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Title: Whose Side Are You On: The Moral Clarity of Occupy Wall Street
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URL Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rober ... -are-you-on-the_b_1000157.html
Published: Oct 8, 2011
Author: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-b
Post Date: 2011-10-08 19:35:01 by tom007
Keywords: None
Views: 62
Comments: 5
Whose Side Are You On: The Moral Clarity of Occupy Wall Street Posted: 10/7/11 12:00 PM ET R Once Occupy Wall Street demonstrations started to sweep across America, the mainstream media began to pay attention -- and sounded a chorus of criticism. The movement was disorganized; it had no agenda. It wasn't organized like the Tea Party. Fox News trotted out ace reporter Geraldo Rivera -- really -- to charge that European anarchists, paid illegal aliens, and out and out leftists were behind the innocent kids. Herman Cain led disapproving Republicans, calling the movement "un-American," when he should have been celebrating what it was doing for pizza sales. Virtually everything said about this movement is wrong. Stand back; take a clear look. Every politician should understand one thing: this is coming at you and you must decide. Whose side are you on? 1. Moral clarity Occupy Wall Street has no policy agenda, but it has utter moral clarity. The demonstrators have built an island of democracy in the belly of Wall Street. The bankers looking down on them would be on the street had not taxpayers bailed them out. And now they are confronted with students sinking under student debt with no jobs, homeowners who are underwater and can't find mortgage relief, workers desperate for work. No one is confused about the message. Wall Street got bailed out; Main Street was abandoned. The top 1% rigs the rules and pockets the rewards. And 99% get sent the bill for the party they weren't even invited to. 2. Non violent discipline That moral clarity was dramatized when the demonstrators stayed disciplined in the face of police provocation, including pepper spray in the face. The movement did not begin to sweep the country until people saw the police protecting Wall Street's banksters by assaulting peaceful protestors. Suddenly this wasn't a disorganized, rag tag gathering. These were citizens under attack for exercising their rights. That struck a powerful moral chord. 3. A Rising Protest Across the country, people have responded to this clarity. Unemployed kids rallied to their side. White-collar workers stopped by for lunch. Suburbanites came in to share. On Wall Street, Liberty Square became a tourist center. Unions and national progressive organizations marched in support, without pretending to speak for the demonstrators. For progressives, this surge of protest began building months ago, when thousands of people rallied to take over the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin to protest Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to crush worker rights. It built over the summer as thousands turned up at town meetings and sobered legislators with their demand for jobs, not cuts. The Washington Post suggested that unions and national organizers were resentful of Occupy Wall Street, but in fact most were buoyed by the energy unleashed, the moral challenge posed. 4. Political Steamroller Pundits dismiss Occupy Wall Street for not having a clear agenda. They are told to turn their protests into political demands. Some offer suggestions of what they should advocate -- "infrastructure investment" says Paul Krugman, a speculation tax on banks, home mortgage relief. The press wonders if Occupy will become the left-wing Tea Party and run candidates in elections, as if left-wing Koch brothers were orchestrating the protests. But this is silly. Occupy Wall Street is already a political steamroller. Without an agenda, without an electoral operation, without a slate of candidates, if it continues to grow, it will force every national politician to decide whose side he or she is on. Are you with the banks or with the 99%? And prove it. Reporters will insure the question gets posed; voters will be interested in the answer. This is a question that discomfits the White House, as Vice President Joe Biden admitted, since the administration bailed out the banks without reforming them. It is a question that exposes Republicans -- particularly Tea Party Republicans -- the ersatz populists who brayed against the bank bailout in the election, and then have worked tirelessly to rollback any reforms, gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and reopen the financial casino. It is a question, as the demonstrators show, not simply about the banks. The demonstrators demand action on jobs. And they want Wall Street to pay us back -- not cuts in Medicare or student loans or schools. And these challenges are likely to grow more stark. Mass unemployment is continuing. More and more Americans are losing their homes. More kids are graduating from school into the worst jobs scene in decades. Big banks are in increasing legal and financial peril for their pervasive fraud and abuses in the housing bubble. Independent Attorneys General like New York State's Eric Schneiderman have launched investigations. Investors are collecting on lawsuits. If this economy continues to stagnate or slow, which seems increasingly likely, banks like Bank of America are going to looking for another bailout. And once more, every national politician, from the