Occupy Wall Street: A Draft to Share.
Clicking on the NYTimes’s daily confused article on the current #occupywallst, I’m moved by how corporate media’s utter bafflement on what is happening (and spreading) is almost entirely a result, not of bad answers, but of bad questions. And it’s not a stretch to suggest that this is an indictment of several major liberal institutions.
It is apparent to anyone with a pulse that the American political and economic system is designed to benefit the absolute richest people. Res ipsa loquitur. Let’s look at one easy example: Candidate Obama promised much needed healthcare reform (with care being denied across the country while health insurance execs pulled in staggering salaries like UnitedHealth Groups’s Stephen Helmsley making 57,000 dollars an hour).
President Obama, however, did everything he could to stop the two proposals that would have the greatest effect of improving healthcare: a single payer system (with the government supplying all of the health insurance akin to the fire department or highway system) OR a public option (with the government allowing a non-profit government run option available to all). They put Max “gotten over a million dollars from the health insurance lobby” Baucus in charge of coming up with the senate plan (who refused to have any single payer advocates speak in front of his committee) and we got a weak “reform bill” that has led to faster health insurance spikes in real people’s wallets - as predicted by single payer and public option advocates (Dr. Marcie Angell, a Harvard medical lecturer and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, stated “ it mandates that people buy these companies’ products for whatever they charge. Now that’s a recipe for the growth in health care costs not only to continue but to skyrocket, to grow even faster.”) ”The cost of health insurance for many Americans this year climbed more sharply than in previous years, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and adding more uncertainty about the pace of rising medical costs.” wrote the Times just this week.
But Obama claimed a victory when his healthcare bill passed because that’s what Obama does: he claims victories that haven’t happened. The war in Iraq is over (tell Sgt.Andy Morales of Longwood, Florida, killed last week there). Even his claim that the US got something small done in Copenhagen to combat global climate change was met with befuddlement from other countries that said nothing had occurred.
It’s not just the executive branch, of course. The Supreme Court tosses the class-action suit targeting Wal-Mart’s treatment of women workers. Congress almost shut down the government over the idea of taxes being raised on rich people. The economy continues to tank due to massive government deregulation of the banking and financial markets, but Congressman Eric Cantor is opposed to extending unemployment benefits while more and more people hit their last unemployment check.
People are pissed. They don’t know yet what they’re working for, but they know what they’re working against. The calls to Occupy Wall St are symptomatic of this.
Yet, it’s entirely predictable: when the Democrats are in control, people are reminded that the Democratic Party is comfortable commanding top-down power and committing acts of evil. Look at the last two major upsurges in progressive activism: The “sixties” and the anti-globalization movement of the late nineties.
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s attacks on Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and vietnam (along with support for violent military coups in Brazil and Indonesia) shocked a lot of Americans. Millions took to the streets pushing for change.
Madeline Albright’s willingness to kill half a million iraqi children, Clinton’s wholesale endorsement and action in favor of “free trade,” (read: simultaneously shutting down high paying union factory jobs domestically while transferring the work overseas to sweatshop conditions). For a brief period, it was de rigueur for global financial negotiations taking place in the US or Canada to install a small army and inhabit a total siege mentality around their meetings in preparation for the coming hordes of well-organized affinity groups hellbent on obstructing them.
Republicans weren’t the problem, democrats weren’t the release valve of popular discontent. This is not an argument for Obama to improve or for people to go out and push for better “liberal” candidates. Not at all. This is total bewilderment that reporters for major news organizations, who presumably attended institutions of higher learning, fail to recognize this pattern and reality, both as reported in their own media and as lived in their own lives.
To be fair, there is confusion and muddied thinking at #occupywallst as well (repeated immediate rejections of any association with the left or socialism, which is unfortunate, and multiple people stating “we’re here to take wall street back,” which is hilarious). But before the mainstream corporate press hounds bray again at the confusion of the people occupying the heart of wall street, they need to deal with the occupation that wall street commands in their own minds.
