Turning Points

This article appeared at the Nation of Change website and was written by Kevin Zeese, one of the organizers of the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. I took the liberty of changing some of the links to what I thought were better sources of information and also adding some links that were not in the original article. If you want to know what the Occupy movement is all about, this is one of the better summations.

A Warning to the Economic and Political Elites: Listen Now

The Occupy Movement is not only resulting in the occupation of public space, but also in political space. We are al­ready shifting the dialogue and the movement has just begun.

When we started planning the occupation of Freedom Plaza six months ago, our goal was to create a place where the ignored voices of the American people could be heard. They are starting to be heard thanks to occupations all over the country. If it is not clear to the economic and political elites, this is the beginning of an American revolt.

Before considering occupation, we tried other avenues: elections, lobbying, petitioning, email campaigns, tele­phone campaigns, marches, rallies – but they were ineffective. The country continued going in the direction of concentrated wealth, rather than where super-majorities of Americans wanted to go.

The occupation of Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington, DC and occupations around the country display our message of anger at the unfairness of the economy, the expanding war quagmires and the corruption of government that result in the people’s urgent necessities being ignored in favor of more wealth for the top 1%. Continue reading →

I read about what I thought might be an interesting book, You Call This a Democracy?, by Paul Kivel, and bought it. It is, indeed, interesting. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Introduction:

“Do you think the United States has a ruling class – a portion of the population who own tremendous wealth and who benefit from the way that decisions get made in this country? If you do, you are absolutely right. There is a ruling class in the United States, and it is just as rich and powerful as any ruling class has ever been.

“There are an even smaller number of people, the power elite – primarily a few thousand powerful white men, who make many of the decisions that affect our everyday lives. The decide where to invest money, where to build factories or whether to move jobs overseas; they decide what kinds of people get locked up, what’s on the evening news, who runs for elections (and who gets to vote), and what is the quality of the food we eat and the water we drink. They decide on the conditions where we work, the state of our neighborhoods, and who has access to health care. We pay in our wages, our taxes, our health, the quality of our housing, and often with our very lives.”

The author, Paul Kivel, writes that he grew up in an “upper-middle-class white Jewish suburb of Los Angeles in the 1950s and early 1960s. My grandfather was successful in real estate and my father was a stockbroker. The end result was to increase my family’s wealth so that we ended up at the top of the managerial class, and were certainly wealthy by most people’s definition.”

Is Mr. Kivel a class traitor for writing this book? I don’t know, but I find the book to be a very interesting and eye-opening experience. It has a lot of end notes for further investigation, should the reader care to do so. I’m certain that reading the book would give anyone who supports the Occupy Wall Street movement a much better understanding of what it is that the people in that movement are protesting about. Highly recommended for all of the talking heads in the main stream media who keep saying that they have no idea what the Occupy Wall Streeters really want.

From Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine, a hip hop video blog:

As I read more about the Occupy Wall Street movement, I am asking myself questions about the Masters of the Universe that they are protesting against. How did these people/organizations come to be? That, of course, is an enormously complex question and parts of the answer come from scholars who have labored for many years in the fields of psychology, political economy, sociology, economics, and related areas of study. I came across a most interesting video, by Al Jazeera, which, in a round table discussion forum, brings up the question and attempts to provide some answers. The video is 46 minutes long, so, if you want to watch it, make sure you have the time to do so.

I don’t belong to Facebook, but I saw this posted on a forum where I hang out and thought it worth promoting. It is on Facebook and the author says, “feel free to share…”

“Dear Wall Street:

Wondering what all the fuss is about? Let me tell you:

We gave you our blessing, and you laughed behind our backs for being gullible.

We gave you our retirement savings and you gambled it away on products even you did not understand – and reaped billions doing so.

We gave you plans for our children’s education, and you shredded each future sheepskin with your greed — well, everyone’s children but yours.

