I spent most of Friday during the day in Boston, at Dewey Square, taking in OccupyBoston. I brought all the donations I could scrounge up (for instance, my entire adult history in mothballed bed comforters and towels) and hoped to hang around and get some video interviews and stories I could tell. Instead I wound up volunteering for a web project they needed - I thought my time would be better spent utilizing my skills as a developer rather than working on Occupy content and publicity for a small, local blog.

I haven’t written much here on the Occupy movement in the last few weeks, though I’ve been more than keenly following it online. There are so many thoughts swirling around in my head that I’ve been paralyzed from writing an essay-length post about it, although if you follow my Twitter account, the Facebook page which features many of the tweets, or keep up with @leftinlowell on the left sidebar here, you’ll know that I’ve been a very active author about OccupyBoston and OWS in the 140-character arena.

I could write a lot (and may yet) about what I found at Dewey Square on Friday - the strong sense of community, amazing solidarity, the organic means of organizing they employ - but many others have written about that already and you can find reams of pixels devoted to covering the news and day to day life of Occupiers.

But this afternoon, I found the 140 character limit failing me, and as I said in a direct response to an inquiry, needed a full blog post to explain my feelings and thoughts, specifically regarding the pressures that the Occupy movement is and will face in the coming weeks and months. Via @BostonPhoenix, I found this short description (and full video) of a Harvard political panel hastily formed to facilitate a discussion of the Occupy movement, including visiting fellow Ed Rendell, former Governor of Pennsylvania.

A far greater percentage of the audience than of the panel had actually spent signiicant time at an Occupation — Williamson has spent time at #OccupyBoston — but that didn’t stop anyone from speculating or projecting.

Rendell is not alone — especially and not surprisingly among Democratic politicians — in wishing that some of the enthusiasm of Occupy would carry over to the ballot box. What Democratic politicians have been very slow to acknowledge is that many Occupiers are as sick of Democrats as they are with banks — and are not enthusiastic about the possibilities of a two-party system they see as being hopelessly corrupted by corporate campaign contributions.

As a thoroughly committed progressive electoral political activist, I have, and will continue to, volunteer my time to electing good candidates at all levels of government, turning out the vote, encouraging voter participation, and going to the polls myself. It’s the least I can do for my democracy. But as an electoral activist, one who also has some experience in movement politics (the anti-war Bush era) I want to caution the Occupation against giving in too much to the powerful forces that would love to squeeze out this amazing energy for their own use.

There are so many pieces of evidence I could use to back that up. The most obvious is to look at what happened to the Tea Party movement. Although I am in total opposition to just about everything the TP stands for, the movement at its inception was grassroots at its core, expressing anger at the status quo. (I don’t argue about the need for such anger, but the TP is, at least in its current incarnation, gravely wrong on who was to blame.) Even one of its founders, a conservative blogger, now repudiates what it’s become - a front group for the financial backers of the Republican party and its politicians.

Or look at the Obama 2008 campaign. The enthusiasm of young volunteers and voters was part of the reason he was propelled to such heights of popularity. They were fired up, ready to go. And when they got there…they got some of what they wanted, sure. At least a modicum of health care reform. A half-measures stimulus package for jobs that turned out to be only partly effective - because the downturn was steeper than anyone knew, and because a third or more of the stimulus was ineffective tax cuts instead of direct stimulus spending. He has had a weak stomach for the fight…the opposite of a firm, demanding executive branch leader that we so need…instead, “capitulating” and “pre-compromising” are the catchphrases that come to mind about Obama’s first term.

Obama also put Wall Street execs into his economic brain trust. Wall St certainly doesn’t love this president, but if you were looking for them to enact policies against greed and corruption, you were sorely disappointed…besides the Elizabeth Warren-driven Consumer Protection Agency, we extracted no price from the financiers - not jail time pursued where possible, nor reigning their excess in, or asking them to pay their fair share of their own ridiculous bailouts.

The last of which, along with prolonged unemployment woes, prompted the Occupation movement to begin with.

If I have any advice for the burgeoning Occupy movement - if I could make any appeal at all to them that would matter (and by them, I do mean us, since I will continue to do what I can to support it), it would be this: if you allow yourselves to be coopted and pressured to work on elections, driven by the necessarily short-term thinking of electoral activism, you will be distracted from your larger goal, and you will be disappointed, time and again.

There are a few reasons for this, some inevitable in any circumstance, like the fact that we cannot all agree, even with those we agree, 100% of the time. I eased out of the anti-war movement because of the 2006 campaign for Governor Deval Patrick, swept up in the enthusiasm of what he was trying to accomplish, and believing that I could be more effective as an electoral activist than trying to change the stubborn mind of the Bush administration on its war policies. Choose between bashing my head on a wall repeatedly, or use a hammer to break through? Give me that hammer!

