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Outside Money Making the Race a Rich Man's Game

Please take 15 minutes to listen to this report by Guy Raz of NPR's All Things Considered. The richest 100 people in America are providing 80% of the money going to Republican Super-PAC's, and, this constitutes 80% of all the money being spent by these lawless electioneering entities. This report implies but does not come out and say that the "Citizens United" decree was a direct response to the advent of social media and crowd-funding, which made it possible for We the People to have a larger say in, for instance, who is elected president.



Note: If you can't see the audio player above, click here to listen to this segment.

Let's Be Less Productive

This article by Tim Jackson ran in the New York Times on May 26, 2012. The image was added.

Has the pursuit of labor productivity reached its limit? 

Productivity — the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy — is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.’s and finance ministers. Perhaps forgivably so: our ability to generate more output with fewer people has lifted our lives out of drudgery and delivered us a cornucopia of material wealth. 

But the relentless drive for productivity may also have some natural limits. Ever-increasing productivity means that if our economies don’t continue to expand, we risk putting people out of work. If more is possible each passing year with each working hour, then either output has to increase or else there is less work to go around. Like it or not, we find ourselves hooked on growth. 

What, then, should happen when, for one reason or another, growth just isn’t to be had anymore? Maybe it’s a financial crisis. Or rising prices for resources like oil. Or the need to rein in growth for the damage it’s inflicting on the planet: climate change, deforestation, the loss of biodiversity. Maybe it’s any of the reasons growth can no longer be safely and easily assumed in any of today’s economies. The result is the same. Increasing productivity threatens full employment. 

One solution would be to accept the productivity increases, shorten the workweek and share the available work. Such proposals — familiar since the 1930s — are now enjoying something of a revival in the face of continuing recession. The New Economics Foundation, a British think tank, proposes a 21-hour workweek. It may not be the workaholic’s choice. But it’s certainly a strategy worth thinking about. 

But there’s another strategy for keeping people in work when demand stagnates. Perhaps in the long run it’s an easier and a more compelling solution: to loosen our grip on the relentless pursuit of productivity. By easing up on the gas pedal of efficiency and creating jobs in what are traditionally seen as “low productivity” sectors, we have within our grasp the means to maintain or increase employment, even when the economy stagnates. 

At first, this may sound crazy; we’ve become so conditioned by the language of efficiency. But there are sectors of the economy where chasing productivity growth doesn’t make sense at all. Certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation of people’s time and attention. The caring professions are a good example: medicine, social work, education. Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages. 

In the first place, the time spent by these professions directly improves the quality of our lives. Making them more and more efficient is not, after a certain point, actually desirable. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour? The Royal College of Nursing in Britain warned recently that front-line staff members in the National Health Service are now being “stretched to breaking point,” in the wake of staffing cuts, while a study earlier this year in the Journal of Professional Nursing revealed a worrying decline in empathy among student nurses coping with time targets and efficiency pressures. Instead of imposing meaningless productivity targets, we should be aiming to enhance and protect not only the value of the care but also the experience of the caregiver. 

The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value. 

Care is not the only profession deserving renewed attention as a source of economic employment. Craft is another. It is the accuracy and detail inherent in crafted goods that endows them with lasting value. It is the time and attention paid by the carpenter, the seamstress and the tailor that makes this detail possible. The same is true of the cultural sector: it is the time spent practicing, rehearsing and performing that gives music, for instance, its enduring appeal. What — aside from meaningless noise — would be gained by asking the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony faster and faster each year? 

The endemic modern tendency to streamline or phase out such professions highlights the lunacy at the heart of the growth-obsessed, resource-intensive consumer economy. Low productivity is seen as a disease. A whole set of activities that could provide meaningful work and contribute valuable services to the community are denigrated because they involve employing people to work with devotion, patience and attention. 

But people often achieve a greater sense of well-being and fulfillment, both as producers and consumers of such activities, than they ever do in the time-poor, materialistic supermarket economy in which most of our lives are spent. And here perhaps is the most remarkable thing of all: since these activities are built around the value of human services rather than the relentless outpouring of material stuff, they offer a half-decent chance of making the economy more environmentally sustainable. 

Of course, a transition to a low-productivity economy won’t happen by wishful thinking. It demands careful attention to incentive structures — lower taxes on labor and higher taxes on resource consumption and pollution, for example. It calls for more than just lip service to concepts of patient-centered care and student-centered learning. It requires the dismantling of perverse productivity targets and a serious investment in skills and training. In short, avoiding the scourge of unemployment may have less to do with chasing after growth and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society. 

