What Occupy can learn from Dr. King and the civil rights movement

I'm reading this really excellent book called Nixonland: The Rise of the President and the Fracturing of America (more details here). It's a fantastic analysis of the political career of Richard Nixon, who may well be the most brilliantly cynical and manipulative president in American history. The book gives great insight if you want to understand what's behind the 'Tea Party' movement and the right-wing's martyr complex politics in general.

Nixonland points out something interesting and still relevant. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may be a sanitized figure in death but, as I've written about in the past, he was hardly a consensus figure in life.

The strategy of his wing of the civil rights movement was to disturb the (illusion of) peace and draw out the hatred that was really there, but lurking just beneath the surface.

The book also points out that the civil rights movement was adamant in NOT being linked to a particular political party, but rather to an agenda. When some Democrats refused to push, or even obstructed, parts of their agenda, the civil rights movement did not hesitate in encouraging people to not vote for Democrats.

They recognized that threatening to withhold their vote - and being willing to actually do it - was the only real leverage they had on legislators. They refused to reward people who crapped on them. They were about their agenda, not about a particular party.

I wonder if Occupy sympathizers will heed this lesson.

What income inequality looks like

I don’t have a good ranking of 2010 data, but according to 2000 census numbers, Orange County, CA was in the top two percent of richest counties in America by median household income (61^st out 3145).

Its median household income was comparable to that of the affluent Westchester County, NY and was nearly 50 percent higher than the national average.

It also had the 3rd highest concentration inAmerica of households earning over $200,000 a year.

Yet in 2011, nearly 46 percent or Orange County students came from households poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunches.

The definition of austerity

Austerity, n.: when you identify the problem as insufficient growth and your solution is to starve yourself.

Quote of the week

From a piece on Yahoo! News:

"I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death. They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.” –Republican spinmeister Frank Luntz.

The Occupy movement in one sentence

The best, most succinct sign I've seen about the current situation:

'More equal economies grow faster'

Even the very establishment journal Foreign Policy ran a piece conceding that international evidence suggests that more equal economies grow faster.

It notes that equality of opportunity and the famed pursuit of the American dream are not quite what they are advertised to be. According to an analysis by economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis at the Santa Fe Institute, of children born to the poorest 10 percent of parents in the United States, more than half remain in the bottom fifth of incomes as adults.

In other words, socialism (to employ the most grotesquely misused word in American politics) is good for everyone.

Want smaller government? You got it!

One of the easiest ways to get elected is to promise smaller government and lower taxes. It sounds great as rhetoric because it's removed from context. In first world countries, there is an equation, a link between taxes paid and services to citizens provided. Different countries define that equation in different ways but it's there in every developed country. One of the most brilliant things strategically the American far right has done is to break that link, to focus only on the undesirable part (taxes) without discussing their relationship to the desirable part (services).

I'd have less problem with the smaller government/lower taxes rhetoric if its espousers were honest about the consequences. Yeah, they sometimes use rhetoric like "We all have to make sacrifices" (all usually meaning the 99%) or "tough choices have to be made. But it's all passive tense stuff, vague, nebulous and deliberately evasive. Just once, I'd like someone to have the guts to run for office on the platform of "crappier roads" or "higher crime."

Here are a few examples I've heard in the media recently about people who got their desire for smaller government...

-School districts across Indiana are getting rid of busing;

-Some municipalities are dealing with budget shortfalls by turning off streetlights;

-Warren County (NY) tried to seriously scale back its meals for seniors program until town supervisors (all conservatives) in the municipalities affected revolted.

It's funny how everyone loves smaller government and lower taxes when it's a theory but a bit less so when it actually affects them (THEM!). No wonder conservatives typically avoid being completely honest about the *full* consequences of their rhetoric.

Occupy vs the Tea Party

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

The American political system pretty much boils down to the craven and corrupted Democratic Party, the venal and corrupted Republican Party and smaller parties who are mostly well-intentioned but don’t show the tiniest desire to become remotely electable (bearing in mind there are thousands of public offices below the presidency). What a depressing state of affairs. No wonder there’s so much frustration and anger that’s been expressed via the non-partisan Occupy movement and the formerly non-partisan Tea Party.

The Tea Party has been taken over by the Republican Party (the Dems would love to co-opt Occupy but they haven't succeeded yet), but there are still strains within it that remain independent and certainly the anger that originally animated it was organic; most of them are part of The 99 Percent too. The left likes to look down their noses at the Tea Party as comprising The Other, ignorant, racist rubes, but this ignores what the two movements share.

Both the Tea Party and Occupy reflect the anger of ordinary people against a corrupt system that serves the elites and not the people... or rather, at the expense of the people. The main difference lies in the response. The objective of the Tea Party is to starve government of money, since cash is what feeds the beast of corruption. Occupy's is to re-direct that money so it's used in a more humane manner. Both want to blow it up. One wants to replace it with something better; the other believes that something better is not possible so replace it with nothing.

Both really diagnosis the same problem, but offer different prescriptions.

More on the Occupy Wall St. movement

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.


A follow-up to my post on the Occupy Wall St. movement...


The excellent and highly recommended Yes! magazine has a good piece on Where the 99 Percent Get Their Power. The biggest single factor: it embodies real democracy.


Economic injustice in America is so obvious that even the very establishment Foreign Affairs journal explored Why the Rich Are Getting Richer... subtitle: American Politics and the Second Gilded Age.


