Monthly Archives: October 2011

Occupy Victory

26 Replies

Media pundits like the New York Times’ Bill Keller continue to fret about the Occupy Movement and their leaderless revolution.

I’m prepared to celebrate when the Occupiers — like the lone hunger artist of India — accomplish something more than organizing their own campsite cleanup, demonstrating their tolerance for tear gas, and distracting the conversation a little from the Tea Party. So far, the main achievement of Occupy Wall Street is showing up.

But to look at the words of the Republican leaders last week, I would say the Occupy Movement has already accomplished its main goal—raising national consciousness of economic inequality.

Income inequality, a cause of liberal economists and pundits, is working its way into the discourse of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

It’s a concept that the Occupy Wall Street movement has virtually owned and spread as its protests expand. Democrats have latched on, too, hammering Republicans for economic policies they say favor only the rich. And the Congressional Budget Office released a major report last week, showing that average household income for the top 1 percent of earners increased 275 percent from 1979 to 2007 while increasing just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of earners. So rather than ignore the disparity — and risk looking out of touch — Republicans are acknowledging income inequality. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is discussing it; House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has talked about wealth disparity; and rank-and-file Republicans have started to lace the phrase into talks and interviews.

As soon as you have got Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan defending their support of the 1%, the main political dialogue has changed. There is no real way for Republicans to explain how the Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the fat cats have benefited the country as a whole. Here is an example of their lame defense strategy.

“Absolutely, there’s huge income inequality, and it started right here in Washington,” said Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas). “The way we fix that is getting the government out of the way of the private sector so we can put these people to work.”

Years ago, when Reagan first started cutting taxes for the rich, his advisors put forth the notion of “trickle down economics”, but the new CBO study shows that to be the Big Lie we always thought it was. And as Paul Krugmann points out this morning, there is nothing more hypocritical that Republicans railing against government spending.

Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because “more spending is not what California or this country needs.” But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon — now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.

The Occupy Movement took much of its inspiration from the Arab Spring revolutions, and now as winter approaches, I think they need to borrow another page from the Arab street—The Friday Protest March. Instead of trying to Occupy Wall Street with a small number of diehards, what is needed is a well organized large march at lunch time every Friday in each one of the main Occupy Cities. They would get all the press coverage and more importantly would widen their network over the coming months. The movement has already changed the national conversation as Ohio Republican Congressman Steve LaTourette acknowledges.

“In all [of] the messages that the president has tested this year, income inequality is probably the one that’s picking up the most steam, at least in my hometown, and so it’s something we’ve got to be aware of,” LaTourette said. “I don’t know if it’s something we need to talk about but … it’s something we need to be aware of.”

Now comes the hard part for the Occupy forces. Sustaining a movement for the next 12 months that will be based on economic justice and rebuilding America instead financing useless weapons of mass destruction.

Deluded and Defiant

22 Replies

A headline in this morning’s New York Times described the last days of Qaddafi’s life as “deluded, defiant and unwilling to quit”. I laughed and thought, “just like like Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann”. The Republican Presidential field does make you wonder about the current state of our democratic process. Here you have at least two candidates that are in the race solely to raise their speaking fees (Cain and Gingrich). Four more candidates who have as much chance of being the Republican nominee as I do (Santorum, Huntsman, Bachmann and Paul). One candidate (Perry) who was riding high in the polls until he opened his mouth and then went into freefall. And then there is Mitt Romney, who has never held a firm opinion on anything for more than about a month and has never been able to attract more than 25% of the vote in any poll.

My guess is that Romney will get the nomination next summer, but not before being bludgeoned with the blunt force instrument of Perry’s Texas sized war chest. In the end, the evangelicals (and much of the Tea Party) will stay home in the November election and Obama will win on the strength of a great ground game, continued foreign policy success and a gradually improving economy. Then hopefully the Tea Party will split off into a third party, forever dooming both themselves and the Country Club Republicans to the wilderness of irrelevancy.

For Obama, getting out of both Iraq and Afghanistan would allow him to make real his promise of last week.

