Time to stop addressing our concerns to the hired help; from now on, we deal directly with the masters

the post title comes from an article in truthdig by lawrence weschler...

Time to Start Preoccupying Wall Street

i'm a little uncomfortable with the notion of "dealing directly with the masters" if only because i don't acknowledge them as my "masters"... i know that, for all practical purposes, they ARE my masters but i'm not interested in petitioning them for a goddam thing... i think they simply need to go away and in so doing release their monopolistic stranglehold on money and power... get the hell out of the way so that ordinary folks can step into the power of self-determination - the way it was meant to be and the way we were born to be...

in the article, weschler offers, as so many are doing following the shut-down of so many occupy encampments, his prescription for next steps for occupy, in short, "a major national mortgage and student loan strike"... whatever the merits of such an idea, the purest grain of truth in the article is in this paragraph...

In doing so, the movement ought to build on another of Occupy Wall Street’s greatest conceptual breakthroughs: the insight that it’s become pointless to address our concerns to the politicians—a political system virtually paralyzed, evenly divided between bullies and weenies, with a president for all intents and purposes veritably palsied with compunction and misgiving (who knows why and who cares anymore?). You don’t occupy Capitol Hill; you occupy Wall Street. And the formula needs to continue to be: time to stop addressing our concerns to the hired help; from now on, we deal directly with the masters.

again, as i've said before, we're dealing with a massively systemic problem here and attempting to address it through the existing system is ludicrous... we're way past the point of incremental fixes...

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You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy

tom engelhardt...

[Recently,] President Obama hustled around my hometown, snarling New York traffic in the name of Campaign 2012. He was, it turned out, “hosting” three back-to-back fundraising events: one at the tony Gotham Bar and Grill for 45 supporters at $35,800 a head (the menu: roasted beet salad, steak and onion rings, with apple strudel, chocolate pecan pie, and cinnamon ice cream -- a meal meant to “shine a little light” on American farms); one for 30 Jewish supporters at the home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, for at least $10,000 a pop; and one at the Sheraton Hotel, evidently for the plebes of the contribution world, that cost a mere $1,000 a head. (Maybe the menu there was rubber chicken.)

In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, we're one nation. We're one people. And that's what's at stake in this election."

Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1% president.” The end result from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1% of what they will need for the next year.

These were the 67th, 68th, and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd, and 73rd. (It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6% of the events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.

Think about that. You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy. Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that involve him -- 63 so far in 2011 -- perhaps 12% of his time is taken up with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen.

[...]

It’s clear enough -- or should be by now -- that the electoral process has been occupied by the 1%; which means that what you hear in this “campaign” is largely refracted versions of their praise, their condemnation, their slurs, their views, their needs, their fears, and their wishes. They are making money off, and electing a president via, you. Which means that you -- that all of us -- are occupied, too.

So stop calling this an “election.” Whatever it is, we need a new name for it.

the country belongs to the 1%... we're just their indentured servants...

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Money in politics - addiction as a metaphor for corruption

all in all, a useful metaphor...

william b. daniels in truthout...

Addiction and recovery metaphors are helpful for framing the private money crisis facing American democracy. The funders and the lobbyists are the dealers. Private money is the drug of choice. Members of Congress are the addicted consumers. Cynical and apathetic voters and the Citizens United Supreme Court justices are the codependents who enable the corruption machine to continue functioning. There can be no sobriety unless there is complete abstinence. This dynamic is what makes Congressional reform so daunting and cynicism such a facile response.

yes, and...?

Can we afford to be cynical? Do we give up on electoral politics and accept that our democracy is a corrupt, private-money machine? Or do we stop being codependent? Do we intervene and take steps to stop the new bosses in 2012? Do we confront the elephant in the room and show the addicts, the dealers and the codependents that we, the people, are the higher power of the Constitution?

We have all the tools. We can register voters and counter voter suppression laws. We can cultivate and support local and state candidates committed to the public interest. We can contribute. We can seek out every eligible voter who believes in the public interest and persuade them to vote. We can vote and participate in get-out-the-vote drives in our own communities.

[...]

Every time a hit piece attacks a candidate committed to public-interest policies, we strike back with the truth and the facts. We explain the manipulation to our friends and acquaintances. When we see an ad promoting an evidence-free ideological candidate, we expose it as the machine talking. When we see candidates thriving without a campaign organization, we check for their boss connections. By striking back in these and similar ways, we will help to knock out the candidates the new bosses purchased with private money.