It notes that: [Economists Jacob] Hacker and [Paul] Pierson refreshingly break free from the conceit that skyrocketing inequality is a natural consequence of market forces and argue instead that it is the result of public policies that have concentrated and amplified the effects of the economic transformation and directed its gains exclusively toward the wealthy. 


It's amusing to hear clever politicians like Pres. Obama and NY Gov. Cuomo express a certain degree of sympathy for the Movement, considering they represent the One Percent. I just hope that corporate Democrat organizations like MoveOn and Democracy for America don't co-opt (neuter) this populist movement.

Occupy Wall St.

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

 I am remiss for not having yet mentioned the growing Occupy Wall St. movement that is holding marches on in New York City and many other cities around the country protesting greed, excess and corporate domination of American government and society.

 A few good websites about and covering the movement...

 -Occupy Wall St. website

 -Occupy Wall St. Facebook page

 -Democracy Now

 Readers are free to leave other suggesting in the comments field and I will add them.

Commenter John Warren adds: The Village Voice.

More on Cuomo's cowardly tax cap

I guess I'm not the only one who says Governor Andrew Cuomo's property tax cap is cowardly. Even conservative town leaders in conservative upstate agree.

Class warfare

Republicans’ class warfare

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.

It’s a brilliant perversion of language to hear Republicans complaining that President Obama’s jobs plan constitutes class warfare. I make no commentary about Obama’s plan, though, as with most of what the president has done, it’s probably too little to matter and I’m sure he’ll end up capitulating on whatever minor improvements the plan may contain anyways.

However, GOP complaints are the height of hypocrisy. From demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to extend tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires (who already pay lower tax rates than the working class) to taking money away from ordinary working Americans to subsidize the recklessness of bankers and other financial institutions, the entire Republican economic agenda is based on class warfare. Privatize corporate profits, socialize the losses.

A result of Republican warfare against people who work for a living? The Census Bureau reported that more Americans are living in poverty than in any time in the 52 years they’ve been keeping such statistics.

It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period [since 1999].

Local bookstore shutters: we've met the enemy and it is us

Like most other local bibliophiles, I was incredibly saddened to learn of the closing of Red Fox Books in Glens Falls. They did a great job in reaching out to the community with a wide variety of programs, in bringing in a wide variety of authors both local and national and providing great, engaging customer service. It managed to survive for five years in an area which has struggled economically for the last 30 years and is a tough market for independent retailers. Red Fox’s demise was particularly disappointing since its opening was the culmination of a several year campaign to bring a full service bookstore to Glens Falls.

Like many other local bookstores in the country, Red Fox was badly affected not only by online retailers (which were in existence when RF opened) but particularly by the sharp rise in popularity of Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader. Once you factored in shipping, the amount you’d save shopping at Amazon was usually quite minimal unless you bought a lot of books at a time. You could order just about any book via Red Fox’s website and pick it up at the store at no extra charge. You could buy e-books via Red Fox’s website and their pricing was pretty comparable to the Barnes and Noble, iTunes and the like. But many locals insisted on shopping at BN.com or Amazon to save 25 cents. The result: a failed local business, local people unemployed, the loss of choice for local bibliophiles and the loss of a good amount of local sales tax revenue. Enjoy that quarter!

One thing people who prefer this digital method of reading need to understand is that not all e-readers are created equal. If you buy the B&N Nook, the Apple iPad, Sony e-reader or some other kind, you can buy e-books at the site of the company who produced the e-reader but you can also buy them at your local independent bookstore (if you have one) and you can also get them via the library. But if you buy a Kindle, you have no choice; you are shackled to Amazon.com as your sole vendor. E-book readers have a choice that we physical book readers just lost... but make sure your decisions don’t eliminate that choice.

Of course, a great big thank you goes to Red Fox's owners Susan and Naftali for their great contribution to our community. It will be sorely missed.

A somewhat related piece of news that caught my eye was the closure of the Lowe’s big box home improvement store in Ticonderoga. Chains and big corporations do have some advantages over independent businesses, but one big disadvantage that can be summed up quite simply: easy come, easy go. Lowe’s lasted on two years in Ti before pulling the plug. Of course, one wonders what sort of damage it did to locally-owned businesses in that brief time period.

On North Country Public Radio’s In Box blog, commenter and Adirondack Almanack founder John Warren asked: How many people lost their jobs in Jay, Ticonderoga, and Port Henry because this store sapped their local business over the past several years? Those who opposed this store as strip development blight out of character with the rest of the community and a drain on local economies were right. Who will move into this 440-car parking lot and empty 150,000 square foot big box?... NCPR should now be holding those elected officials accountable by asking why they pushed for such risky development without concern for the locally owned businesses and historic character of Ticonderoga...

Local officials should definitely focus on helping small and medium locally-owned businesses, as the Lowe’s debacle illustrates. But the community has a responsibility too. Those locally-owned businesses can survive if local people are spending their money instead supporting chains half a country away.

Locals like to scapegoat boogeymen like 'big government' and 'onerous regulations' for the region’s sluggish private sector economy. And yet how many of us CHOOSE to send their own money to private sector businesses halfway across the country rather than comparable ones on Main Street in our own towns?

Income inequality and economic growth

NPR's All Things Considered ran an interesting story exploring whether the exploding gap in income inequality is holding back economic growth. It notes that income inequality is worse in the US now that at any point since the year before the start of the Great Depression and that it's 'in the same inequality ballpark' as countries like Cameroon and Ivory Coast.