EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
It’s Time to Occupy a New Year
Out with the old. I would say good riddance to 2011 even as I fear 2012 may be worse, given the financial trends, social chaos and political idiocy that we confront every day.
Every time I believe it can’t get worse, it does.
It seems so clear that the political system is moribund and paralyzed and the economic system may be in worse shape.
A tiny sliver of the 1% may be in charge although not in control. Their own short-term greed makes it unlikely that they can stabilize the system or do any longer term planning. Their Titanic has hit its iceberg. Some new technologies may be keeping it afloat for now but for how long?
We lurch from crisis to crisis in an atmosphere of deep denial.
Obama clearly has no new ideas and the Republican candidates for the most part don’t know what an idea is, as they pander to a no-nothing base to prove that they can be as crass as they are.
Television dutifully reports all this as if we should take it seriously. No wonder only 7% of the people approve of their own money-dominated Congress.
The Republicans can’t get any nastier with each other and now the Democrats are moving in the same direction with the announcement that Dennis Kucinich, who's been gerrymandered out of his district, is now—oh, no—going after Progressive Marcy Kaptur’s seat.
As I think about the year ahead, I am reminded of what I said at this time of year last year about what I called the year of the “Crumble.”
Sound familiar? It’s not a long distance from “crumble” to collapse as Democracy gives way to plutocracy.
I wrote then about 2010: “The economy continued to crumble for ordinary people with little hope for a quick turnaround, even as some markets surged. The hopes of the jobless for employment crumbled. The faith of the so many homeowners that they will find a way to stay in their homes facing foreclosure is crumbling.
"And so have the hopes of so many of us that our new ‘change Is coming’ president would fight for us, would end the wars, would close Gitmo, would abandon torture, would make healthcare more affordable, would give us a government we could believe in; that, too, has crumbled.
"Look back at the devastation of the year gone by: its ugly election, bought and paid for by U.S. Supreme Court-sanctioned special interests; oil spilled by the Gulf-full; wars escalated; climate change unabated; and Wall Street unchecked, and we have to scratch our heads and wonder who is crazier, them or us.
"A year after the earthquake, rubble is still piled up in the streets of Haiti, which has received only two percent of the money raised to reconstruct it. We now have six active military operations underway, rating less and less coverage—only four percent of the network news fare, by one count.
"In contrast, the partisan wars are all TV news covered over and over again, with Fox charging, MSNBC responding, and Jon Stewart joking.
"There seems to be nowhere to go, but down.
"The pragmatic compromisers of the democratic center may convince themselves they are 'getting it done' in D.C., but they are also alienating the Democratic Party base and disgusting all those who believed it would be or could be different.
"Already, there are new escalations in Afghanistan, a rising military budget that goes uncommented upon, and more repressive laws on the way.
"There will be a price to be paid for their legacy of spinelessness and corporate complicity.
"The media still remains at the center of our conundrum, as we argued ten years ago when we founded the media issues network, Mediachannel.org (now Mediachannel1.org) to advocate for fundamental media change.
So we are left where we started, as David Swanson argues, with the need to support independent media, arguing:
[W]e need an alternative not only to Fox News but also to the rest of the corporate media. This is the easiest and most important project anyone can work on. The dream of persuading the labor movement (which can't even strongly oppose corporate trade agreements when the president is a Democrat) to invest in a new television network should be abandoned. If the George Soros's of the world haven't figured out that there's a communications problem, they never will. But we already have what we need; we just need to make it bigger, and we can do so. We should invest in TheRealNews.com, Thom Hartmann, Free Speech TV, Link TV, GRIT TV, Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, community radio stations, blogs and web sites.
We should make use of foreign outlets that, for their own reasons, are willing to provide decent coverage of U.S. politics: Al Jazeera, ATN, RT-America, etc. Unsubscribe from the New York Times, stop contributing to any purchasing of ads in it, stop reading it, and read the Guardian online instead. Get connected online, and people will send you the occasional good article or video that all lousy outlets produce. Share that one further, but promote a good website that's hosting it, not the corporate source."
