What the Wall Street Occupation is about.

The Wall Street Occupation is several weeks old and building up steam.   The overall meaning seems to be a frustration with the direction in which America has been moving, but the occupation has cross-cut the American political spectrum.   Many Democrats, but also some Republicans have spoken out in support of the occupations, but the occupation is still somewhat serving as a real life Rorschach.  Naomi Klein recently visited the occupation and offered her interpretation of the situation:

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over. And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

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[Deregulation] was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world. The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

Alan Grayson has also offered an analysis: And here's where lots of leaders from disparate backgrounds (Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul) are now seeing eye to eye:

Continue ReadingWhat the Wall Street Occupation is about.

Michael Moore on the challenges we face

Over at The Nation, Naomi Klein interviewed Michael Moore, who has just released his newest movie: "Capitalism: A Love Story." You can hear the entire podcast here. What follows are three excerpts from the interview (Michael Moore speaking):

You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point. . . . Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. . . . [W]hen anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now--if we make it that far--they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined." Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.

Continue ReadingMichael Moore on the challenges we face