The essence of my perspective is covered in the title "Liberal heart, Moderate mind". When adequate time and motivation come together, I'll speak my mind on political issues here.... and sometimes, on music and arts... and maybe even post the occasional mp3.
Since the GOP won control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, their agenda has been anything but the one issue they all campaigned on with such energy. How many times did we hear John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, and so many more Republicans ask "Mr. President, where are the jobs" as the mid-term campaign theme. They hit it over and over and over again...... at least until they won a majority in the House.
Then they did nothing on the issue of job creation. The focus was on trying to end funding for National Public Radio, and Planned Parenthood, and clean energy. They tried to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). They called it "Obamacare" and they said they were going to "repeal and replace". They did pass a repeal of PPACA in the House only to offer no replace of any kind. (Of course it was only a symbolic passage in the House as there was no way it would pass the Senate and certainly no way President Obama would sign it even if it had.) They tried to dismantle the EPA. Nothing about job creation.
This doesn't mean they didn't try hard to sell America on the spin that these bills were really about fighting for job creation. They added the term "job-killing" to any regulatory function of government. Jobs would suddenly appear they argued if they could succeed in passing their bills to weaken the "job-killing EPA." Businesses being prevented by the EPA from polluting air and water in their manufacturing is the cause of high unemployment they argued. If we simply let businesses put higher levels of arsenic and mercury in our water for example, they would be more free to hire more workers.
It's nonsense. They KNOW it's nonsense. But the lobbyists who fund their campaigns sufficiently enough to get them elected represent the very businesses seeking to maximize profits by not being required to keep pollution to a regulated level. The oil companies that make billions in PROFIT who still get billions in tax dollar subsidies heavily fund members of Congress. The Republican House uniformly votes down ending any of them. Subsidies that were designed to help establish an oil industry generations ago when it needed help to compete in the marketplace. They are way past that need for such help. Clean energy needs that help now. It has for some time, but the clean energy industry has not amassed enough money to match the power of the oil industry lobbyists or the campaign contributions they can make. Such financial power over members of Congress virtually assures their billions in tax dollar subsidies keep flowing to them no matter how little their need.
Arguments have been made by Republican Congressional members that our minimum wage is stifling to job growth. This May on ABC, Ron Paul even said "I think the question you have to ask is whether or not when you set the minimum wage it may cause unemployment.... The least skilled people in our society have more trouble getting work the higher you make the minimum wage..."
That might make sense if the minimum wage was more than twice what it is now. At $7.25/hour, if you miss 9 days of work in a year, you fall below the poverty guideline for a family of 2. Full time jobs typically require a 40 hour per week year round commitment. If making minimum wage requires foregoing 2 weeks vacation per year to just barely inch above the poverty guideline for a family of 2, then requiring such a low minimum wage is certainly not stifling employment opportunity to the least skilled workforce. No matter how unskilled the labor for a job is, when a worker commits 40 hours a week year round to performing that job for a business, that business better damn well pay that worker at least enough to stay above the poverty guideline.
Miss 9 days of work per year while working for minimum wage,
and you fall below the poverty guideline for a family of 2.
Minimum wage, job creation, clean energy, education, gay rights, women's health access, fixing crumbling bridges and roads, the arts. The GOP in Congress uniformly says no to all of these. However they INSIST that the wealthiest amongst us should not have their taxes increased by any measure, even if just to match the rate of taxes that the average citizen pays. They say no to ending billions in outdated oil subsidies.
The mantra of job creation was just a campaign slogan. They have not worked to this end. House Republicans have bills they claim are for helping job creation. They call them the "Forgotten 15". What they forgot is that those bills don't help job creation, they simply weaken regulations. Meanwhile, they unanimously vote no on every bill before them that would address any of these issues. Except one. The separated piece of Obama's Jobs Bill that offers incentives to employers who hire veterans. This is one that no matter how far out they have gotten, they know there is no way they can spin an opposition to supporting our returning vets. This one exception aside, it's no great puzzle to realize that the GOP is the party of NO.
In my last post here, I announced my new website - www.snarkysigns.com. It warehouses wall photo signs I create that comment on politics and more. Anyone is free to grab and share these images. There is no doubt the content leans decidedly left, often fitting the snarkiness of the pages' name, but the content I create for snarkysigns.com has certain lines it will not cross. Humor, satire and snarkiness aside, the content is designed to provoke thought, not thoughtless reaction.