Tim Jackson is a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and the author of “Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.”

Not So Funny

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Think About It, Friends

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What Happened to the Occupy Movement?

This article by Arun Gupta was published by Al Jazeera on May 23, 2012. 

Police cleared New York's Zuccotti Park, and the movement has reportedly struggled to find more organising space [Getty Images]

Occupy Wall Street was at the pinnacle of its power in October 2011, when thousands of people converged at Zuccotti Park and successfully foiled the plans of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg to sweep away the occupation on grounds of public health. From that vantage point, the Occupy movement appears to have tumbled off a cliff, having failed to organise anything like a general strike on May Day - despite months of rumblings of mass walkouts, blockades and shutdowns.

The mainstream media are eager to administer last rites. CNN declared "May Day fizzled", the New York Post sneered "Goodbye, Occupy" and the New York Times consigned the day's events to fewer than 400 words, mainly about arrests in New York City.

Historians and organisers counter that the Occupy movement needs to be seen in relative terms. Eminent sociologist Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Poor People's Movements, says:

"I don't know of a movement that unfolds in less than a decade. People are impatient, and some of them are too quick to pass judgment. But it's the beginning, I think, of a great movement. One of a series of movement that has episodically changed history, which is not the way we tell the story of American history."

Brooke Lehman, a central figure in the anti-corporate globalization movement a decade ago, says:

"Compared to a year ago, the level of activity is amazing today. There is a whole new generation of high school and college students being radicalised."

Others note that protests did take place in more than 110 cities on May Day in recognition of worker resistance and solidarity, no mean feat given the hostility to labour among the ruling elite i the US. At the same time, only shameless partisans would deny that the Occupy movement is struggling to reclaim the heights it had last year, and many activists admit this in private. Some argue that police and media hostility act as a one-two punch that can knock out movements such as Occupy, and this is all too true, as explained below. But other movements surmount these obstacles. North of the US-Canada border, hundreds of thousands of university students in Quebec have maintained a militant strike for three months against tuition increases in defiance of whip-cracking politicians, pundits and police.

Lack of 'space'

The real stumbling block for the Occupy movement is also the reason for its success: space, or now, the lack thereof. Understanding the significance of political space and Occupy's inability to recapture it reveals why the movement is having difficulty re-gaining traction.

In-depth coverage of the global movement

Americans have become so enmeshed in the transience of work, life, housing, play, finance and the proliferation of virtual spaces that it is easy to forget taking collective action in a shared physical space is how social change happens from below. Take the labour movement. The history of industrial workers' struggle starts with the insight that capitalists are their own undoing, by amassing workers in a common space - the factory - where they become aware of their common interests, as well as their potential power to stop the machinery of capital. The same is true of student movements. The shared educational space can unite students around common grievances and goals. And for the civil rights movement, black churches played a pivotal role.

Now, Occupy Wall Street differs in that it appropriated a private-public park and reconfigured it as a political space. It was a manifestation of the central concept of the Occupy movement: there can be no political democracy without economic democracy. Its potency sprang from the same source as the Arab Spring, Spain's Indignados and the Wisconsin labour uprising - peacefully liberating public space and governing it through participatory democracy.

Before this social contagion first surfaced in Tunisia in late 2010, the previous moment of a mass global outburst was Feb, 15, 2003, the day of protests against the impending US invasion of Iraq. That was the problem: it was only a day with no bottom-up democratic essence. Not only could Bush shrug it off as a "focus group", the protests could be twisted as legitimacy for aggressor states - because they allowed space for democratic dissent in contrast to the terror of Saddam Hussein.

Colonised by consumption

Anti-war protest has little impact anymore, because it has devolved into gathering on a weekend in the political capital, marching around empty streets with pre-printed signs, mouthing toothless chants and listening to cliched speeches. It is too predictable and too easy to ignore, by rulers who are insulated from the ruled by dollars and truncheons. On the other hand, occupying space in the heart of a city without end is a challenge to state power.

One activist said of the encampment on Wall Street: "At any moment, you could call for an impromptu march on Goldman Sachs and a hundred people would join you." The night of October 5, 2011, was a spectacular example of this. After a union-led rally in downtown Manhattan, thousands of people surged through the financial district in breakaway marches for hours. With so many people in the streets feeling the wind of public support at their backs, Wall Street felt fragile and the New York Police Department was under siege.