And let’s also get behind WikiLeaks as they fight for transparency and accountability by governments and media. We need to support not only Mediachannel1, but Pacifica Radio, Progressive Radio, Bill Moyers and Laura Flanders’ new shows and sites like OpEdNews.com, CrooksandLiars.com, Disinformation, Firedoglake.com, Global Research, Consortium News, Real News, ZNet, Reader Supported News etc., etc.
At the same time, we have to go back to an old idea for which online interaction and an email barrage is no substitute: organizing real people.
There are more of us than there are of them, but they are organized and focused and we are mostly reactive and emotional.
As James Kwak wrote on The Baseline Scenario, there is a reason for this. Progressives are captured by symbolic politics while the right is committed to substantive goals. He cites the view of Murray Edelman who divides the political sphere into insiders and outsiders.
“Insiders are basically special interests: small in number but well organized and with specific goals. Outsiders, or the ‘unorganized masses,’ are the rest of us: we have some interests, but we are poorly organized to pursue them and therefore are generally unsuccessful. In particular, Outsiders suffer from poor and limited information, and therefore are especially susceptible to political symbols.”
He cites Arnold Kling’s summary of Edelman’s insights:
“Given these differences, the Insiders use overt political dramas as symbols that placate the masses while using covert political activity to plunder them. What we would now call rent-seeking succeeds because Outsiders are dazzled by the symbols while Insiders grab the substance.”
Happily, this year which seems to be ushering in a year not of a crumble but a collapse, is also the year when Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots emerged so powerfully to capture the national imagination and create a force based in the 99% willing to fight the Wall Street crimesters and stand for social justice and equality.
I have been having a happier news year ever since OWS emerged.
I have been following its bold initiatives in print and in the streets. I have just finished a new book called OCCUPY collecting my reporting for AlJazeera and other websites as well as my News Dissector.com blog.
Despite all the depressing things that are happening—and the economic depression that so many of the wisemen of the punditry admit is arriving—I am more hopeful than I have been in years
It feels good to be fighting back—and, not just online.
The fact that this movement received the media attention it has is a sign that the people of this country are open to something new and will, if well communicated too and organized, join in to make the changes we need so desperately.
In 2012, we have to continue to occupy the high ground and occupy the mainstream.
When people lead others follow.
Adelante! Forward! Or. As, Martin Luther King put it, “Tomorrow is Today.”
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
11 Comments so far
Show AllThis from Reuters:
"The United States ranks fourth in income inequality after Chile, Mexico and Turkey [out of 34 economically 'advanced' countries around the world]. In the U.S. the best-off 10 percent make on average 15 times the incomes of the poorest 10th, compared to a six to one ratio in the Nordic countries, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland."
Wow. "American exceptionalism", I guess [snark]. Now we're giving Mexico a run for the money. Unless and until more of the 99% in the U.S. wake up to this reality and express their outrage, the inequality in the U.S. will only worsen. OWS has helped wake up the hypnotized and narcotocized masses in 2011; let's hope that continues into 2012 and beyond.
"It seems so clear that the political system is moribund and paralyzed..."
I'd say it's humming along quite efficiently. It's redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich as intended.
I became politically aware in the first term of Reagan and it was painfully obvious where everything was headed then, with the attacks on unions and the deregulation of capital and the military build up and the extra-regulation of personal behavior. It's been like watching someone drive off a cliff for 30 years, all according to plan, while sitting in the backseat screaming to no avail.
I agree, the Occupation has been "the" highlight of the year. Watching Keith Oberman, Amy Goodman, and Ed Schultz give the next generation a chance to passionately articulate "why" they protest---has been an honor to behold. Let the likes of Gingrich and O'reilly try to ridicule them and all it does is magnify their own mean-spirited hypocrisy.
When all it seems "we" have on our side is the truth---it's comforting to know that there are still a few American's out there who are willing to risk everything in speaking it.
I found this song on the Automatic Earth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Msnp9_C06Y&feature=youtu.be
we need to call the msm what it is
the propaganda ministry
dr goebbels would be proud of what his children have accomplished
no one watches cnn - "On the heels of 2010's primetime numbers, the worst for CNN in at least 15 years, CNN was up in 2011 with both advertiser targeted adults 25-54 and total viewers. But even with a 17% gain in total viewers and a 29% gain with adults 25-54 in primetime, 2011 was still CNN's second-worst rated year over the last 15."