And in some ways, in some campaigns, you can be more effective as an electoral activist; ask for, and receive, real and lasting change. I am largely proud of my Governor, and the work I did to elect him. He has been an effective economic leader to say the least, nevermind his progressive support for gay rights, and for most social programs (your mileage may vary). But even I have had my enthusiasm for his tenure brutally dampened at times, especially now, that he, who should be smart enough to know better, has been on the forefront of the impending legalization of casinos. I have been disappointed, even in the best of our leaders, enough to distract me from more far-reaching goals.

If I can be disappointed in someone like Deval Patrick, just imagine the disappointment around a second term of Obama.

You can’t take on everything. Neither individuals, nor movements, can afford to be divided in their efforts or their aims. And in the end, electing more and better leaders will not change the system. That system is so broken, electing a Patrick or a Warren or this or that individual is like a plank trying to hold back a tide. The system needs fundamental uprooting and replanting, and no amount of progressive electoral politics (save the entire corps of incumbents being ousted and replaced wholesale at once by a massive grassroots effort of small donors and volunteers) will truly address the core problem at hand.

Electoral politics is about fraying the cloth of the “system” at the edges; Occupation should be about reweaving the entire bolt.

I have some ideas to propose (well one overarching, giant idea, really) of how Occupy can do this, for once, and for all. It’s an uphill battle so massive, so stacked against us, so big of an effort that just to think it makes me shiver in fear and excitement. But it is the only inevitable conclusion I can come to when thinking about the future of our country and how to right all the wrongs. I am talking about a constitutional amendment to rescind corporate personhood and the ruling of the Supreme Court that money equals speech.

All of what is broken with our system is about money and influence in our politics. Global climate change cannot be addressed because of the massive amount of money being pumped into stopping the regulation, and reversal of, carbon dependence. Economic justice is being thwarted by financial contributions from banks and Wall Street, so that the concept of going back to Clinton-era taxes on the wealthy and capital gains (money making money, as opposed to work making money) is nigh impossible to argue. And so on, and so on, and so on. If in a democracy being elected depends on monetary support, and people with more money can support more heavily than the rest of the 99%, then who will ever listen to the 99%?

A constitutional amendment is a big hill to climb. It’s a long-term hill, it could take a decade. It could take more. The money arrayed against such an act would be astounding - if you think Wall Street spends money on politics now, wait until you try this out.

However, no amount of cash is going to convince the American people that the system is working as it is, or that Citizens United was a good idea, or that corporations should have rights as though they were people. If lasting change is what Occupy seeks, than the moment is now.

But whatever form, and eventual goal, this movement takes on (if indeed it does not peter out after we see the economy rebound after some new temporary economic bandaid that puts off the inevitable real crash that I feel is coming) it needs to think beyond 2012. Beyond 2014, or 2016. Beyond the cyclical electoral process.

If that means fighting the pressure from Democratic politicians to elect them, as well as ignoring the temptation to help enact near-term policy bandaids, then as a staunch Democrat, I say, so be it. What you lose in short term gain is far exceeded by the long term possibilities.

I can’t help thinking that much of our future is dependent on what this nascent movement called Occupation does next (but no pressure!). And, I would love to be able to say at the end of all of this, “Our Democracy is dead…long live our Democracy.”

I’ve been following (mostly online) the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston protests since nearly the beginning. They got traction and coverage on blogs and Twitter long before the media was covering it - in fact, before the unprovoked pepper spray incidents that made the news, the only place to read about what was happening was online.

The media complained that they weren’t cohesive enough and there wasn’t news to cover. Well, that has quickly changed and evolved. For starters, there were some very bad decisions from the NYPD - both institutionally, and by some idiot individuals - which put the protests on the map for the media, and solidified the motivation of participants and supporters. What’s more, it seems the organic sort of organizing that has sprung up has - and I have to use the word evolved again - to meet the challenges of running a protest, dealing with the media, finding a set of demands to articulate why they are angry and not going to take it any more. OWS has spokespeople and media tents and a strong online presence - all while being relatively leadersless in the traditional sense.

In some ways, my personal cynicism alert flag is up. (Yeah, I know, I’m too young to be truly cynical…) I spent years organizing with the peace movement against the Iraq war, butting my head up against the sheer stubbornness of the Bush administration and, later, Obama’s. After all, GitMo is still open, the USA PATRIOT Act was reauthorized and is being used to spy on Americans without due process, we’re still in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan though with some troop drawdown, and Obama even unilaterally bombed, for right or wrong, Libya, without the consent of Congress.