Keeping a space continually, and using democratic forms of self-governance recreates the commons, which has been colonised over decades by full-spectrum consumption - shopping, eating, drinking, entertainment and paid spectacle. Occupy Wall Street attracted throngs of journalists and the curious because it was a completely different spectacle. It was a miniature society that rejected the private, individualism and capitalism. The scene of hundreds of people exchanging food, art, music, knowledge, politics, healthcare, shelter, anger, ideas, skills and love was unlike anything else in our consumer societies - because not one exchange was lubricated by money (of course the goods were paid for at some point). Within the occupation, thousands shared the experience of having a direct democratic stake in a society they were helping to build from scratch.

These democratic societies, more than 300 of which popped up around the United States by October 2011, propelled Occupy by enticing a huge number of political neophytes to join an organic movement. The real power of a social movement, from the 1960s to the Tea Party, is not to recombine existing activists in a new formation but to bring in the previously non-political. At occupations, experienced organisers marvelled at the ability to have meaningful conversations with people of radically different backgrounds and politics. Having visited nearly 40 occupations across the US, I encountered many self-identified conservatives and Republicans and even a few Tea Party members who said they were part of the 99 per cent.

It was the Occupy movement that created the people - "the 99 per cent" - not the other way around. The range of politics and issues ran the gamut, but having the space for collective discussion gave occupiers the time to coalesce around the idea that society's problems stem from the concentration of wealth and power among "the one per cent". Thus, those who lack healthcare, had homes foreclosed upon, are unemployed, stuck in low-wage jobs, are homeless, subject to repressive immigration laws, burdened with student debt, opposed to destructive energy extraction or angered by corporate personhood and a political system corrupted by money could find common cause and unite against a common enemy.

Media blackout

But it wasn't just anger. Different visions of society blossomed in the space. As Michael Premo of Occupy Wall Street, puts it: "You don't know how to dream unless you see it sometimes. The occupation unlocked the creative, radical imagination." Seeing different ways of organising work and community has kick-started innumerable projects around the country, such as urban farming, community centres, workers cooperatives, free schools and housing reclamation.

That's all changed. While a few scattered occupations remain in the political hinterlands - cities such as Little Rock and Tallahassee - every other one has been booted out of the collective space over the past six months. In many cities, most prominently New York, the general assemblies have disintegrated, because the democratic practice becomes a floating abstraction without the space to anchor it. The space glued the various tendencies together because the decisions were conducted within and concerned the alternate society growing up around them. In cities where the assemblies continue they often draw perhaps one-tenth of the numbers who attended at the peak. Ruth Fowler, a writer who works with Occupy Los Angeles, says: "Occupy is very odd right now. The people who have stayed are the cream of the crap, and the brilliant. The rank-and-file in between are at home."

Despite new activists drifting away, Occupy has hardly disappeared. Nationwide, it is defending homeowners from evictions and disrupting auctions of foreclosed homes. There is a national campaign to force the government to break Bank of America into regional banks. Students are fighting against tuition increases and school cuts and for a moratorium on student debt. Occupiers are working with unions to battle corporations cutting wages and benefits. And many Occupy groups have joined movements for single-payer healthcare and against environmentally destructive oil and gas drilling.

David Solnit, who works with Occupy San Francisco, indicates one reason why the Occupy movement appears to have faded away, "Any movement has its mass mobilisation and its in-between times... We need a better measuring tape than numbers and public space and whether it's amplified through media owned by the one per cent."

Simply put, corporate media are inclined to dismiss a movement that wants to chop up corporations - if not eliminate them entirely. A study by two sociologists backs this up. Surveying more than 2,200 US newspapers, Jackie Smith and Patrick Rafail found coverage of the Occupy movement has dwindled to a trickle since November, despite hundreds of active Occupy groups, thousands of organising projects and extensive May Day activity. Even more telling, newspaper coverage of inequality has shrunk by nearly 70 per cent since autumn.

State repression

One can debate whether or not Occupy is still effective, but there is no way to deny income and wealth inequalities have reached historical extremes or that two-thirds of all in the US - and 55 per cent of Republicans - say "there are 'very strong' or 'strong' conflicts between the rich and the poor," according to the Pew Research Center.

