s. We must radically change our system of government to make it more responsive to our social needs. Then too, we have the additional urgency of saving the planet we live on. We will not do away with our financial system, but one hopes to tame it and make it subservient to the needs of society, rather than the other way around. The neoliberal experiment is over. It didn’t work. It produced too much poverty, destroyed our national creativity, hollowed out our economy and is completely indifferent if not hostile to the environment–that is just one more arena for corporate exploitation. Those for whom the country does work seem to be the least deserving and least imaginative members of our culture–they must become the new workers in a revised economy that works better for all of us, including them, though they don’t see it that way right now. It’s more than just hitting the restart button. We can no longer tolerate a system in which our national assets are sold off at fire-sale prices, as employees are stripped of their retirement–that is robbery–we are now confronted with the new robber barons, who are far more sinister than the predecessors for whom they are named. They are on automatic pilot and will not cease until we stop them. One of the best things we can do to tame Wall Street is impose a small tax on every stock market exchange which will not only raise money but also inhibit the rapid, electronic stock exchanges that continue to pose a risk to our economy. America is not broke. In fact the Institute for Policy Studies has outlined several changes in our tax and subsidy policy that could create seven times the amount of money that the failed Super Committee was trying to achieve. And most of us wouldn’t know the difference. The idea that we are broke is simply another example of how the neoliberals have fashioned a corrupt tax code with advantages to the super rich and subsidies to industries that are generating huge profits, for providing energy that does not reflect the true cost of doing business. A sensible Congress could solve these issues simply and effectively.
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