occupy

A report on protests at the Tampa convention appearing in the Hill (h/t Lambertstrether) partly focused on views about our economy and financial system of an Occupy protestor named Andrew Speirs. more »

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Our lives are defined by invisible wars, wars whose theater of combat is the human imagination. These economic and political wars are waged year in and year out, decade after decade, century after century.

Words are the weapons of choice in these wars, and the corporate-backed radical right adds new ones to its arsenal every year. This year was no different. From "entitlement reform" to "triggers," the corporate oligarchs couched their aggression in decoy language that made it possible for Democrats as well as Republicans to launch them on an unsuspecting public.

But something was different this year. This was the year that the people came up with some words of their own, outside the corporate- and billionaire-funded think tanks of conservatism. For the first time in many years, the right-wing warriors of language ran into heavy resistance. That's an important development that should be celebrated -- and repeated.

War of the Words

The corporatists own the Republican Party, and large swathes of the Democratic Party too. Most Americans disagree with their ambitions, but they've been so good at designing and using these linguistic weapons that the public hasn't had a chance. Major media journalists have used these words as mantras, while too many Democrats have embraced them for their own selfish purposes.

That's why they keep winning so many battles, no matter who's in power.

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There is a growing movement of people fed up with corporations-as-persons, money-as-speech, elections-for-sale in America. They are ready to amend the US Constitution as the only sure way to reverse the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United v. FEC and Buckley v. Valeo. But what’s the best amendment? Sanders/Deutch or Udall/Sutton? Move To Amend or Free Speech for People? more »

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Last week’s Take Back the Capitol action brought two or three thousand unemployed people to the capitol. These representatives of the 99% went to the offices of 99 Senators and Representatives who now represent the 1%, where they were ignored and doors were closed on them. Some members were filmed fleeing down stairwells or hiding in copy rooms. more »

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Millions of employees mounted Great Britain's first General Strike in many years today after the government threatened to impose more cuts in retirement benefits and pay for public workers. more »

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It's like the old-timers always said: Don't quit before the miracle happens.

While the Arab Spring showed that people can still accomplish the impossible, Our political debate was frozen in corporate cynicism. Now everything has changed. For the United States, spring came in autumn. Who says miracles don't happen?

Like a Prayer

A few months ago I prayed for something. Granted, it wasn't the kind of prayer that's sanctioned by any ecclesiastical authority. And, okay, maybe it wasn't exactly a "prayer." I guess the technical term for it would be "blog post." But trust me, it was a prayer.

I'd been asked to write something for the Fourth of July, and I wrote we have to fight a new war, a "war of independence from corporate politics." To be honest, those words felt Utopian even as I wrote them. Still, I never doubted them. The words were born out of the desperate sense that so many of us shared, a sense that our society is collapsing. And that it will keep on collapsing unless we change the way we think.

I wasn't arguing for any particular policy or platform. "The problem isn't just with politicians, or even the system," I said then. "The problem is dependence itself."

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Conservatives say they want to "bring back" the old USA, the one that existed during those decades of the twentieth century they only seem to see through a gauzy golden haze. Whatever its problems, that country was a place where Republicans and Democrats agreed on two simple principles: That the most fortunate among us should pay their fair share, and that our government must invest in the nation and its future.

When Rick Perry says he wants to bring back "the America I where I grew up," he's talking about the era when Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican President, built the Federal highway system. One of the reasons Eisenhower was able to do that is that the top tax rate was much higher than it is today. While today's highest marginal today is 35% and capital gains are taxed at only 15%, the highest tax bracket was 91% the year Rick Perry was born.

Whenever I talk about tax brackets I'm attacked by right-wingers who say I don't understand, that high taxes discourage job creators. They'll say things like "You hippies just don't get it! If taxes are too high rich people will stop working and investing. The Job Creators will go away!"

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A government that says corporate money is “speech” dispatches lines of police to stop actual human-being citizens from actually speaking out. It's all right there in front of us: Wall Street got bailouts, the rich got tax cuts, corporations got to buy elections, people got job loss and home loss and pension loss and health care loss, protests got crackdowns. more »

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