Is a Sleeping Giant Slowly Awakening?

Before we had this thing called democracy, citizens traditionally made their displeasure known with their local autocracy in the old-fashioned ways - rebellions, insurrections and revolutions. And these ‘popular movements’ usually started with an unauthorized assembly of the lower classes whose members usually had a valid set of complaints - generally something to do with not getting enough to eat. And the target of these complaints was always the same –the well-fed, arrogant and privileged bastards who were running things both ineptly and primarily for their own benefit.

Fall 2011 something similar has sprung up - the Occupy Wall Street / 99er movement, and its target is again the well-fed, arrogant and privileged bastards who were running things both ineptly and primarily for their own benefit by somehow having high-jacked our democracy. Also interestingly its primary complaint overlaps with one of the chief complaints of the other recent (some say manipulated) pack of outraged citizens, the Tea Partiers. Members of both disgruntled groups, while being from opposite ends of the political spectrum, have at least one grievance in common, they both are greatly displeased with the financial establishment and the government’s response to its economy crashing, greed-driven actions, specifically the government bank bailouts and how the bailouts seemed to helped the bankers and no one else.

But the genius of this new Occupy Wall Street / 99er movement is its amorphous and autonomous nature. Even as it is mainly focused on a single fat target: greed, it leaves ample room for other related targets, which are in abundance to say the least. Whereas the Tea Partiers wanted to blame everything on our first non-white president, this new movement leaves this target rich environment wide open – bankers, the ultra rich, the moronic GOP, the pathetically ineffective Democrats - essentially the Establishment in general. Like an old time carnival shooting gallery, all kinds of outrages present themselves as delightful sitting ducks and colorful bulls eyes continually rotating by.

Here are some of some ‘sitting duck’ facts: *

• 46.2 million people Americans living below the poverty line, the highest number in 52 years of record keeping
• Corporations booked profits at a record $1.5 trillion a year, increasingly possessed by the super rich, while real unemployment stood at 16%
• Average income for the top 10% of Americans is $164,600 and $31,200 for the bottom 90% of Americans
• 10% of Americans control 2/3 of all wealth.
• We're 6.6 million jobs short of our pre-recession levels, and new workers enter the work force every day,
• Median full-time male workers make $48,000 a year, the same as 1969,inflation-adjusted.
• 98% of 27 million net new jobs created in America between 1990 and 2008 were in service sectors not easily outsourced, such as health care.
• 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics, more than 1 in4, live in poverty.
• Home prices have dropped to 2003 levels.
• The stock market is at 1998 levels and increasingly the domain of Wall Street insiders and computer trading.
• Wages declined more than 6% since 2007 while corporate and CEO income skyrocketed.

Here are some more that bear repeating: **

• The top 1% of the population receives nearly 25% of the all income and holds and astonishing 40% of the all US wealth.

• We are still engaged in two expensive official wars and at least four and maybe more unofficial ones.

• The military budget is at or above Cold War levels. Increasingly Obama, the Commander in Chief, is becoming interchangeable with Bush, in an open-ended, perpetual “War on Terror.”\

• As the planet warms and the weather gets ever weirder, the Denialsphere gets ever more traction as the Obama Administration turns its back on climate science.

• Many economists think we could well be headed for the dreaded ‘double dip’ as the ill-advised Super Committee confronts the politically contrived crisis of the Debt Ceiling and intends to lower government spending at the dead wrong time.
  

• Rising Medical costs reflected as health insurance premium rate hikes continue to reduce personal disposable income.

• Tea Party inspired GOPers in States houses and in Congress continues to overplay their phony mandate and pass every more draconian and reactionary legislation.

• Hoping to capitalize on widespread public discord and distress in the 2012 election, the GOP works day and night to drive the economy into the ground.

It’s not what the Occupy Wall Street people are asking for, its what everybody realizes - something is very wrong. We are in one hell of a jam and real action is called for. Our whole way of life appears to be coming apart at the seams and yet evermore fiddling takes place as the fires rage ever wider.

* From John McBride/Seattle comments to JoeNocera’s 10/14/11 NY Times column.:

** Courtesy of yours truly

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Reflections 1

I found this in a journal that that I sometimes write in . Apparently I wrote it back in January of this year. I thought I'd share it.

1965-1975

We weren’t wrong and we weren’t right, we were young and the world had not yet gone into reverse.  Yet looking back I feel a certain embarrassment at our levels of blind self-righteousness – or least at mine as a reflection of the generational delusion as a whole.  That said, I’ve found little that I can repudiate of what we once believed or more precisely toyed with as possible.

There was I believe genuine wisdom and well grounded ideas immersed in the tangle of overstatement and delusional idealism.  Sometimes profound new ideas pointing to a real course correction for the human race as whole would bob to the surface.  But then they would sink again amidst the swirling flotsam and jetsam of the day to be lost amidst the cacophony  spewing forth from gifted charlatans, revolutionary romantics and charming blowhards.

In the 1950’s a crude adolescent-oriented, electronically amplified music was born of the mating of southern ‘Rockabilly’ and urban ‘rhythm and blues’ - ‘Rock and Roll.’ It would dominate popular music for the next 50 years. But by the mid 1960’s a new generation of musicians built on and enhanced this foundation by going back to the source – the solid art of guitar blues chords coming out of the Mississippi Delta by way of Chicago. This new improved version of “rock and roll’ began to be respected even by Jazz aficionados. And when spiked by psychedelic drugs it became a force to reckon with especially when leavened with powerful socially conscious poetry-infused lyrics from veterans of the folk music revival of early 60’s.  The “roll” part was dropped and it became simply known as ”Rock.” And as such it would have worldwide impact, and serve as the soundtrack for a brave attempt at crashing the gates of the existing order.

Of course as we know those gates survived that assault and were subsequently stoutly reinforced.  Decades have passed and dreams of overthrow have dissipated into sad nostalgia, a nostalgia that mixes the usual remorse for a wasted youth with something more, a longing for a time when people actually believed the future held hope.   

Jan 18, 2011