The only satisfaction we got out of our fight was that most of the American public got on our side after a while. But it still reelected Bush and let itself be lied to about Kerry’s war record and ability to lead, and we never got a truly different kind of leader to replace him in 2008, either. Obama put Wall St executives in charge of the economy even after it was evident they were full of shit.

But there is something really interesting happening with Occupy[America]. For one thing, it’s just average citizens (not diehard liberals or extremely informed people like me) who are protesting. Photo after photo, interview after interview, this is very evident.

There are so many people in this country who have been foreclosed on, laid off, unable to move forward, that a segment of them, with nothing left to lose, are truly taking the fight to the streets. Since they have nothing left to lose - no middle class lifestyle, no prospects - they have a lot to fight for. I always said the worst part about being an anti-war protester is that most of our citizens, even when sympathetic (and the majority was by the time I left that movement) are busy with their lives, making their livings, feeding their families, going to soccer games, and being generally content that things aren’t that bad for them, personally. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s totally human, and what’s more, a legacy of the last century of American progress. We built the middle class. A country with a middle class able to make ends meet is a relatively politically stable country. It’s a good thing.

Which is why I think there is something different in the air.

Gradually, we’ve seen the erosion of the buying power and the salaries of the middle class. For so many decades before, our children did at least a little better than their parents. Then, since the Reagan era, we started to see the slide. We began to only tread water…then occasionally swallowed some. Then we began drowning, but we as a people were the last to see it happen.

Even in the 2008 economic meltdown, we failed to notice our lungs filling with something other than air.

This generation of young people really are the first who truly believe - nay, who know - they are not destined to do better than their parents. Unlike the spoiled kids of my generation (raised largely in the 80s and coming of age in the 90s), they see the coming tide sweeping over them and pulling them under the water before they even get a chance to begin. They are left behind. And they know that if they do nothing, it will only get worse. They have nothing left to lose.

They join every one of their older siblings, parents, grandparents who have lost a house, a job, a future, despite being of the generations born with more promise. For some of us older ones, we’ve experienced firsthand how it’s gonna be going forward if there are no changes. For the rest of us older ones, we are beginning to understand how fragile our position of comfort is. The OccupyWallSt movement presents this to us in bas-relief - the notion that the middle class is under siege and has been for quite some time.

The thing that is different from now from these previous movements is that the situation that has caused these long term problems is not going to be alleviated by last generation’s leaders. Obama is cut off at the knees to even patch a pathetic temporary band-aid (the jobs bill) on our economic slide by Republican intransigence. And even Obama’s half-measures would probably only prove to elongate the stagnation, not solve the underlying problem. We’re now seeing the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us reach the levels seen right before the 1929 crash. Eventually, this was going to get noticed by someone. By everyone.

Even the Tea Party movement, while misguided to the extreme, is an expression of this loss of power by the average person. Why did they catch fire? Despite being such a minority of even the Republican party? Because poor and middle class Republicans too are suffering in this economic climate, this class warfare on us by the super-wealthy. They just aren’t right on who to blame for this.

Most of America, on the other hand, already knows what and who is to blame. They already overwhelmingly want to see taxes raised back up on the uberwealthy. They know that Wall St needs taking down a peg or three, and that we need to go back to regulating our economic system so that the playing field becomes level again. They just need the energy to look up from their day to day struggles against the tide, to look up, and see that horizon again.

I don’t know where the Occupy movement is going to go. It seems to change and swell bigger by the day, though it could have an upper limit, I suppose. But if this truly is the moment where the American people reach the tipping point, if this is the straw that, finally, after 30 years of straws, breaks the camel’s back, then maybe we can make the changes without the economic crash that I have been foreseeing for years. That crash (which will make 2008 look like cakewalk) could still be coming. But if we organize enough in advance, if we can offer an alternative to the American people now, perhaps we will not lose a decade like they did in the Great Depression. After all, we have history to inform us how best to rebuild the American middle class and spread prosperity around to everyone.

So, occupy on! There may not be an immediate result, but it could offer a long term solution. Hats off to the most powerless among us.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” - V

Whose pockets, Mitty? Whose?

ROMNEY: To balance our budget and not spend more than we take in, we need to make sure that the promises we make in Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are promises we can keep, and there are various ways of doing that. One is we could raise taxes on people. That’s not the way…

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Corporations!

ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No they’re not!

ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.

AUDIENCE (laughter)

ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In their pockets!

ROMNEY: Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Okay, human beings, my friend.