president on down, will have to decide whose side they are on. 5. It's Only Just Begun No one can predict what happens to Occupy Wall Street, but the public protests have just begun. When the Civil Rights Movement took off, it too faced many of the same criticisms. It had too many demands. Its priorities were unclear. Did it want only to overturn legal segregation? Why was King going to Chicago? Why was he talking about poverty, and not just about equal rights? How dare he talk about the war? But King wasn't the only voice. There were competing and complementary centers of power. There were lawyers and lobbyists. Students in SNCC chafed at King's caution. Black power challenged integration. Riots shook the country. Movements aren't tidy. They aren't organized. They unleash energy. They inspire ordinary people to leave their daily routines and do extraordinary things. They inspire; they insult; they mortify. They disrupt business as usual. And if they touch a chord, they grow, and they force politicians and citizens to decide. Historically, when America has reached the levels of extreme inequality and corruption that it now witnesses, popular movements arise to demand change. The populist movements of the late 19th century took on the Robber Barons. Unions, left parties, Huey Long and his "every man a King" movement pushed Roosevelt from the left in the 1930s. And now, even as pundits were wondering where the left was, the eruption is beginning again. Will this movement be a factor in the 2012 elections? It already is. Will it make clear demands? It already has. Whose side are you on? Wall Street or kids in the street? The top 1% or the 99%? It doesn't get clearer than that. Follow Robert L. Borosage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/borosage
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
(Edited)
The following is from an email I sent to someone about the demands of the OWS crowd explaining why their demands could not be met by any people who wanted to retain even a vestige of liberty. Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr. In a free economy the government does not set wage levels. They are determined by the people who need work done and those willing to do the work. I have no issue with tariffs since the Constitution does allow for them--in fact I believe the government should be funded primarily through tariffs and perhaps excise taxes (taxes on things like gas, alcohol, etc.). Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors. Um, no. That is what Obama's idiotic health care plan is trying to do and it has never worked anywhere else so I don't know why they think it will work here. Besides that, Obama has a provision in his plan that REQUIRES Americans to buy health insurance. Congress doesn't have the authority under the Constitution to do that and Obama certainly doesn't. If they can tell you that you have to buy health insurance they can also, if they choose to do so, tell you that you have to buy a car and even a certain kind of car. Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment. You can just see how well that would work, can't you? If you give people enough money to live on and reward sloth and laziness you will get more of it. It is true with most things in life. Reward what you want more of and punish what you want less of. This stupid idea alone would bankrupt any nation. Demand four: Free college education. Exactly who is going to pay for all this "free" stuff these stupid, mindless efs are demanding? Not the government, the government has no money other than what it steals from the people. So their demands for all this free stuff is just communist/socialist bs. Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand. Just one more area where they show they may not know very much about the issue they are yammering about. "Fossil fuels" is a fairy tale. Can you imagine how many dinosaurs it would have taken to make all the oil and gas that has already been discovered and used? The earth would have had to have been completely overrun with them and for a very long time. People who believe in the "fossil fuel" theory should do a bit of studying about abiotic oil. Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now. Once again, the money has to come from somewhere and the government does NOT have any money. Infrastructure can be repaired, replaced and rebuilt through excise taxes on gas and things like that but the government doesn't have a "trillion dollars" to spend NOW on anything. The fact is that the US is in debt (when all the unfunded liabilities are included) more than 100 trillion dollars, a figure so large as to be pretty much meaningless. It can never be repaid. So they are talking foolishness to add another trillion and demand that it be done NOW. Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants. Even more bs from ignorant people. I already talked about this insane demand to spend a trillion dollars on anything right now and not just because the US is broke. But with their plans the politicians will be rewarding some at the expense of others and the fact is that it is not theirs to give and the government is not supposed to be in the business of picking winners and losers. We have a very big scandal right now involving Obama, the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy. Seems that Obama rewarded some big campaign contributors with more than half a billion dollars of taxpayers money. A company called Solyndra which was supposed to be making solar panels. They declared bankruptcy not long ago after the government gave them over half a billion dollars. Someone made out like a bandit but it wasn't the American people. Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment. More stupidity. Unless by racial equal rights they mean to quit discriminating against white people in favor of all other groups then they don't have a point. And we have gender equality in as much as that is possible. Women can do any job a man can do if she is qualified to do it. What these people want are preferences and set asides, not based on ability but on things like race and sex. Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live. Another insane idea. Without borders you don't have a nation. One of the problems in America right now is that the politicians have allowed illegal aliens to disrespect the immigration laws. Mexican politicians are bad to whine about any immigration law in the US but their immigration laws in Mexico are much more strict and far more strictly enforced than ours are. Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system. In their whole list, this is one of the two things that make any sense. I also think we should go back to paper ballots and counted and recounted (when necessary) by independents and party observers. I find no fault in that one. Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period. Since the "money" that has been loaned is nothing more than bookkeeping entries and since it would be impossible for the US to pay its debt I don't find much fault with this one either. But the government should have never been in the business of making student loans and the US should never have been funding the "World Bank." There is no authority in our Constitution for either thing (nor for a lot of other things they do). Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies. This is not a great idea. Say someone came to you and wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars. Assuming you had it to loan and thought enough of the person to take a chance on him (or her) wouldn't you want to be able to find out whether they would in fact pay you back? Credit reporting agencies serve a useful function so long as people need credit. Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union. This one is not objectionable from a libertarian point of view. People should be allowed to vote for a union if they choose to do so but they also need to understand that many times the unions promote things which are inimical to their interests (like some of the biggest unions supporting Obama for example). That hasn't worked out so well for the country. Still, if people want to be members of unions they can. By the same token, companies in right to work states (like North Carolina) can fire them if they make demands that can't be met and then hire new workers who would be glad to have the job. Everyone's freedom of association is protected that way. Sometimes union people vote themselves right out of a job. These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy. These insane demands, if met (which they won't be), would destroy America or any other country. These people are being used by people like George Soros and they are so ignorant that they haven't thought these things through. The problem with their demands is that they are a call for more government, bigger and more powerful government and the government is the source of most of the problems they are protesting! While there is nothing wrong with demanding the elimination of the Federal Reserve--I support that 100%--some of their other demands are nothing short of insane.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. Lord Acton The human herd stampedes on the fields of facts and the valleys of truth to get to the desert of ignorance. Saman Mohammadi The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. Albert Einstein "...if the military is going to defend our freedoms, then we need freedoms to defend. Our freedoms must be restored before the military can defend them..." Lawrence M. Vance Você me trata desse jeito só porque eu sou preto. Junior (my youngest son)
Hi James, Seems like a start. Haven't read the rest. Fudilism sucks.
Hi James, Seems like a start. Haven't read the rest. Fudilism sucks. No way man.... The living wage or "minimum wage" is part of the problem, any kinda of "restoration" will only make things worse. Things could be made better by letting businesses fail, by not bailing out anyone, by taking the big money out of politics.
____________________________________________________________ The objective of tyrannical government is to pretend to fail and pass the buck onto the citizens oppressed.
IMVHO, these demonstrations are driven by socialist street agitators and since not one of these young folks bothered to show up at the various town halls to challenge the s'bag politicians last year, I'd have to say I oppose them. They do have some very valid points, but I'd bet the ranch they're ObamaPILES underneath it all.
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The relationship between morality and liberty is a directly proportional one.
#2. To: James Deffenbach (#1)
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage.
"Satan / Cheney in "08" 
#3. To: tom007 (#2)
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage.
#4. To: tom007 (#0)
Whose Side Are You On: The Moral Clarity of Occupy Wall Street
#5. To: Jethro Tull (#4)
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