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2011/12/28/this-is-cnn-woeful-ratings-just-not-as-woeful-as-last-year/114839/
the average age of people who watch abc, cbs etc is 61 years of age
as for fox - people who watch it are less informed than folks who don't watch the news at all - quite an accomplishment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-less-informed-people-fairleigh-dickinson_n_1106305.html
i recommend anything by gerald celente, danny, paul craig roberts
global research.ca is good
http://www.haaretz.com/ - from israel
fars news http://english.farsnews.com/ from iran
asia times - http://www.atimes.com/
real news - http://therealnews.com/t2/
noam chomsky - http://www.chomsky.info/
norman finkelstein - http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/
for a good laugh i recommend drabble
- http://www.gocomics.com/drabble
As to an approval rating of congress: seven percent? Has it got down
to that? It used to be in the 9% - 10% range. If it's 7% now it must be
falling fast. The joke's on us, and what a joke ! We're being represented
in the writing of the laws by a building full of compromised "gofers", not
even one out of every ten of which is considered trustworthy. I'm impelled
to conclude that it's time to attempt to organize a third major political party.
Danny Schechter writes of: " ... [politicians] alienating the Democratic
party base ...", and of the need for " ... organizing real people ...".
There is a precedent for a new major political party's arising ; it was what
now is called the Republicans (GOP). [The GOP eventually took the place
of the old Whig party, which deceased.] Nothing in law or the Constitution
forbids altering politics by putting a third major party into the "mix it up"
congressional infighting. That would make much more difficult any refusal
by one party to permit even voting on a bill they don't like. Also, selection
of the Speaker of the House of Representatives would become a question
for negotiation among three parties, not just a party-line vote. I see no
better way to organize real people so as to make their needs and will
empowered in writing and administering the laws. Such empowerment
might even get some bad laws repealed. Power to the people !
Danny, I'm all for your work, for the most part. I feel, however, considerably less optimism. I don't think Occupy can win unless the progressive billionaires and millionaires put their money together and create a force with enough power to counter the conservative money machine. Another reason Occupy can't win follows:
The free-trade agreements pioneered by Bill Clinton and largely responsible for there being 40 applicants for each open position in my life’s work—editing, writing and proofing—likely heed the beginning of the end of the “quintessential multinational firm,” according to a valuable little book called, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio/Penguin, New York, 2010).
According to Tapscott and Williams, that old-fashioned multinational “was modeled on a hub-and-spoke architecture. A head of office drew up plans and issued commands to an international network of satellite production facilities that built products for local markets.”
“This market-by-market approach to organizing production no longer makes sense in a global age,” the authors write. “National silos gave rise to bloated and expensive bureaucracies that deployed inefficient, incompatible, and often redundant processes for making and marketing products locally. Insufficient knowledge transfer across organizational boundaries and departmental silos meant that most multinationals failed to seize opportunities for innovation and cost reduction. Now that global business standards and info technologies envelop the planet, the cost of coordinating a distributed global business is infinitely cheaper than just a few decades ago.”
This is what caused the Crash of 2008 and the rise of the elite 1%, leaving the 99 percenters (the commoners, or serfs) to struggle for survival just as the inhabitants of the great Mayan civilizations struggled to survive when the Spaniards attacked with guns, steel and germs 500 to 600 years ago; just as the makers of horse carriages struggled when the car was invented about 100 years ago; just as trains and ocean liners petered out after the airline industry skyrocketed in the 1940s and 1950s; just as farmers struggled and had to migrate to cities to squander out a “living” wage during the first Industrial Revolution from 1700 to 1900.
This is what Occupy Wall Street—and all of the Occupy protests--are fighting. Do you think they will win? Doubtful. A friend of mine told me that he went to his union’s meeting about a week ago and there was no “fire in the belly” of his fellow union members. It seems that after the police brutally, in the dead of night, scrambled Occupy Wall Streeters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and trashed laptops, tents, sleeping bags, and backpacks within the New York City Sanitation Department’s warehouse, there may be too few people, whether young and with nothing to lose or not, willing to face life-ruining jail time or injury. It seems that more and more multinationals are moving to a new model, a truly global firm that breaks down national “silos.” “This is not a multinational with a new twist. Smart firms are abandoning the multinational model completely,” the authors write. Today “supply chains” are becoming “value networks.”