The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year.  The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward, and our troops are finally coming home.  As they do, fewer deployments and more time training will help keep our military the very best in the world.  And as we welcome home our newest veterans, we’ll never stop working to give them and their families the care, the benefits and the opportunities that they have earned.

This includes enlisting our veterans in the greatest challenge that we now face as a nation — creating opportunity and jobs in this country.  Because after a decade of war, the nation that we need to build — and the nation that we will build — is our own; an America that sees its economic strength restored just as we’ve restored our leadership around the globe.

We need some new anthems

30 Replies

In my new book, Outlaw Blues; Adventures in the Counter-culture Wars, I talk about the role of the great protest song in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. Songs like If I had a Hammer, Blowin in the Wind, We Shall Overcome were the basic tool of non-violent protest sit-ins. If you were going to get arrested, it was easier if everyone was singing the same anthem. I thought about that the other day in New York when I visited Occupy Wall Street. The main music of the encampment was some drum circles. That’s like a performance–full of ego. It’s the opposite of singing an anthem.

I think we need some new anthems, but it also raises a larger question. The great non-violent protest movements of the past have had at their core a leader whose core vision was of love, not anger. As Michael Shellenberger pointed out years ago, King’s most famous speech was “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare”. The core of OWS is the concept “We are the 99%”. It is brilliant in its simplicity to distill the notion that the whole system is rigged to advantage the 1%, but without a dream—a vision of how we get out of this Interregnum—the movement will never advance beyond drum circles, witty posters and identity politics.

Year of Living Dangerously

23 Replies

One year from today we will enter the final two weeks of the Presidential Race. The punditry are making certain predictions they see as “inevitable. But there is a big chance that the radical spirit in the air on both Left and Right as represented by Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, could prove the pundits wrong.

As to the Republicans, the conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney is now the “inevitable” nominee of the Republican Party. He may in fact prevail next summer, but it is far from inevitable. Two factors will make this a long and brutal race for the nomination.

    • Money-Rick Perry has raised a lot of money and he’s not going to shrink back to Texas without a fight. Reporting Romney’s quarterly total the New York Times noted.

The amount gives Mr. Romney what is expected to be the second largest third-quarter haul in the Republican field, behind Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Mr. Perry’s aides said last week that he had raised more than $17 million for the period, which covered his first weeks in the campaign.

On the Democratic side, the rise of the Occupy Movement it is making it easier for Obama and the Democrats to fight a Populist Campaign for 2012 which isn’t on Tea Party terms, but on theirs. If Tea Party really does decide to throw their support to the very same Elite Republicans who Limbaugh claims are at war with the Tea Party,it would be a really revealing moment. To decide to throw away the revolutionary attitude and fight in an election—to “Help the One Percent”—(i.e. to have no “Billionaires” surtax). The Tea Party is welcome to fight that war, but it will reveal them to be the Dick Armey Astroturf movement some have suspected as being from the start.

I continue to argue, we are in this wild Interregnum Moment. The very fact that the elite keeps asking that the Occupy Movement create a leadership structure. And they refuse. May be they know what we do to leaders of nascent movements.

 

 

Steve Jobs

38 Replies

 

I will add but a few words to the millions that will be written in the next few days about Steve Jobs.

At the Innovation Lab we try to inculcate the notion that you can’t be afraid. You can’t be afraid to fail. You can’t be afraid to “be different”. You can’t be afraid to celebrate the weird mix of art and science that is true innovation. Steve Jobs embodied all of those qualities. I wrote a bit about him in my new book and there is a cool video in the book of his graduation speech at Stanford that you will see replayed too often in the next few days.

I think Steve Jobs represents everything we hope for in our vision of the entrepreneurial America we have in our dreams. As a country and as leaders, we fall short of that dream on a daily basis. At Apple, which has been a wonderful partner to our Lab, they have a saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch every day.” Steve inculcated a culture of innovation into the people he worked for. That may have been his greatest gift.