I recently saw a Facebook sign that in my humble opinion crossed that line. It offered the occupy wall street movement as a unifying force to join, "…the KKK, the Nazis, the Radical Muslims, and the Democratic Party against a common enemy: Capitalism."
I don't mind the snark. I don't mind the satire. For many, the satire of the statement will show the ridiculousness of some's extreme attempts at demonizing the whole Occupy movement. What concerns me is the fact that too many will take this sign not as sarcasm, but as a validation of such connection.
Some may say I am being overly sensitive. That may be true on some level, for I would prefer to see positive change rather than just more division come out of the current protests. But anyone who would deny that the message offered in this Facebook sign could not be taken seriously obviously has not seen the threads of comments that tend to follow such images. For too many, such messages are not considered satire, but warnings of impending demise of everything American in nature. A modern day Red Scare. For these people, the level of fear and hate that is stoked by such images and messages is not something to be taken lightly.
After seeing this message, I decided to address this, and to clarify a few things that I notice about the occupy movement. The bulk of this post is adapted from what I wrote on a friend's Facebook page displaying the image in question.
Such an attempt to link Democrats to anything bad via occupy wall street (ows) is comical and pathetic. Even in the use of the term radical to imply violently dangerous rather than simply radical which means different from the current norm, these attempts at demonization through one step of association beyond Kevin Bacon are just pathetic.
Yeah, I get that tea partiers take any call of racism as a great insult. Many feel victimized by liberals who flippantly dismiss them all as racists. There are some on the left who stand guilty of this gross over-generalization. There also are many tea partiers who fail to distinguish between such generic demonization and legitimate offense taken directly from blatantly racist signs.
Many tea partiers may feel a sense of vindication or even take joy in any remote chance to label ows protesters as racist. Announcement of ows support by any known racist or character of ill repute can be seen as opportunity to put forth the very flippant generic dismissals they so detest, condemning the entirety of ows via the despicable character of a few late-comers. Yes, the American Nazi Party has officially endorsed ows, for as stated in their official release, they see it as opposition to the "…‘JEW BANKER’ influence…". Former grand wizard of the KKK, David Duke has also jumped on board, complaining of "Zionist bankers", even referring to Ben "Shalom" Bernanke. David even produced an odd, somewhat lengthy video, complete with stirring music and translucent American flag waving behind him that almost leaves one to believe he is considering a run for office yet again.
But David Duke's video speaks only for him. I rather doubt that David himself is out there protesting in any city. I suspect his support (as well as his history) remains essentially unknown by nearly every ows protester unless they stumble across it somewhere floating around the internet. His online video remains the extent of his not-so-visible ows support.
On the other hand, remember these blatantly racist images? The Obama-as-witch-doctor signs, the watermelon-patch-on-the-White-House-lawn signs, etc. They were definitely a minority aspect of the tea party rallies. Still, they were very plentiful. Especially given the size of the tea party. Compare the size of the tea party movement to the size of the ows protests. Ows is far greater in size and scope. Compare the ratio of racists or kooks to legitimate thoughtful protesters, and ows has a great advantage.
Some of the tea party's worst signs
Nonetheless, the kooks and racists need to be called out no matter the name of the rally. Sometimes that is hard to do, especially in concerns of racism - an ill that rarely presents itself so blatantly. Racism is usually subtle or hidden enough that it can never be pointed to directly.
Ows members and any potential leadership do need to speak to these elements directly. Maybe once ows forms into well-gelled organizations (like the tea party movement eventually did with Tea Party Express and a couple others), then maybe that leadership will speak directly in opposition to the David Dukes, etc. who are pledging their support to ows. For now, with any formal central OWS leadership still to be established, I see and hear many individuals denouncing the kooks and racists who join in support of ows. Me included. The ultra-conservative website The Blaze has been gleefully compiling the worst of ows supporters. Even they acknowledge within their documentation of ows anti-semitism that of the 3 examples they could find, there were others nearby who spoke out distancing the anti-Jewish rants as wholly separate from ows thought and goals.
But in order to speak out against the kooks and the racists among you, the moral violations or racism still have to be clear. In the massive groups of diverse protesters at ows events, how clear is it that there is KKK support? Would you, could you possibly know if someone was a KKK member if they didn't bring their pointed hood? Not unless they started yelling blatantly racist things. That level of open racism is very rare. Even the American Nazi Party does not wish to be blatant in displaying their racism. In their statement calling white supremacists to support and join with the ows protests, the official statement of ows support even says "— DON’T wear anything marking you as an ‘evil racist’".
