Colin Powell is one of my favorite conservatives who happens to be black. A question: whatever happened to this type of reasonable, pragmatic, reflective, and problem-solving oriented Republican?
I like this interview because Powell hits on a point that is remarkably clear to all those observers who look at the Occupy Wall Street Movement with any type of reasonable and considerate eye. While Cain, Gingrich, and other mouth pieces of the Right-wing want to savage and caricaturize those Americans who "dare" to use free speech in order to call attention to gross disparities of financial, and political power, there is much to suggest that the OWS movement, despite some challenges, does indeed speak for the silent majority.
The OWS movement is remarkably centrist: they want to challenge the robber barons and plutocrats who have destroyed the economy for their own enrichment; they argue that we need to return to an economy that grows the middle class; they hold a belief that gross disparities of wealth and income inequality create social instability; and OWS wants to make certain the promise of a America where there will not be a permanent elite, and that the nation is to stop being one where inter-generational upward mobility is less than that of France.
In all, these are reasonable claims on citizenship, the polity, belonging, and justice.
However, because of the power of the Right-wing echo chamber to reframe reality, reinforce corporatism as being synonymous with the Common Good, and a public that is woefully ignorant of the United States' deep vein of populist resistance, these efforts are savaged as somehow outside of the American political tradition.
This Rightward shifting of the public discourse should be no surprise. It is the result of decades of maneuvering by conservatives to establish think tanks, position themselves in the media, and make neoliberalism a type of common sense gospel where market solutions, tax cuts for the rich, and now "austerity policies" which balance State and Federal budgets on the backs of the poor, are the de facto solutions for times of economic crisis.
Ironically, these policies are a reversal of causality, as they in fact created the Great Recession; consequently, thus, and in no way, can these same broken policies expedite us out from our present morass.
Thinking broadly on these questions, The Guardian UK has a great piece on the political possibilities symbolized by the Occupy Wall Street Movement that is well worth reading in its entirety.
A selection follows here:
Anti-Capitalist? Too Simple. Occupy Can be the Catalyst for a Radical Rethink
The Occupy London movement is marking its first month this week. It is routinely described as anti-capitalist, but this label is highly misleading. As I found out when I gave a lecture at its Tent City University last weekend, many of its participants are not against capitalism. They just want it better regulated so that it benefits the greatest possible majority.
But even accepting that the label accurately describes some participants in the movement, what does being anti-capitalist actually mean?
Many Americans, for example, consider countries like France and Sweden to be socialist or anti-capitalist – yet, were their 19th-century ancestors able to time-travel to today, they would almost certainly have called today's US socialist. They would have been shocked to find that their beloved country had decided to punish industry and enterprise with a progressive income tax. To their horror, they would also see that children had been deprived of the freedom to work and adults "the liberty of working as long as [they] wished", as the US supreme court put it in1905 when ruling unconstitutional a New York state act limiting the working hours of bakers to 10 hours a day. What is capitalist, and thus anti-capitalist, it seems, depends on who you are.
Many institutions that most of us regard as the foundation stones of capitalism were not introduced until the mid-19th century, because they had been seen as undermining capitalism. Adam Smith opposed limited liability companies and Herbert Spencer objected to the central bank, both on the grounds that these institutions dulled market incentives by putting upper limits to investment risk. The same argument was made against the bankruptcy law.
Since the mid-19th century, many measures that were widely regarded as anti-capitalist when first introduced – such as the progressive income tax, the welfare state, child labour regulation and the eight-hour day – have become integral parts of capitalism today.
Capitalism has also evolved in very different ways across countries. They may all be capitalist in that they are predominantly run on the basis of private property and profit motives, but beyond that they are organised very differently...