We gave you tax breaks because we were told you would create jobs as a thank you for the privilege. Instead you gave yourself bonuses and built edifices to yourselves that would feed thousands of the hungry and educate many of our youth who deserve it.

We gave your corporations break after break, and for what? So you could break the very backs that worked so hard to provide them.

We gave you the largest amount of cash and savings the world has known, and you threw a party — but forgot to invite us who paid for it.

We gave you our trust, and you stacked the Supreme Court to allow you a freeway to buying our politicians.

And now we are tired.

We are tired of giving to you who have proven so ungrateful.

We are tired of giving you breaks without a thank you.

And most importantly, we are tired of your self-imposed self-entitlement.

You have done nothing to deserve our trust, our money, or a break. And now we are going to work to take it all back.

And you can blame yourself for it.

And for the record, we do not hate money. We are not communists or socialists.

We are Americans. We are Italians. We are Spaniards. We are Arabs. We are Germans. We are Democrats. We are Republicans.

We are made of up many parts. Just like you.

Remember, you created the vocabulary for this discussion, and if the issue at hand is about money for you, then it shall be about money for us.

Steve Lyons
Boston, Massachusetts”

I think OWS is the most refreshing thing that has happened in American politics since the 1960s. I wish the movement every success possible.

Finally.

Several months ago, I replied to a comment on a blog that I used to frequent, but no longer do because reading that blog raises my blood pressure dangerously high. The comment was in reaction to a local zoning ordinance in the community where the blog is based and the commenter dragged in the irrelevant issue of United Nations Agenda 21. I won’t go into Agenda 21 – anyone who is interested can go to the United Nations website and read all about it. Suffice it to say that I don’t subscribe to the New World Order/One World Government conspiracy theory that Agenda 21 is designed to enslave everyone to the dictates of those shadowy people who are espousing one world government. The response that I published on the blog haunted me for weeks afterwards – I kept asking myself why people like the person who commented believe what they do. In the interim, I found the humorous video that was the subject of the last post. After thinking the matter over for a time, I would like to retract my claim that it was “humorous” – I think it is more likely that the producer thought it was dead-on right.

This whole incident triggered an intense re-examination, on my part, of my thoughts about conspiracy theories. I’ve never been fond of them – they always blame a current event on international bankers, Jews, the Illuminati, the Skull and Bones Society, the New World Order, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bohemian Grove, and aliens, among other perpetrators. But I’ve also never really investigated why people believe these crazy ideas. The comment on the blog (and my response) was the tipping point.

So. My initiation into this inquiry took the form of reading Mark Fenster’s book, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. That book is a bit dense at times (it is a university press book) but it is a fascinating introduction to how conspiracy theory mongers think. What particularly fascinated me was his assertion that conspiracy thinking is not, by any means, limited to the right-wing. It is all over the political spectrum and it is something that we all need to educate ourselves about so that we don’t fall into the trap of using conspiracy theories to “solve” the problems of the world. I’ve not read it yet, but I have Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, by Timothy Melley, on order. I was much intrigued by his idea that people who engage in conspiracy thinking almost always have two personality traits that stand out. First, that individual subscribes fervently to the idea of individual rights. He will very likely worship at the altar of Ayn Rand, be a strong proponent of Second Amendment gun rights, or be a follower of Austrian economics. Second, that person doesn’t believe that he has much, if any, control over his life. Events that happen to him are the result of others plotting to take away his rights. The combination of these two personality traits, according to Melley, is agency panic, which he describes as an “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy” to others. He further states that “for one who refuses to relinquish the assumptions of liberal individualism, such newly revealed forms of regulation frequently seem so unacceptable or unbelievable that they can only be met with anxiety, melodrama, or panic.” When I read this, lots and lots of things started falling into place. I’ve always known that Americans worship individualism and that any idea that even faintly smells of collectivism is angrily swatted down. According to Geert Hofstede, the United States has the highest ranking in individualism in the world. I’m not surprised. If you combine this ranking and the ideas of Melley, I think it is safe to say that he has just shed an enormous amount of light on the political debate that has paralyzed this country for the last 40 years. He has for me, anyway.