How many of today's generation know who David Duke is? Even of those who know his name, how many would even know if they were standing face to face with David Duke? How many would know if they were standing next to a Muslim (wether radical or not) who supported violence and terrorism? How could one tell such a person from any other?
One cannot. Not unless they make it clear. There are very few ways to discern the affiliations of any individual at these protests. Other than the uniformed officers and uniformed military protesters, very few others display any affiliation via their dress. One can only tell if the support of the protester standing next to them is inappropriate through what they say, do, or the sign they hold.
I bet even very few of those holding the racist Obama signs at tea party rallies were yelling blatantly racist remarks with their vocal cords. Nonetheless, the signs were still pretty blatant examples of racism. How many were confronted with the blatant racism they were displaying? Or even for the damage they were doing to the root message of the tea party rallies? However many the answer is, it was not enough. Such displays went on for a good year.
Maybe ows simply has the advantage of having started later, and thus having more time to learn from that lesson of optics. Ows may still lack a central leadership to make such "official" declarations against the bad elements of "support", but there are a lot of individual such declarations. From all walks of life, civilian and military, employed and unemployed, those who feel the core messages of ows protests are important have no desire to allow the movement to be hijacked by the kooks.
Then there are those who race to define the whole thing as something it is not. It is not KKK, it is not a violent jihad, it is not nazism. This is absolutely laughable. So is the idea that it is anti-capitalism. Despite the occasional unthinking anarchist who just decries that capitalism isn't working as a reactionary meme, the long ignored issues being addressed via ows movement are not anti-capitalist. In short, ows is a reaction to UNCHECKED greed.
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Any system of government or economies are subject to the basic eternal human element of greed. Our republic is no exception. Democracy itself is not immune to the ravages of greed. Greed gone long unchecked is destructive. Take note, however, the key and critical part of that sentence is "long UNCHECKED".
In fact, greed can actually be beneficial, provided it is not given free range. Greed unchecked would destroy a true free market. Product safety, workforce conditions, proper disposal of manufacturing waste so as not to poison air and water. All these things unchecked (meaning lacking intelligent regulation) get sacrificed in the name of profit. It is the nature of business to maximize profit. Self-regulation on these matters does not work. Once a competing company foregoes any of these in order to squeeze out a little more profit, then the competition must do so as well, lest it be squashed out of business by the truly free market. Greed is fine. It actually helps business compete. UNCHECKED greed is disastrous.
With a decade of deregulation, especially in the financial industry, greed has been let loose to roam unchecked. Wealth disparity has widened dramatically ever since. You've probably seen all the various charts visualizing this divide that is decimating the American middle class. The rich get not only richer, but insanely richer. Meanwhile, the middle class stagnates at best, and falls into poverty at worst. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats, but as we have clearly seen for many years now, a rising upper class does not necessarily lift all classes.
Two months ago, if one was to predict that this November would see this level of protest against Wall Street and money in politics, they would have been laughed at. There is one critical element that allowed this level of protest to brew relatively quiet for so long. Growing wealth disparity. Without it, all the other issues would never see the intense level of protest they do now in ows.
Wealth disparity that gets out of hand nearly always results in some form of backlash. Look at history. Protest. Revolt. War. Societal change. Economic collapse. Right now, American wealth disparity is peaking, about equal to (and even surpassing by some studies) the level of 1928.
The greater the disparity, the greater the force of the eventual revolt. It is predictable. It is essentially human nature. Ows is fueled by a handful of ills in our society. All of them have a major economic component. All of them are intertwined at the core with the wild degree of wealth disparity. It may have been impossible to precisely predict "occupy wall street", but the writing has been on the wall that something was coming. Wealth disparity rarely gets this far advanced without some form of significant backlash.
There is however a big distinction to be pointed out. Opposition to UNCHECKED greed is not envy. Envy is an element of the human experience that anyone afflicted by it must learn to deal with, but it is not the driver in opposition to unchecked greed. Far from it. America in general loves to see success. Striving to attain it for oneself is the American way. We root for it not only in ourselves, but for our fellow Americans. Rather than viewing the multi-millionaire with envy, most Americans view him as an example of the financial success we seek for ourselves. It's not that economically frustrated Americans wish to simply take from those with more, it is that most Americans feel that we ALL have a stake in paying a fair share of taxes. Tax deductions and loopholes favor the rich, especially the mega-rich. Calls to tax millionaires' income at a percentage closer to what working class taxpayers pay is by no means a display of envy or a desire to punish success. It is a about seeking a singular successful America where we ALL share the costs and the fruits of a prosperous well functioning society.
