Occupy Wall Street has been attacked for not having a clear message, not having a list of specific demands, not having a defined leadership or spokesman. Which also means that it's been difficult to pigeonhole, categorize, or otherwise dismiss it. Both David Atkins and Matt Taibbi have some thoughts on how this is working out. Here's a relevant snippet from Taibbi:
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
There's 3 stories in the New York Times about efforts to take back the economy from the 1% who've rigged it to fill their pockets at our expense. More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
Tale Number One:
Saranac Lake is a town amid the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of New York State - and a long ways from anywhere else. In 2002 the last department store in town, an outpost of the bankrupt Ames corporate chain, closed. There were no local alternatives closer than Plattsburgh. Anyone who has had to deal with Adirondack winters knows that's a long way to have to go to buy underwear.
WalMart might have been the next step, with the usual consequences. A Big Box store that would have overwhelmed the remains of the local economy, another cookie cutter blight on the landscape. The article by Amy Cortese details what happened next:
It’s a situation familiar to many communities these days. But rather than accept their fate, residents of Saranac Lake did something unusual: they decided to raise capital to open their own department store. Shares in the store, priced at $100 each, were marketed to local residents as a way to “take control of our future and help our community,” said Melinda Little, a Saranac Lake resident who has been involved in the effort from the start. “The idea was, this is an investment in the community as well as the store.”
It took nearly five years — the recession added to the challenge — but the organizers reached their $500,000 goal last spring. By then, some 600 people had chipped in an average of $800 each. And so, on Oct. 29, as an early winter storm threatened the region, the Saranac Lake Community Store opened its doors to the public for the first time. By 9:30 in the morning, the store, in a former restaurant space on Main Street opposite the Hotel Saranac, was packed with shoppers, well-wishers and the curious.
There's quite a bit more at the link. It's a heartening story that's still being written. There IS an alternative to waiting for giant corporations to save the day. And if the Adirondack Scenic Railroad can close the remaining gaps, they'll even have rail service to the outside world again.
Back To The Land:
There's an old joke about a farmer who won the lottery. They asked what he was going to do with all that money. He thought a moment and said "Guess I'll just keep farmin' till the money runs out." It's not really a joke - but there are still people who want to make a living from the land.
The obstacles are formidable. At Quincy Farm in upstate New York, Luke Deikis and Cara Fraver say they are living their dream, harvesting cabbage, sweet potatoes and carrots on a 49-acre property on the Hudson River. Still, even after three years of farming, Ms. Fraver, 30, waits tables, and Mr. Deikis, 31, moonlights as an engineer in the film industry, occasionally driving three and a half hours to Manhattan to pay the bills.
Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, appears to have championed their cause. The 2008 Farm Bill included a program for beginning farmers and ranchers, and over the past year, the Agriculture Department has allotted $18 million to universities and extension programs to educate beginning farmers.
Agriculture policies skewed to keep food prices low, massive subsidies to giant agricorp businesses,
patent law abuse - all of that is coming up against the buy local, 100 mile movement, and a desire by people for food that isn't a health hazard. There's something about coming back the basics of existence that can lead to a
sense of community. And even people not ready to go all the way back to the land can still enjoy
community gardening.
The Moral Minority Strikes Back:
While Occupy Wall Street is on the outside, there's some inside work going on as well. The Sisters of Saint Francis have found a way to live their faith.
Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.
The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.
”We want social returns, as well as financial ones,” Sister Nora said, strolling through the garden behind Our Lady of Angels, the convent here where she has worked for more than half a century. She paused in front of a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. “When you look at the major financial institutions, you have to realize there is greed involved.”
When Limbaugh or Hannity talk about drug-crazed hippie slackers fornicating in filth, well, this kind of blows that whole narrative to bits. Granted, the sisters have been at this for a while - but the zeitgeist is shifting and they bring moral imperatives to bear in ways that complement Occupy Wall Street.
Still Not Getting It
Two steps forward, one step back; some people still don't get it. Adam Davidson has a piece in the Times explaining why we can't solve our problems by taxing corporations or the rich.
Most people who study the issue agree that the top federal corporate tax rate (35 percent of profits) is simply too high. The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you’ll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike. While this may seem like Republican propaganda, NPR’s “Planet Money,” for which I work, polled many leading progressive policy groups and academics, all of whom told us that they would support lowering the top corporate tax rate. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama agreed. Republican candidates are even talking specifics: Mitt Romney proposes dropping it to 25 percent; Rick Perry wants to lower it to 20 percent; Herman Cain, of course, is pushing 9 percent.
Davdison's piece is worth reading because it's a handy compendium of nearly all the fallacies embraced by the Very Serious People.
...It’s tempting to look to our millionaires and demand they pay more in taxes, but the same inconvenient truth applies. When you add up all the money made by all the people who earn more than $1 million a year, it amounts to around $700 billion. But since the millionaires already pay close to $200 billion in taxes, the government would have to increase rates to nearly 100 percent — which is about the worst idea ever — for it to have any real impact.
Actually, the U.S. had top bracket rates of 90%+ for years - and it was a time when the middle class did damned well for itself. See, it's not just about taxes - it's also about how income gets shared AND where the tax money goes. The top 1% have siphoned off all the growth in the economy for decades; the rest of us have barely been holding even and now we're slipping back. Meanwhile the taxes that do get collected are not going to places that are doing any but that 1% any real good.
Davidson is just repeating the Austerity orthodoxy that's wrecking the economies of every country putting it into practice. Digby put the pieces together to spell out what this adds up to. There are so many zombie lies in Davidson's screed, it's scary to realize he won an award for journalism. If he's bucking for an editorial slot at the Wall Street Journal, he's certainly got the common 'wisdom' down. If there's a story to be told, this one is the one that needs to be heard.
Morning in America at the End of the Day
What these stories show is that America is ready to move in a new direction. Occupy Wall Street is like a seed crystal around which a new sense of the country is forming. The Republican debates are demonstrating that the end product of Reaganism is nothing but empty promises and economic disaster. We are NOT better off than we were thirty years ago. Conservatives keep talking about achieving some Randian vision of perfection, even "Going Galt" if they have to - which is ludicrous because this is the world they've made. If anyone is "Going Galt", it's the people who are working to make our corrupted politico-economic system irrelevant to their lives.