I am fully well aware that many in our community gain their livelihood in the halls of Wall Street.
But I am squarely on the side of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, and the bigger progressive movement, the American Dream Movement, that has been formed to edge out the Tea Party and put America back on track to progress.
Because I know that the greater number of us in our community are suffering the impacts of this systematic shifting of wealth and power to the 1 percent. Why else would people be screaming bloody murder if school taxes go up by $100 or a bond to build a 21st century library costs $30 more than merely repairing it. How many of us have paid $160,000 in college tuition and now our newly minted graduates are struggling to find meaningful work?
The truth is that people have been complaining for a decade about scraping by, and now we know why.
Things may be just honky dory for about 1 percent of this country, which,, thanks to 30 years of Voodoo “Trickle Down” Reaganomics, have prospered beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations, while the 99 percent have found their incomes, their wealth, and with it, their political power, whittled away.
While most Americans have seen their incomes shaved by close to 10 percent since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 through this June, CEOs saw their pay go up by 23 percent just last year alone. Whereas most countries see a ratio of 20, 30, even 40 to 1 from the highest to lowest paid worker, here in the U.S., the ratio is 475:1.
We now have the greatest income disparity between rich and poor since 1928 – a bigger gap, even than Egypt; 37 percent of families with young children are below the poverty line. We have the greatest level of poverty of any major country. The top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent (150 million people); the median wealth of a black family today is $5,000. College students are graduating with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and no job.
When the Occupy Wall Street people carry signs that say “We are the 99 percent” that is not just a slogan, not rhetoric. It is accurate.
And the faces of the thousands of people who have been turning out in support, reflect that broad spectrum of America. I even found some Republican/Libertarians among them.
Among the 10,000 (or 30,000, depending upon who you talk to), who assembled in support of Occupy Wall Street at Foley Square on Oct. 5, were many who had rushed from Washington D.C. where they had just spent three days in the Take Back the American Dream conference.
You probably didn’t hear of the conference, because, like the protests of thousands that are ignored compared to few dozen Tea Partyers flashing signs, this conference of 1,500 people, intended to forge a new coalition, the American Dream Movement to counter the Tea Party, was largely ignored, as well.
Even the C-Span guy who was there to tape the keynote by Van Jones of Rebuild the Dream (remember him – he was the Obama Administration’s green jobs guy before being forced out by Republicans for a comment he made in the 1970s), could not hide his disgust when I asked, “So, they will be showing this conference 24/7 live like they did the Tea Party gathering of 600 at Nashville’s Opryland?”
“I wish,” was his reply. “It’s all Tea Party.”
Just as the corporate media ignored the Occupy Wall Street movement until the NYPD used over-the-top tactics, the corporate media has made a mistake to ignore the formation of the American Dream Movement, which will be a formidable nemesis for the Tea Party.
Instead of 600 largely disgruntled white, middle-aged, financially secure people angry at government (meaning Democrats), and wanting to shrink government to the size it can be flushed down a bathtub drain, these 1,500 people at the Washington Hilton more accurately represented the “99 percent” – a full spectrum of people from every race, age, persuasion, and every part of the country.
What is more, they weren’t just representing themselves, but they came as leaders and organizers of progressive groups, ranging from Moveon.org, People for the American Way, Democracy for America, Common Cause (which actually has its roots in moderate Republicanism of the 1970s), to grassroots organizations like Reach Out America, based here in Great Neck.
They have already recruited 2012 progressives to run for office in 2012 – and counting.
The Tea Party, which is really a ragtag collection of disaffected people, has a rallying principle: cut taxes and shrink government – as long as the cuts don’t affect them personally.
The American Dream movement has a guiding principle as well: social, environmental, economic and political justice, fairness and equity.
But instead of the amorphous anger and slogans of the Tea Party, the American Dream Movement has specific ideas, and the data (facts) to back them up (too many to detail in this column).
