Visual source: Newseum
Congrats, Occupy Wall Street protesters! You've managed to do something in one month that Democrats could not do in years: you've shifted the media debate away from cuts and deficits and towards a discussion on income inequality and jobs. You've been so successful, even House Majority Whip Eric Cantor is forced to play on your issue turf:
House Majority Eric Cantor plans to deliver a speech to emphasize that Republicans care about the issue as well.
Cantor -- who is often cast by Democrats as the face of Republican obstruction -- will talk about income disparity in a speech at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania this week. Cantor's office tells Hotsheet the GOP leader is likely to hit on points he made on "Fox News Sunday" over the weekend.
"We know in this country right now that there is a complaint about folks at the top end of the income scale, if they make too much and too many, don't make enough," Cantor said on Fox. "Well, we need to both go encourage those at the top of the income scale to actually put their money to work to create more jobs so that we can see a closing of the gap. You know, we are about income mobility and that's what we should be focused on to take care of the income disparity in this country."
Speaking of Democrats, Eugene Robinson looks at the tension between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party:
So Democrats are cautiously embracing the Occupy Wall Street protests and adopting the demonstrators’ rhetoric — for example, emphasizing the gulf between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the remaining 99 percent. In remarks Sunday at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, Obama spoke of King’s commitment to economic justice.
If Democrats reap a political windfall from Occupy Wall Street, it will not be richly deserved. While it is true that they have been better than the Republicans on issues of economic fairness, that’s not saying much. Although Obama is disliked by many on Wall Street for his rhetoric about how “millionaires and billionaires” need to pay “their fair share” in taxes, the fact is that he decided not to seek fundamental reforms.
It is also a fact that Wall Street is a major source of campaign financing for both parties. At present, Wall Street donors are giving heavily to Romney — a money man by trade who once headed the private equity firm Bain Capital. In July, however, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that one-third of the $35 million collected this year by Obama’s top-tier fundraisers came from the financial industry. Apparently, animosity is no match for self-interest.
Bloomberg's editorial board makes the same general point about Democrats (specifically, the president) embracing the Occupy Wall Street message, and adds in a different bent:
We support Obama’s stance that people who earn more than $200,000 (or $250,000 for a couple) ought to contribute more to the public weal. Critics call this “class warfare,” but it needn’t be. The intention isn’t to punish the rich, nor to suggest that people with high incomes are bad. The intention is to raise the money necessary to finance the amount of government we want, and to do so as fairly as possible. Those who have been luckiest in the lottery of life -- whether by talent or trust fund -- have also, in recent years, been luckiest in rates of taxation, as Warren Buffett has vividly demonstrated by comparing his average rate with that of his secretary.
It becomes difficult, however, to maintain that there is no invidious intention if proposals to raise taxes are justified by rhetoric suggesting that Wall Street or the banking industry or wealthy people in general have misbehaved in some way that hurts the rest of us.
Cheap populist rhetoric would seem absurd coming from an administration that has hired heavily from the financial industry and raised plenty of campaign contributions from rich people. Wall Street certainly deserves criticism, but not everybody with income over $200,000 works in finance. Such rhetoric would also appear opportunistic, with the Obama administration finding targets even more unpopular than itself to pick on. And it gives a needless weapon to conservative critics of the Dodd-Frank financial consumer protection bill -- an Obama victory that Republicans promise to repeal if they regain the White House.
Matt Taibi pens a must-read on the non-partisan nature of the movement:
This will be an effort to transform OWS from a populist and wholly non-partisan protest against bailouts, theft, insider trading, self-dealing, regulatory capture and the market-perverting effect of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks into something a little more familiar and less threatening, i.e. a captive "liberal" uprising that the right will use to whip up support and the Democrats will try to turn into electoral energy for 2012. [...]
The Rush Limbaughs of the world are very comfortable with a narrative that has Noam Chomsky, MoveOn and Barack Obama on one side, and the Tea Party and Republican leaders on the other. The rest of the traditional media won't mind that narrative either, if it can get enough "facts" to back it up. They know how to do that story and most of our political media is based upon that Crossfire paradigm of left-vs-right commentary shows and NFL Today-style team-vs-team campaign reporting.
What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that's a story our media won't want to or know how to handle.
The money that greases the wheels for corporations in D.C. also happens to gum up the system for the rest of us. The gridlock has gotten so bad that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is looking to apply third-world lending program concepts to help American small businesses. Joe Nocera examines the program:
With the government a nonfactor, Schultz began mulling other ideas. He knew that small businesses created most new jobs, but that many small businesspeople couldn’t hire because they had lost access to credit after the financial crisis. He thought about Starbucks’s involvement in microlending programs in some of the countries where it bought coffee. He wondered if there was some way that that could be applied to small business lending in this country. Finally, he thought about the nearly 7,000 Starbucks stores in the United States, and its tens of millions of customers. Surely, he mused, there must be some way to take advantage of Starbucks’s sheer size. [...]
Here’s the idea they came up with: Americans themselves would start lending to small businesses, with Starbucks serving as the middleman. Starbucks would find financial institutions willing to loan to small businesses. Starbucks customers would be able to donate money to the effort when they bought their coffee. Those who gave $5 or more would get a red-white-and-blue wristband, which Schultz labeled “Indivisible.” “We are hoping it will bring back pride in the American dream,” he says. The tag line will read: “Americans Helping Americans.”