The media indifference extends to downplaying state repression. Ironically, force is a measure of success because it's recognition that the movement is a threat:

In Oakland, police rolled out a tank on May Day

• Chicago has increased penalties for protests and made it more difficult to secure permits in advance of the anti-NATO protests
• University of California officials are pushing for charges against 11 students and one poetry professor that carry 11 years of prison time and million-dollar fines for nonviolent sit-down protests against Bank of America
• Most ominously, the FBI, which was forged in the crucible of the post-World War I Red Scare, is up to its old tricks. Relying on the same techniques it uses to ensnare Muslims in "terrorism" plots, the FBI arrested five anarchists in Cleveland for allegedly plotting to blow up a bridge
• Most recently, one activist in Salt Lake City claimed three FBI agents showed up at his home, unannounced, asking for names of people planning on attending the anti-NATO protests in Chicago

The repression is aimed at preventing Occupy from reclaiming a space, which novelist Arundhati Roy predicted months ago: "Holding territory may not be something the [Occupy] movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States." Since March, Occupy Wall Street has tried to retake public spaces in Lower Manhattan four times, and four times the police have cracked down. The most recent attempt, the night of May Day, was met by a massive police presence in Wall Street, with cops threatening anyone who looked like a protester with arrest.

Let it marinate

"Cinematic" is the only way to convey the image of public sidewalks and streets blanketed with thousands of riot police, surveillance units, snatch squads, detectives, beat cops, community police, white-shirted commanders, phalanxes of scooter police, four police helicopters overhead and cars, SUVs, buses, trucks and command vehicles flashing emergency lights. All to clear out a few thousand people, mainly youths, who gathered for a democratic assembly and the faint hope they could recreate the magic of Occupy Wall Street.

Even though I spent hours in the area with other journalists, and was threatened with arrest five times, I did not see one mainstream media account describing the opulent display of police force. Nonetheless, despite the unveiled fist of the state that is written out of the media narrative, movements sometimes do find a way to triumph. As shown by Egypt's democratic uprising, numbers and organisation can force the state not only to back down, it can cause the ruling edifice to fatally crack. This is what happened on October 14, when Occupy Wall Street gathered enough people, allies and media pressure to force Bloomberg and the police to abandon their threat to oust the occupation.

The big question for Occupy is how it can build a dual system of power, as Egyptian activists did over years with revitalised labour organising, a national anti-police brutality movement and politicised youth and women in micro-enterprises that populate urban areas. This requires organisation, but it also gets back to the question of space. Alienation, fragmentation and suspicion is so pervasive in US society that people need secure areas where they can take the time to share stories, to listen and debate, create bonds, forge trust and take action.

The places where Americans can and do gather in large numbers, such as parks, squares, factories, shopping centres, the workplace, stadiums, schools and places of worship are almost all privatised and subject to strict legal and physical regulation. Nonetheless, Occupy's future success is based on finding forms of space where it can reproduce itself.

Until then, Frances Fox Piven is right that movements take a decade or more to have an effect. It took 22 years from A Phillip Randolph's aborted 1941 March on Washington to Martin Luther King Jr's 1963 march that signaled the end of Jim Crow. It was a decade from the first national anti-war march in 1965 to the end of the Vietnam War. It's taken more than 20 years for the LGBT movement to succeed in getting a sitting president to endorse marriage equality.

And just as it took years of labour organising prior to the 1937 sit-down strikes (another form of occupation) that secured collective bargaining rights for unions, the Occupy movement has barely begun.

Surviving Austerity (Cartoon from the New York Times)

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Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms

The following article appeared on RobertReich.org on May 9. 2012.

Boardroom or Bedroom: 2012?

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms. 

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting women’s reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Republican bedroom crowd doesn’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.

Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.

Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.

They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.

We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

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SD on Sidelines in Citizens United Battle

The following article appeared on the Madville Times blog on May 21, 2012.  

Montana, 22 Other States Fight Citizens United; South Dakota on Sidelines

Montana is fighting the Supreme Court’s logic-defying Citizens United in a lawsuit filed by a corporation, not a person, that wants to maintain its right to interfere in Montana state elections with unlimited and anonymous campaign donations. Twenty-two states have signed on to back Montana:

"Montana and the other states are asking the court to either let the Montana Supreme Court decision stand or to hold a full hearing. They argue laws like the one in Montana that bans political spending straight from corporate treasuries are needed to prevent corruption.

"The other states, many with their own type of restrictions hanging in the balance, argue local restrictions are far different than the federal ban the court decided unconstitutionally restricted free speech. Further, state elections are at much greater risk than federal elections of being dominated by corporate money, requiring tailored regulation, the states’ court filing says.

“`The federal law struck down in Citizens United applied only to elections for President and U.S. Congress,' New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wrote on behalf of the states. `By contrast, Montana’s law applies to a wide range of state and local offices, including judgeships and law enforcement positions such as sheriff and county prosecutor.'