The Movement is intended to actually restore the American Dream – equal opportunity to upward mobility and progress based on ability and hard work – which means restoring openness and fairness to business investment; restoring a progressive tax structure; putting taxpayer dollars to work investing in infrastructure and restoring jobs; and restoring representative government through campaign finance reform and pushing back against widespread voter suppression efforts.
Republicans are already blasting the tens of thousands who have taken to the streets across the country as “un-American” for protesting (that’s really rich; they certainly didn’t call out the Tea Partyers as unpatriotic); accusing them of “class warfare,” when the warfare has come from 30 years of systematically shifting wealth and power to the top 1 percent; and making the absurd, even comic, claim, as Republican millionaire Presidential candidate Herman Cain said, that if someone doesn’t have a job and isn’t rich “it’s their fault.”
“To protest Wall Street and the bankers is to say you are anti-capitalism. The free market system and capitalism are the two things that have enabled this country to be the greatest in the world,” Cain said.
Except that we don’t have free market; we don’t have functioning capitalism.
“When we say that at a time when richer getting richer while middle class is collapsing and effective tax rates for wealthiest are the lowest in decades and it is proper and right for rich to pay their fare share, Republicans say are engaged in class warfare,” Sanders said. “Class warfare is being waged, unfortunately the wrong side is winning, and we have to turn that around.”
“There is nothing wrong having a lot of money, but there is a lot of wrong in abusing that money,” former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich told the American Dream conference.
The media has been critical of the Occupy Wall Street for not having specific demands, but the American Dream Movement has a very specific agenda:
Jobs not cuts: That’s the unifying priority for all the groups hitting the streets across America. How do you get there? You put Americans to work rebuilding America’s infrastructure; educating our children. Putting Americans back to work will generate revenue at all level of government, reduce the outflow of spending, and produce a trickle-up effect.
“Change trade policy so we don’t continue the process where we lose 50,000 factories in 10 years, which have gone to other countries,” says U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“While biggest companies that employ one-fifth of workers cut their workforce by 2.9 million over last 10 years, they added 2.4 million jobs overseas,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who notes that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a manufacturing policy.
Restore a progressive tax structure: The progressive tax system is what helped to build a middle class. Now, as Warren Buffet has pointed out, billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretary; billionaire hedge-fund managers pay a mere 15 percent, since a loophole in the code lets their income be taxed as capital gains.
Get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent. The proposal is only on incomes greater than $250,000, that the rate go back to the Clinton era (when everyone was doing well and the budget was in surplus) – that means that the first $250,000 are taxed at the lower rate.
A 2 percent surcharge on wealth over $7 million – that’s not the average person, it is only the top half of one-percent, and it’s not on the first $7 million – would generate $70 billion a year, according to Reich.
Get corporations to pay their fair share – the nominal rate might be 35 percent, but few, if any corporations actually pay that amount. Rather, Exxon-Mobile, which pocketed $19 billion in profits, paid zero tax (a mailman paid more); not only that, they actually got a $156 million rebate from IRS. Bank of America, last year, received $1.9 billion tax refund, even though the company made $4.4 billion in profits. 2005, one out of four large corps paid no income taxes, but collected $1.4 trillion in revenue.
Republicans like to say that “America is broke.” But that is simply not true.
“It is beyond outrageous that the U.S. is losing $100 billion every single year because the wealthy and large corporations are stashing their money in tax havens in Cayman Islands, Bermuda and other countries,” Sanders said. “The chairman of the budget committee brought out a photo of a four-story building in the Caymans, in which there are 18,000 corporations -they use it as a postal address to avoid paying taxes.”
Make Wall Street work for America: Pass a financial transaction tax – just one-half of one percent (as is being implemented in Europe) would deter reckless speculation, curb the casino-like volatility and nonproductive transfer of wealth, while raising $200 billion a year that could be invested (nurses want the transaction tax to go toward health reform). “It’s not even a rounding error for Wall Street,” Reich said.
“A tiny tax (0.25% or less) on each trade of stocks, derivatives, other financial instruments, would raise a lot of money and discourage speculative financial activity that has no social value and makes system more unstable,” Sanders said.