“In the past, companies like Boeing wrote detailed specifications for each part and asked suppliers to build to plan. Boeing gathered the parts on the plant floor and spent weeks assembling a single plane. Today, suppliers co-design airplanes from scratch and deliver complete subassemblies to Boeing’s factory, where a single plane can be snapped together like Lego blocks in as little as three days.”
“Handing significant responsibility for innovation over to suppliers signals an important change in how companies compete.” Bringing new products to market now means working with a vast “ecosystem” (a word the authors use, rather oddly, considering the global warming consequences and economic consequences being ignored in the never-ending quest for greater profits for shareholders) of partners that possess complementary skills. Innovation is less about inventing and more about orchestrating or coordinating good ideas,” the authors claim.
But they never touch upon any negative consequences of this new business model or the “collateral damage” it already is bringing by destroying the middle and lower classes while depleting their retirement funds or health insurance or educations.
The authors instead say, “Boeing and BMW are not giving up on innovation. Both companies are taking advantage of the resources they have ‘freed up’ to focus on improving a few dimensions of value that ‘matter most’ to their customers.”
Tapscott and Williams, unfortunately, reveal their bias (or is it realism?) when they focus on China’s burgeoning motorcycle-making industry since 1990. China collaboratively “reverse-engineered” motorcycles it allowed the Japanese to make within its boundaries and now, modifying and improving on some of those designs, is making Chinese-brand motorcycles some of the most popular in the world. One reason it can do this, of course, is that Chinese workers, desperate to feed and shelter their families, work for peanuts versus the fat, lazy Americans or the westernized Japanese—although they, too, soon will work for peanuts and “owe their souls to the company store.”
However, this rush to modernize, increase profits for shareholders, and decrease product costs so sales rise, has fatal collateral damage. A recent 83 page report detailed suicides and labor conditions at Foxconn in China. It was produced by 20 universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. Interviews of 1,800 Foxconn workers at 12 factories found evidence of illegal overtime and failure to report accidents, says Wikipedia (one collaborative venture that has achieved tremendous success and added value to everyone’s life and knowledge). The report criticized Foxconn's management style, which it called inhumane and abusive.
An estimated 18 Foxconn employees attempted suicide in 2010, with 14 deaths. The Foxconn suicides occurred between January and November, 2010.
"social chaos and political idiocy that we confront every day."
I especially enjoyed the video of a couple of hundred Catholic priests beating the shyt our of each other with canes. This is a mere precursor for the insanity that will be 2012.
Danny Schechter, the news dissector, is right-on: the media is completely controlled by the Institute for Strategic Studies which arranges the information available to the public so that is leads them in the direction supportive of the controllers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and their leaders, the Roundtable of the Committee of 300, (http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_committee300_11.htm)
... all international bankers and industrialist, globalists whose intent is the destruction of the USA. They promoted NAFTA to export manufacturing out of the US so that it would not be able to be self-sufficient. The US citizenry has been taken over in a coup, first with the Federal Reserve Act, then with NAFTA, with the appointment of George Dubya, and then the neocons 9/11 extravaganza of smoke and mirrors, the clamp down with the Patriot Act, Military Authorization Act, and more.
Occupy is the beginning of the revolution. It is hope sprung from an awakening. The criminal political parties will be purged. Congress will be cleaned of filthy millionaires, and the people will discuss among themselves freely the issues, and decide democratically what is best for the United States of America, as a positive force in the world for peace and prosperity.
They have reoccupied Zuccotti Park. Although the arrests are supposed to be massive (photographers being thrown against walls, one kid arrested for beating a drum, mostly women and lots of pepper spray), they've stormed up the place and taken it back. Way to go. These guys rock!
Apparently, Michael Moore is in NYC and is on his way to film the event. This is getting interesting...
http://www.ustream.tv/timcast