No one should be defending the “corporations are people” schtick that the Supreme Court’s 100+ year old precedent claims. It, of course, led to the modern conservative court ruling in favor of Citizens United, a very unpopular ruling that has incredibly damaging effects on our democracy.

Of course, if you’re Mitt Romney, you’ve had corporate profits go into your pocket, but for the vast majority of Americans, we don’t get any or much of that slice of the pie, do we? But gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? That doesn’t hurt anyone, does it? Way to be out of touch, Mittsy.

I also love the condescending “my friend” he puts at the end of sentences. Who’s he fooling?

Via dkos.

If you haven’t already had your “duuuuuh” moment, please watch this. If simple freaking facts can’t sway you, then nothing can, except maybe if god talks to you or something. I’m told he does to Rick Perry.

Video update: Aaron Sorkin’s Crystal Ball? Is it creepy or are the GOPers just this lame?

“Frankly, your speaker has it. Am I dealing with him, or am I dealing with you?”

Taegan Goddard, a national blogger type, puts out a bit on the current debt ceiling/deficit talks that strike me. For those following, House Majority Leader and young gun Eric Cantor has aggressively asserted himself in the current talks being held at the White House. The whole thing struck me as odd, because it is Obama that should be the young petulant one in the room. pssst. I heard he is a ….radical.

Anyways, the 2010 election is not likely to redefine decades of brokering between the two political parties. So, why is the gristled John Boehner making a hole and making it wide for Cantor?
(more…)

OK, it seems that the blog has been a little slower as of late. Thankfully, Jack has added his own special blend of herbs and spices to our recipe. But it still feels like it could use some more frequent posting lately.

Enjoy. (more…)

I’d like to give a shout out to all my tea partying pals. I hope you told the birthers to go pound sand.

I digress:
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is stepping up his call for Congress to let the Bush-era tax cuts lapse.

“This crisis is so imminent and so difficult that I think we have to allow the so-called Bush tax cuts all to expire. That is a very big number,” he said, referring to how much the U.S. government could save from letting income taxes go back up to levels last seen under former President Bill Clinton. -snip

Of course, we know that POTUS will poo poo this to some degree ’cause he has his very own ‘read my lips’-esque campaign speak that draws a line at $250,000+/-. So, there is that.

Data, being ambivalent, only offers this guidance: Top 1% pay 28% of federal income taxes, and earn 23% of all income.

And finally, where is the rally that squawks about the $880/month I’m dolling out for crappy health insurance we can’t afford to use? Can I see a single payer plan that would spike my taxes by $5000? I’d be saving money then.

Or as good as - the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been forwarded past the filibuster threat in the Senate by a 63-33 vote, pretty much assuring its passage.

This is a long time coming - the nation, and the military, has been ready for this for a long time. Now, we can finally allow gays to openly serve as they do in many other countries. Gays and lesbians have been on the front lines in war, risking their lives for their country. And now they will not be thrown out for being who they are.

Congrats to the activists who fought so hard for this. It is a victory that took too long, but it is a victory.

Though he’s wrong on almost every other issue, kudos on this to Senator Scott Brown for voting for our gay servicemen and women. (Note: I can’t find the role call but at 63 votes to pass, mathematically he has to be one of the yes votes.) Also kudos to Sen. John Kerry, who fought for this for a long time.

Obama just lost us Social Security.

That’s what they could say ten years from now when the Republicans have dismantled the program like they have been trying to do for over 70 years. What the wingers couldn’t do for all that time, Obama has done for them. He has truly begun the undermining of this popular “third rail” of American politics. Republicans are salivating over the battle. Via FireDogLake, HuffPo’s Ryan Grim got Republican leaders on the record saying exactly what you’d expect them to say (bold mine):

Republicans acknowledged that the expiration of the tax holiday will be treated as a tax increase. “Once something like this goes into place, a year from now, when it expires, it’ll be portrayed as a tax increase,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). So in a body like Congress, precedents matter and this is setting a precedent. I think that certainly is going to create some problems down the road if it passes.”

Given that Congress, under Democratic control, can’t gather itself to let tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire, members of both parties are convinced that letting the payroll tax rate revert back to its current spot will be near impossible.

“Once you bring a rate down, if it goes back up, people will feel that. They’ll feel their paycheck being less and that argument” — that letting it expire amounts to a tax hike — “eventually is bound to be made,” said Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.).

“There’s always a tendency to continue those things… Once something comes in, it’s very difficult to change it,” said Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio.) He then volunteered, without prompting, that “It would be detrimental to the Social Security system, especially when it’s in bad shape.”