So power up, cynics. We are America’s higher power. We need your help to change our dysfunctional republic and restore the American social contract.

mr. daniels has considerably more faith in our profoundly and - dare i say - terminally broken system than i do... i have been belaboring what to do for a number of years and have come to the conclusion that incremental fixes simply ain't gonna cut it... i believe the only thing that can save us now is a constitutional convention and what's the likelihood we're going to see one of those any time soon...? the other option is a deus ex machina which i give about the same odds of happening...

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Don't co-opt OWS and the case for a Constitutional Convention

from macleod cartoons...



i just came back from a journey of the heart where i visited with a very good friend whom i have not visited for way too many years... he is a man i would unabashedly describe as "great," a man who thinks, reads, comes to his own conclusions, and, now in his early 70s, is always unfailingly out ahead of not only his peers but also those of every age group... while the basis of our friendship is clearly based on our intellectual compatibility, his greatness is considerably enhanced by the fact that he chose to spend his working life as an aircraft mechanic and devoted his spare time to raising children, building houses and collectible race cars, and crafting a relationship with a fine and strong woman which will culminate next month in a 50-year wedding anniversary celebration...

in the extended conversations i was privileged to have with him over the few days we spent together, conversations that, as you might expect, ranged all over the map, we honed in on most of the salient political and social issues of the day... i shared with him my somewhat peripheral involvement with the occupy movement and my experiences working, traveling and living in many foreign countries, and we ended up mutually reaching for some sort of macro solution to the problems that are dogging our country...

interestingly enough, the solution he has in mind and one that i would be at great pains to disagree with, is convening a constitutional convention... he is a student of howard zinn and agrees with zinn that our system has been seriously flawed from the beginning... while my gut reaction was to immediately want to defend the u.s. constitution as the unimpeachable product of the founders, it didn't take me but a few moments of reflection to follow his reasoning...

here's glenn struggling with the current state of the occupy movement and expressing his profound hope that it doesn't get pulled in to the political/electoral morass...

I disagree with the prevailing wisdom that OWS should begin formulating specific legislative demands and working to elect specific candidates. I have no doubt that many OWS protesters will ultimately vote and even work for certain candidates — and that makes sense — but the U.S. desperately needs a citizen movement devoted to working outside of political and legal institutions and that is designed to be a place of dissent against it. Integrating it into that system is a way of narrowing its appeal and, worse, sapping it of its unique attributes and fear-generating potency. Even if you believe the U.S. has some sort of vibrant democracy — rather than a democracy-immune oligarchy — not all change needs to come exclusively from voting and electoral politics. Citizen movements can change the political culture in ways other than working within that pre-established electoral system; indeed, when that system becomes fundamentally corrupted, working outside of it is the only means of effectuating real change.

[...]

I hope OWS, at least for now, remains a movement that refuses to reduce itself into garden-variety electoral politics. What is missing from America is a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions of the consequences of their continued pilfering, corporatism, and corrupt crony capitalism, and only this sort of movement — untethered from the pacifying rules of our political and media institutions — can re-impose that healthy fear.

inspiring "a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions," as laudable as that goal is at this moment in time, doesn't get us to where we so desperately need to go - a re-imagined, workable, transparent, equitable system that works for all of us... to me, THAT is the desired end state and absolutely nothing else will do... now, how do we get there...?

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Why Occupy Wall Street and its offspring should stay away from electoral politics

glenn...

[T]he reason this is a street protest movement (rather than, say, a voter-registration crusade or an OFA project) is precisely because the protesters concluded that dedicating themselves to the President’s re-election and/or the Democratic Party is hardly a means for combating Wall Street’s influence, rising wealth inequality or corporatist control of the political process.

[...]

[T]he unique value and promise of these protests is that they are independent of prevailing political institutions, and it’s difficult to see how these protests can simultaneously be fully integrated into those institutions while preserving that value.

[...]

Dedicating oneself principally to the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects or Barack Obama’s re-election campaign would seem a glaring non sequitur to those concerns.

i am in total agreement... our electoral process is so seriously broken and so fundamentally compromised by the vast amounts of money thrown at it by our super-rich elites who are hell-bent on vacuuming up every last scrap of money and power on the planet, it's pure idiocy to waste time on it unless and until it's fixed...

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