I’m continuing to delve into this topic and this morning, I came across a very interesting article in the March, 2011 issue of the magazine, The New Internationalist. Entitled, Challenging the Politics of Paranoia, it delves into the dangers that conspiracy thinking poses to those who believe in social justice. Here is a single paragraph from the article:

“Believing that a sinister, ultra-powerful cabal is to blame for it all opens up the possibility that ‘human nature’ is in fact an innately benevolent thing, capable of flourishing into utopia overnight – if only, if only we could prove that the establishment was involved in a malignant conspiracy of such intense moral repugnance that everyone would find it utterly repulsive. Then the status quo would fall overnight, leading to real, profound and rapid social change. Hence the popularity of the ‘waking up the brainwashed masses’ theme within conspiracy thinking: ‘sheeple’ is the patronizing term that’s most often used. What a glittering apple, dangling just beyond our reach!”

I, and many others on the Left, am guilty of using the neologism ‘sheeple’.

While reading the comments in response to the article, I noted a very valuable list of sources for further study of this phenomenon, compiled by Ralph Dumain. While I don’t have the time (or the money!) to read every source in his list, I think a selected reading would be valuable for everyone on the Left who is puzzled, upset, or outright enraged by the prevalency of conspiracy thinking.

Chip Berlet, who has published an enormous amount of really good work on right wing populism and conspiracy thinking on his site, Political Research Associates, was interviewed by David Barsamian in September, 2004. The interview appeared in Z Magazine and is worth reading. The last question, and Chip’s response, should spur you to read the entire interview:

What is the average citizen to do, facing this blizzard of charges and countercharges and theories and countertheories? How do you make sense of it?

I don’t think you should try to make sense of it because I think it’s like Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum where the protagonist decides to try and chase all of these loose ends, and in the chase he discovers more loose ends. He leaves his job and he begins this quest of showing the gigantic conspiracy. By the end of the book it’s clear that what Eco is saying is there is an infinite number of loose ends, there is an infinite number of questions for which there will never be an answer. You have a choice: you can take part in real life and deal with real issues that affect you in a real way or you can go on that endless quest for finding those loose ends and tying them together. And the choice is yours.

One final thought that builds on Chip Berlet’s last sentence. If you choose to “take part in real life and deal with real issues that affect you in a real way”, you really should visit G. William Domhoff’s website and, if sufficiently impressed, buy some of his books and read them. Power Structure Research is not easy and it doesn’t seem to have many followers, but I think it answers a lot of questions that other means of knowledge production can’t touch.

Chip Berlet has more to say about power structure research in another article, which also appeared in Z Magazine, this time in the November, 2007 issue. In it, he states that what came to be known as power structure research originated with C. Wright Mills’ book, The Power Elite, which was published in 1956. Another book to read!

I watched this video, found it amusingly done, and wanted to contribute to it “going viral”. It has been watched by over 458,000 people, so far.

It was uploaded by The Corbett Report. If you would like to read the transcript and click on the links in it for further information, go here.

Two years ago, I posted a piece on Labor Day. The name of this blog is Turning Points and it is indeed a record of my ongoing journey from innocence to informed opposition. As this country increasingly lurches to the right, I march ever further to the left. I’m posting this little gem, by Larry Beinhart, which I found on the website, Buzzflash. Even though it is written in a sarcastic tone, it surely does reflect the reality in this country. Labor unions? We don’t need no stinkin’ labor unions! Give me liberty or give me death! Send all those commie pinkos and socialists, like the protesters against the Tar Sands project, to jail.

Corporation Day

It’s time to end this silly farce of Labor Day.

No one celebrates labor.