We all know this is going to be the way it goes down. There will be a one year extension next year, since the political season’ll be heating up, and then another, and another, maybe longer one. One way or the other, the FICA tax cut will be permanent. Then comes the SS and Medicare “crisis” that this will create. Republicans will say that since neither is solvent any longer, benefits will have to be cut, the age of SS will have to go up, less will have to be paid out. This is, of course, right as the Baby Boomers are retiring, making it even more dire.

There’s an easy answer to this of course. Make the FICA tax cut permanent, but raise the ceiling of wages that FICA affects to $200K, or $250K. But this will not happen, because it should have happened several times already, and Democrats are effing wusses and can’t get it done, even with big majorities in Congress and the White House.

So, kiss your retirement plans goodbye, my friends. Forget about having quality health care in your later years and certainly, don’t rely on Democrats to save your ass, either.

A self-identified strong political centrist friend on facebook recently expressed his disgust at Obama’s “compromise” on the tax cut extensions for the rich. I commented that if Obama has lost him, he really has lost the squishy middle. Polls show that the vast majority of Americans didn’t want a tax cut extension for the wealthy. And in the context of all the (somewhat misplaced) concern over deficits, this so-called compromise from Obama is even weirder - after all, neither the tax cuts, nor the unemployment benefit extension that we “got” from Republinans, are “paid for.” Which makes both the Republicans, who “ran” on the deficit, and Obama, with his Catfood (er, “Deficit”) Commission, incredibly hypocritical.

Of course, Obama didn’t lose, and the Republicans didn’t win, on the election being about deficits. It was about an economy that people felt hadn’t gotten enough attention by our leaders of either party. Many stayed home, and the result was that the fired up Republicans took control of the House. But you can’t convince a Republican about that by giving in to him.

But it gets worse. Obama called the Republicans “hostage takers” - and he’s right. They held a gun to Americans suffering with long term unemployment, and to tax cuts for the middle class, and demanded a ransom for the rich, despite the 60%+ of Americans who don’t want that. Obama wants us to believe that this was about preventing harm to the hostages.

He might be right, but only for the short term. What do you get when you negotiate with hostage takers? Emboldened hostage takers. They now know they can threaten harm to get what they want with little or no consequences. And the next threat of harm is right around the corner, and is very, very dire - Chris Bowers at dkos explains:

The problem is, this deal does not free the hostages, and escort them to a safe place. This is because, at a minimum, the deal does not raise the debt ceiling.

According to current projections, Congress will have to vote on raising the debt ceiling in late March, or else the whole country goes into default. At that time, Republicans could–and likely will–take the entire country hostage. After their successful hostage taking on the tax cuts, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling preventing default, they could demand spending cuts that will far exceed any of the stimulus in this deal, or exceed any collateral damage caused by not doing this deal.

Keep in mind that many Republican leaders threatened this very thing already. It’s not a matter of maybe, it’s a matter of when and how much.

This time it won’t be your $400-to-700-on-average tax cut extension on the line, or the $2M long term unemployed, but the “Full Faith and Credit of the United States” held hostage. That threat, if carried out (government shutdown, defaulting on loans, the works) could cause another severe dip back down to recession. So, what safety did we gain for the American public with this deal? After all, we just proved to Republicans that holding the American economy and people hostage gets them pretty much everything they want.

Republicans leaders don’t really believe their own hype that tax cuts for the wealthy (or preventing the lapse of such) really helps job growth. The Congressional Budget Office, and many other prestigious institutions, have said over and over again that this “trickle down” theory doesn’t really work - tax cuts for the rich are not stimulative. It is marginally more stimulative to cut taxes for the middle class and below, as they are out there spending their money on goods and services, and so will spend marginally more if given tax cuts. It is more stimulative still is to ensure that the unemployed are buoyed up by benefits, and the best stimulus is direct government spending. Those facts are not in dispute - unless you’re a Republican leader (or their adherents) trying to sell a despicable tax and spending cut policy that will continue to erode the middle class.

In fact, you can easily make the argument that a double dip recession will only benefit Republicans politically, as people will continue the blame the party that is mostly in power, even if in name only. You might even be able to make the argument that they could be cynically aiming to bring us back to recession in order to peddle their snake oil solutions in 2012, and possibly succeed. Certainly, with Democratic leaders reluctant to use their bully pulpit to fight for what will help the middle class and small businesses, there really isn’t any competing storyline out there to gainsay them.

The fact is, not holding a line now will have consequences going forward. Not just political consequences - those are pretty bad alone. But also policy consequences on the “hostages” that Obama thinks he just saved. Enjoy the compromise you have now, because it’s going to get even worse later.