Sanders also is pushing to end Too Big to Fail, noting that a repeat of the $700 billion bailout is inevitable otherwise.
“The six largest financial institution of country have assets equal to 60 percent of the assets of U.S. – $7 trillion in assets. In my view, if we are serious of having anything like a competitive economy, if we are interested in doing away with the casino-like gambling on Wall Street, you have to break these banks up.”
“What I would tell you is that the vast majority of the American people understand the realities we talk about. Every poll says the wealthiest should be asked to pay their fair share, so what we are talking about is not radical, outside the mainstream, it is something the American people want,” Sanders continued.
But the sad truth is that it doesn’t matter if 81 percent support a surtax on millionaires, or hundreds of thousands take to the streets in hundreds of communities across the country. Thanks to the right-wing corporatist activist Roberts Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (which Reich said “will go down with the worst decisions in Supreme Court history, right up there with Dred Scott and Fergusson Plessy), we no longer have a representative democracy.
“With Citizens United, virtually every bit of legislation that comes to Congress, has the fingerprints of big money,” Sanders told The American Dream conference.
Campaign finance reform: When you consider that the wealthiest 1 percent got a windfall of some $200,000 a year from the Bush Tax cuts (over the decade, that’s $2 million), they have plenty of cash to throw at politicians, or against politicians (you would think that such threats would be extortion, but that’s another discussion). Corporations, which are sitting on $1 trillion in cash, have millions more. For them, investing in legislation – even dictating the legislation – is a better use of money than putting people to work.
Amend the Constitution: Since the Roberts Court seems determined to reshape America as a plutocracy, it is necessary to amend the Constitution. There is a movement for a 28th amendment that would remove the legal status of corporations as persons, since the Roberts Court seems set on giving corporations more rights than individuals.
Reverse voter suppression: States where Republicans have taken control are changing laws to make it harder for college students, elderly, black and Hispanic, poor, and urban voters to vote – groups which tend to vote Democratic. As the New York Times reported (Oct. 10), 19 laws and two executive actions have already been passed in 14 states which could make it harder for some 5 million people to vote. That’s the potential to bar or block almost 5 percent of voters from the polls in 2012. On this point, it is truly sad that Great Neck has lost its venerable League of Women Voters, at a time when the leagues throughout the country should be out protesting in force this affront to the “one-person, one-vote” core principle.
Of course, it should be obvious that Obama has proposed much of the American Dream agenda already – but has been thwarted by a Tea Party-dominated Congress, not to mention the dysfunctional Senate rules which enable a single senator to stop any legislation from advancing in its tracks. One senator holding the entire country hostage, let alone this absurd notion that 60 votes instead of 51 are required to pass any legislation. Just how democratic is that?
So the problem is that none of this agenda will go anywhere, any time soon. Republicans who would otherwise support various proposals want Obama to be perceived as a weak leader (note the key points of Chris Christie’s speech at the Reagan Library), and as many people hurting and angry as possible that they calculate, will cause them to vote out Obama, or not vote at all (“a pox on both your houses”).
Meanwhile, this shifting of resources from middle class, working class and poor people to the richest power elite weakens their ability to compete in elections.
What will be the result? Very possibly the protests will grow in volume and intensity, as frustration and discontent grows. This is all looking very much like deja vu all over again: the protests of the 1960s and 1970s, over civil rights, environmentalism, feminism, anti-war.
As Reich observed, “The protests are now in 70 cities. These demonstrations are just small tip of iceberg. An iceberg of discontent, and I say, demonstrate like mad because that wakes up others to the possibility of change.”
Occupy Wall Street is only the tip of the iceberg, and as anyone knows, the what’s below the surface is 10 times as large. The American Dream Movement is what is below the surface…. but not for long.
“Now is the time for a mighty movement for jobs and a just economy,” declared Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.
“This has to be our movement: an American movement for jobs, a movement to turn our country right side up again, and putting working people at the top of the heap, not at the bottom.”