I mean no one. A few months back I suggested to Arianna Huffington that Huffington Post have a Labor section. They have business – as do all major publications – style, black, latino, green, religion, good news, travel, weird news, comedy, celebrity, parents – but not labor. They have recipes, home, do it yourself, body, spirit, and mind, they have tech, engadget, techcrunch, joystiq, and an apple blog – but not labor. They have New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver – but not labor.

Let’s give the day to the people we actually admire, look up to, and support. We could have a Broker and Bankers Day, Hedge Fund Day, Big Banks Day, Billionaires Day, Multinationals Day.

The best replacement would be Corporation Day.

We need to celebrate corporations because we love and admire them so very much. We feel beholden to them for giving us ‘jobs’ and gadgets and stuff.

Plus they need a special day, like Martin Luther King Day, to celebrate their admission to full personhood after hundreds of years of not being persons, being just, well, corporations.

The amazing, and wonderful, thing is that they have already become not just our equals, but our superiors in every way.

First off, they are immortal, which is always an advantage.

As noted, at last they have all the rights of people. They have achieved that status without our human limitations or our social and legal liabilities. They have no sentimental attachments to human values. They need not care for family, relatives, friends, or neighbors. No obligation is so important that if it’s to their financial advantage they won’t seek to get out of it.

Their sole goal is to make money, at any cost to others, and they need not apologize for that.

They cannot go to prison for their crimes. They can kill, rob, steal, chisel, cheat, defraud, poison, pollute, wreck, and ruin. But they cannot be contained, even for that most valid of reasons for imprisoning people – to stop them from doing it again.

Corporate commercial interests have more status in our courts than human interests.

A human falsely imprisoned and tortured in the name of national security can’t sue because the suit might expose government secrets. But a private airline that flew such people to secret prisons and to countries where they would be tortured can expose the entire operation in court in a lawsuit over getting paid.

A high school student has no right to make jokes – like holding up a sign ‘Bong Hits for Jesus’ – but corporations have a right to spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

The results of political campaigns are largely determined by how much money is spent. That makes corporations into super-voters. The more money they have, the more super they are.

When it comes time to pass legislation a normal person can’t tell their congress person how to write the bill. They can’t get anywhere near their senator (try it sometime if you doubt me). But corporations hire lobbyists to write the bills for congress and the senate and guide them on how to vote yes for their bills and then give them the sound bites to explain to us why they were good bills.

Let’s get real, folks. We hate and despise regular working people, they’re not rich!

Let’s have a day for the übermenchen we truly love and adore, Corporation Day!

On Thursday night, Obama could have called for a transformation of our economy from financialization to a real economy. But he didn’t. He could have called for taking the money we spend on our pointless wars and using it to hire millions of the unemployed. But he didn’t. He could have said that small businesses are the engines of job creation in this country and that the wizards of financialization have destroyed our economy. But he didn’t. He could have laid out a lot of good ideas, but he didn’t. Instead, he chose to lay out a plan that guts Social Security by reducing the tax paid by employees from 6.2% to 3.1% and, for the first time, also reducing the tax that employers pay, from 6.2% to 3.1%. I said last fall, when Obama reduced the payroll tax from 6.2% to 4.2% for employees that this was the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. I was right. In a few more years, after the “progressive” Obama is re-elected, there won’t be any more funding for Social Security. When Social Security has to compete for funding with the war-mongers, guess which program will lose?

Obama. Bah!!! I’m sick of him and his rhetoric. He’s a Trojan Horse and the Republican Party’s dream Democrat.

When are we going to stop enabling the criminal political class in this country? When none of us has a pot to piss in? That’s way too late.

Here. Read this wonderful essay at the Kasuma Project, entitled On Radical Imagination: Humanity’s Most Urgent Need. It is a long essay and takes some time to read and digest, but if we can’t imagine a better future, how the hell are we going to get there? We certainly aren’t going to get there by voting for the same criminals that have gotten us into the mess that we are in.