"The joining states, unlike Montana, ask the court to go further and reconsider core findings in Citizens United. They argue, for instance, it was wrong for the court to say unlimited independent expenditures rarely cause corruption or the appearance of corruption [Matt Gouras, "22 States Join Campaign Finance Fight," AP via Idaho Statesman, 2012.05.20]."

South Dakota, alas, is not party to this suit. We’re too busy protecting corporations’ ability to take away our health insurance to keep them from also taking away our democracy. States rights only matter to Marty Jackley and Dennis Daugaard when they serve the plutocracy.

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How Hard Is Poverty Hitting Your County?

A map of changes in poverty, county by county.

[OB editor's note: To use the interactive map, click here. Brookings County, SD, shows a nearly 3% increase in poverty.]

By Andy Hull, Nick McClellan, and Troy K. Schneider

Posted on Slate on Friday, May 18, 2012, at 9:00 AM ET

 

It’s hardly news that the Great Recession pushed millions of Americans into poverty. In 2010, “poverty” meant having an income of less than $22,113 for a family of four; 15.1 percent of Americans were below that line. As this map shows, some areas of the country fared worse than others between 2007 and 2010. While some counties saw their poverty rates increase only slightly, and some even saw them drop, the number of people under the poverty line in Oregon’s Malheur County doubled to nearly two-fifths of its population. And those “bright spots” that appear as dark blue? Look closer—a full 6-point improvement in South Dakota’s Ziebach County still left more than one-half its residents below the poverty line. And even the poverty rate itself understates the privation in the country.

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Report on OB General Assembly, 5/19/2012

Occupy Brookings met in General Assembly on Saturday, May 19, at the Brookings United Church of Christ. Lawrence Novotny facilitated. This report has been submitted by Phyllis Cole-Dai.

1. Petition Canvass for HB1234. Members should turn in all petitions, notarized, to Lawrence Novotny by Monday, June 4. We have a meeting on June 2, so that might be a good time to turn them in, unless you need more time. All petitions must arrive at the SDEA by June 8. Lawrence will send a reminder later this month.
2. Upcoming Meetings. June and July meetings will be as regularly scheduled, on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays. 
3. DVD Available. “The Economics of Happiness”. OB now owns a copy that was donated. Members can pass it around. Mary Schaefer currently has it.
4. Mary Schaefer’s Letter to the Editor. OB member Mary and her husband Pete sent a letter to the editor of the Register about education. It was posted to the OB website. 
5. Tentative Cash Mob Planned for Farmer’s Market: June 30. OB members should try to patronize the Farmer’s Market as much as possible this summer (hours: 3-6 pm Wednesdays, 8 am-12 noon Saturdays). In addition, we want to invite the public to Cash Mob the market on June 30. We will do advance publicity, and also have an information table at the market with literature about why “growing and eating local” is important, Occupy Brookings, Dakota Rural Action and the Fast for the Earth. Before the next meeting, Chris Moller will check with DRA about how they might partner with us in this; Connie Irwin will ask Ann Marie Bahr if she could provide some music (perhaps with Phyllis Cole-Dai). At the next Assembly, members will sign up to do various tasks in preparation for the event.
6. Update on the “Fast for the Earth.” Phyllis Cole-Dai reported that publicity for the Fast is underway, largely (so far) to organizations outside of South Dakota. As of this writing, 16 people have signed up for the Fast from a variety of states as well as Canada and Germany. We have received various types of help from persons and/or organizations that we have contacted. (Phyllis learned on Sunday that the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center has endorsed the Fast and will help us, too, as able.) Building alliances with native people will take special effort and care, as they have good reason not to trust us. OB members are encouraged to visit the website (http://www.fastfortheearth.com) and to sign up if they plan to be involved in any way, whether during launch week (August 1-8) or sometime thereafter.
7. Report on the Postal Service. Chris Moller reported that the current dilemma of the Postal Service can be traced to 2006, when legislation was enacted requiring the Service to prepay the retirement benefits for all employees for the next 75 years. This funding has to be completed by 2016 (only ten years!). No other federal agency has ever been required to do this. It’s practically impossible. But if the Postal Service doesn’t comply, it may be dissolved and mail service privatized. This seems to be the aim of at least some of the groups that supported the 2006 legislation, including Americans for Prosperity and the American Enterprise Institute, both of which are funded by the Koch brothers, among others. Fortunately, a recent bill passed by Congress places a two-year moratorium on severe cuts to postal services. So we need to make our opinions heard over the next couple of years. Senator Tim Johnson has already come out in support of the Postal Service. We need to affirm him in this and also mobilize the community to protest loudly to our other congressional members. We will continue to address this. 
8. Discussion of Whether to Change Our Movement’s Name. Those present believe that we should keep the name for now. We should also be less reluctant to identify our efforts as “Occupy Brookings.”