In American thinking, it takes massive wealth before we cross the line of seeing something wrong. The very fact that there is such opposition to ows attests to that. At what point does wealth disparity go from being a healthy component of our economy, to being simply immoral? Where is a society's limit to accepting individual hoarding of massive wealth amidst the collapse of a middle class? For some, there is no such limit. But for a society, I believe we just hit that limit. This is the core of ows. It is not anti-capitalism. It is not even anti-greed. It is a stance against unchecked greed having gone so far as to wreck the national economy.
I realize some may never recognize this as the driving principle of ows, and some will simply overlook it, but it is evidenced most clearly in this quote that is being passed around so widely.
"I have no issue with those who do something useful, produce value, and make 100 times more money than me. I have MANY issues with those who produce nothing, destroy value, make others homeless and poor, scam the entire world, and make 10000 times more money than me. Those must go, along with the insane system that makes their scams possible." - Giulio Prisco
The question is will ows be the backlash that makes this change come about. I believe some shift is inevitable. Societies rarely tolerate a growth of wealth disparity this drastic without some form of adjustment. The $64 million question though is always - how chaotic or dangerous will that transformation be?
Ows is not free from violent clash. Police over-reach is well-documented on video. From Tony Bolgna's over-sensitive pepper-spray trigger finger in New York City to police riot gear, tear gas, and flash grenade purposefully thrown into a small crowd of people attending to the soldier whose head was split open when police hit him with a tear gas canister in Oakland, CA, there are multiple clear and blatant occurrences of police over-reach. When police were randomly grabbing people in NYC, Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas took them to task telling them if they want to fight, go to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yelling to the police "there is no honor in this!", he reminds them that the people they are hurting do not have guns. There are many more videos online of police over-reactions during ows protests. Simple google searches will find them in seconds.
By no means does this imply that all the protests are completely angelic. Any 24/7 encampment as crowded as many of these occupy events are will undoubtedly create issues of sanitation and opportunistic thieves. We also must face the fact that such encampments allow homeless junkies a place to blend in. Just acquire a tent, pitch it amidst all the camping protesters who don't know each other, and you have a nice little "safehouse" where you can shoot up without being seen. Far worse, of course are a handful of rapes that took place at ows camps across the nation. Police have not been called to deal with the rapes, for an obvious fear that police involvement would result in an end to the occupy encampments.
But yet, the occupy movement still grows. When police have gone overboard and put people in the hospital, anger only grows and so does the commitment of the protesters. Occupy Oakland vowed to shut the city down with a "general strike". They had a march to the port with numbers so large, it did manage to at least shut down the port. But as you can see from the video footage in these two links, rioters vandalized a few businesses along the way.
The night after the "general strike", this clip shows an officer blatantly shooting a videographer with a rubber bullet. Unprovoked.
It also shows vandalism where someone has sprayed "This is ours " on the base of a statue. Neither action is acceptable.
New York City may be the home of Wall Street and the central focus of ows, but Oakland, CA is where the whole thing is heating up the most.
Only time will tell wether the ows movement will result in positive change for the nation. Only time will tell wether the violence ends with the second military ows supporter now seriously injured with "non-lethal" methods of teargas and rubber bullets, or even with the videographer clearly shot intentionally with a rubber bullet while filming from a distance. Only time will tell wether such police over-reach escalates anger to the point of all-out national riots.
Only time can tell, but now is the time for true organization of the occupy wall street movement. Without it, the whole movement is in real risk of breakdown and potential national chaos if it continues as it is in Oakland. That would be a real shame, for it would leave the root cause untouched. That would only delay and make more costly the inevitable change to come.
My hope is that ows organization coalesces sufficiently enough to properly and "officially" address and denounce the kooks and racists, keep the anger contained to the issues, and avoid vandalism, riots and chaos. If ows falls apart without having changed the system that keeps destroying the middle class, then something else will erupt in its place. Maybe a week, maybe months down the line. But the longer we have this extreme level of wealth disparity and a system that allows it to continue unchecked, the next ows, whatever it may be called then, is just around the corner. History shows that such huge wealth disparity will always, somehow, eventually "self-correct".
