The Fortnightly Rant for November 4, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 256, No. 3, posted online Monday, December 12, 2011.
About eighteen years ago we complained that engaging in the American political process was like being strapped in a cheap seat at the glacier races.*
Those days, we are pleased to report, seem to be over. Wall Street still rules the country today, but for the first time in living memory it begins to look as if its grip might slip.
Analysts for Google™ reported on October 27th that interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement “jumped ahead of the Tea Party on September 24 [just one week after it started], and hasn’t looked back.”
In a New York Times poll taken in mid-October, 43 percent of respondents said they agreed with the views of the Occupy Wall Street movement, while just 27 percent said they disagreed.
In stark contrast to the Occupation, support for the Tea Party, the only comparable public movement in recent years, is clearly waning. Respondents in the same Times poll were asked if they considered themselves supporters of the Tea Party. Just 24 percent said they did, while 60 percent said they did not.
And Occupation support is not all coming from dreadlocked hacky-sackers. On October 24th, New York State and Albany police were ordered to arrest protestors at that city’s Occupation. They chose not to comply.
“We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” a state official told RawStory.com. “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.”
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post reported October 27th that “New Yorkers support Occupy Wall Street and the extension of a millionaire’s tax — and it isn’t just the Democrats backing a levy on the rich. A Quinnipiac Poll released today shows state voters agree with the views of the protesters, whose primary concern is income inequality, by a 58-28 margin.”
Perhaps most telling, a poll taken for Investment News found that thirty-nine percent of Wall Street investment managers — objects of the Occupation’s wrath — support it.
For a movement often criticised for its lack of a clear message, a lot of people seem to think they understand it just fine.
And Why Would They Not?
Over the past thirty years the American public has gradually gotten used to a news diet made up mostly of carefully engineered talking points, misleading anecdotes, and lies. It took an economic collapse — fueled if not caused by Wall Street — to turn their attention to the basic facts of the economy.
With exquisite timing, the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] — an indisputably nonpartisan agency — issued a study last month titled, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.” In this history of our Class War, the CBO report details how nearly all of the nation’s income growth for the past three decades has gone to the top one percent of earners. For everybody else, it’s been a race to stay just barely ahead of inflation.
The Economist, a decidedly conservative magazine, wrote in its summary “the data are powerful because they tend to support two prejudices. First, that a system that works well for the very richest has delivered returns on labour that are disappointing for everyone else. Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill.”
Media Shift to Non-Fiction
If the last few decades have proven anything, it is this: what people think is happening matters as much or more than whatever really might be happening. Which is what makes the drivel that comes out of the television so damned important — the idiot box dominates what the country thinks is happening.
Fortunately, for once, there’s some good news on the news front.
In an analysis of news coverage on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News during the last week in July, the website ThinkProgress.com found that the word “debt” was used more than 7,000 times, while the term “unemployed” was used just 75 times. Amazingly, these data just happen to reflect exactly the dominant concerns of the 1 percenters who fund propaganda mills like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
A review of the same networks in mid-October found that “debt” had dropped to just 398 uses. “Jobs,” on the other hand, was used 2,738 times, “Wall Street” 2,387 times, and “Occupy” 1,278 times.
Wanted: Concrete Steps
If public awareness and intent were all that it took to bring about change in this country, there would have been no need for an Occupation in the first place. What’s required here are concrete steps that can actually be achieved and that will have real effects. For a movement without any leadership or message, it’s surprising how many of those have already surfaced.
Anyone with money in a big bank can yank it out and put it in a local credit union. Some credit unions are reporting that applications are up from 30 to 50 percent.
Sen. Tom Udall [D-NM] introduced a Constitutional Amendment on Tuesday that would give states the power to regulate campaign contributions and expenditures. If passed it would effectively answer the Occupation’s October 7th demand for a reversal of the Citizens United decision.
The Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting banks from a variety of risky shenanigans should be reinstated immediately if not sooner. If we got nothing else from this attempt, we’d be entertained by a chorus of howling Republicans.
And, obviously, all Tea Party-Republican dingbats should be flushed form the Halls of Congress one year from today.