ADDENDUM - The following video occurred on Nov. 9, 2011 at University of California, Berkeley. Students were protesting in solidarity with the national occupy movement as well as protesting large state cuts to education and tuition and fee increases. Non-violent protest met with blows by riot police batons. Stephen Colbert points out the disconnect between this action and Berkeley's own website that celebrates its history of activism. The school's website even promotes that it teaches how to protest safely. Look at the video. The students remained non-violent with hands at their sides. Wether they learned this stance in class or not, when the "police" meet non-violent protest with violence, no First Amendment expression is safe. As more and more such blatantly unacceptable examples of "police" over-reach accumulate, the need for some real changes becomes more and more clear. The more violence is used to try to silence the protests, the louder they will get.
A couple new blog posts are in the works. Topics like beating China at the solar energy race and points to consider about student loan debt will be posted in the coming days. For now, though, I am happy to announce my new website - www.snarkysigns.com. It is a gallery of wall photos I create. They are free to copy, post on Facebook, send to friends, whatever. Politically, they may lean left of center, but they all come from the same mix of liberal heart and moderate mind that makes up my perspectives.
For now, there are 3 wall photos at www.snarkysigns.com Two of them are shown in my previous 2 blog posts.
Here is the newest one, focusing on trickle down economics. Also known as Reaganomics, the idea is that giving big tax breaks to the rich puts more investable money in their pockets, and trusts that they will then create jobs for many people in lower economic classes.
It's a great sounding theory, but it assumes that the rich are most likely to invest that extra money via creating American jobs.
That is a big assumption. It is a big assumption at any point in time, but given the global competition for nearly all job markets, using such money to create American jobs would be a poor economic decision for these rich "job-creators". I'm not saying they never create jobs with much of that tax break. They often do. It's just that they overwhelmingly create FOREIGN jobs with that investable money. Especially now. The return is far greater than hiring an American workforce.
Foreign labor has no outrageous minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. It also does not require the employer (or the foreign employee) to contribute to Social Security through FICA tax. (Of course, the loss of income to the Social Security fund through both the employer and the American employee's halves is a related, but separate topic.) Add the lack of any health care cost burden in hiring a foreign workforce, and it's pretty obvious that very few "job creators" are going to trickle down that tax break towards creating American jobs. They will invest it where it gets them the greatest return. In our current globally competing workforces, America will usually be the LAST place that money is trickled.
The truth is, the biggest richest sponges at top only soak up more wealth as a result of trickle down economics while the lower class sponges tend to shrivel and shrink. Current international trade and labor laws accelerate the trend, sending jobs overseas and leaving many lower class sponges to simply dry up altogether.
Trickle down economics is a myth. We keep proving it over and over and over again. Yet current Congressional Republicans keep doubling down on that myth. They are so committed to this falsity, that they cannot ever refer to wealthy Americans as anything but "job creators". They repeat this misnomer continually now, despite the lack of jobs they touted in the mid-term elections, and despite the record low taxes we now "enjoy". The Bush tax cuts have been in effect about a decade now. Obama has cut even more taxes. (Over a third of the Recovery Act "stimulus" was tax cuts.) Many huge corporations making record profits have no tax liability, and some even get billions in tax returns due to all these tax cuts. If trickle down worked the way the myth says it does, we would have a near zero unemployment rate now.
Instead, the wealthy continue to get wealthier and the middle class is suffering heavily. Wealth disparity has grown so far out of control, that the inevitable backlash has begun. Despite voicing many concerns, the biggest central driver of the Occupy Wall Street movement is outrageous wealth disparity. We have gone from a society dreaming of being millionaires to commonly talking about our many billionaires. Remember that it takes 1,000 millions to make one billion. America has over 100 people worth at least 3 billion dollars each. That is no small jump.
The already wealthy get wealthier. The middle class stagnates, loses jobs to foreign labor and falls behind. The poor survive as best they can, praying that no cuts come to the crucial safety net programs that mean the difference between a roof overhead and living on the street, or hunger vs. starvation.
Trickle down economics only fuel this massive economic divide. That is the reality of trickle down economics.
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Sometimes I will blog about new photos I create and add to www.snarkysigns.com and sometimes I won't. To keep up to date on my latest, you'll just have to bookmark not only this blog, but www.snarkysigns.com as well.
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