NEXT MEETING: Saturday, June 2, at the Brookings Public Library.

Occupy the Media

Occupy Brookings member Mary Schaefer and her husband Pete submitted the following letter to the editor to the Brookings Register, where it was published last week. It's in keeping with OB's support for strong public education.


May 17, 2012


As parents of two students who had the privileged opportunity to attend the Brookings Public Schools, we can attest to the fact that they received an excellent education. We have always felt they experienced educational opportunities not found in many communities, taught by exceptional teachers, K-12.

Partaking in Debate, Robotics, Science Olympiad, Music and Theatre meant our kids spent numerous amounts of time at school beyond the normal school hours, in the evenings, and on the weekends. Any parent would agree that being in Debate alone meant their student practically lived at the school during the many months of the Debate season. No better place to be, than with a caring and dedicated mentor, their teacher. There are numerous teachers who give of their time unselfishly for their students, well beyond the call of duty. We are thankful to the great educators we’ve encountered, and the experience and wisdom of those teachers. It is unfortunate that the increasing demands on teachers’ time (among other issues) seems to be causing excellent teachers to leave the profession.

We urge the school board to listen to these wise teachers when they express concerns about adequate time needed for planning sessions, and being overloaded with more teaching responsibilities. Don’t all kids deserve the best from their teachers?

“You can go anywhere from here.” It begins with preparation from excellent and committed teachers, and great opportunities long before the college years. Losing excellent teachers to early retirement is a loss to the Brookings school system, and a loss to the state of South Dakota.


Mary and Pete Schaefer

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Love as a Public Virtue

This article by John Thatamanil was postedon the Huffington Post Religion Page, May 16, 2012.

Fairness, kindness and, above all, love seem like ethereal notions empty of force in a world of power politics and free wheeling capitalism. Realpolitik is for the sober-minded whereas love is best left to otherworldly preachers and slightly addled spiritual gurus. At a subtler level, some Americans have come to believe that values like kindness and love are to be cultivated in private life, in one-on-one interaction, whereas public life is unavoidably a free for all dog-eat-dog affair. Those who seek to order public life by "the soft" private virtue of love are said to be naïve at best and downright foolish or even dangerous at worst.

But watching the nightly news -- no grand appeal to the course of history is necessary -- demonstrates that we get what we deserve when we configure public life as a value-free realm in which the unfettered pursuit of profit, power and private interest are invited to reign without regulation. Investment banks speculate, oil companies pollute, pharmaceutical companies charge whatever the market will bear no matter the cost to our bodies, and the earth is set on a course for catastrophic climate change. The poor go hungry, children live on the streets or in our subway tunnels and the fabric of our common life is torn asunder. The very idea that the citizens of a country might owe each other anything at all, that there may be priceless public goods that cannot be rendered into marketable commodities, is regarded as tantamount to socialism.

Too many American ears have become unmusical to the language of mutual care and obligation. Talk about employing the government to regulate industry and our banking sector and to offer a minimum standard of living for the poor and the elderly is subject to suspicion. Dare to suggest that government should seek to insure that school lunches are actually healthful for our children, and the cry will go up that do-gooders desire a "nanny state" which will coddle citizens at the expense of liberty. At what price will we seek a liberty that does not liberate? Meanwhile, "public servants" seek without shame to dismantle the safety net even as they labor to expand a bloated Pentagon budget with funds that even the Pentagon has the decency not to request.

In such times, the demand that love must be put to work in the public sphere as a force that drives toward justice hardly seems quaint, naïve or Pollyannaish. On the contrary, what seems fanciful is the foolhardy notion that companies will serve the public good out of the kindness of their hearts or that markets will order themselves spontaneously without regulation. How has it come to pass that the ideal of love seeking justice is regarded as utopian, and the notion that the collective good will spontaneously arise when each pursues self-interest is counted as sober minded economic science?

We diminish love because of a failure of imagination that reduces it to kindly feeling. Love is far more: love is labor. It is the demanding work of living out in mind, heart and body the truth of our being bound together. Love is what follows from the clear-minded appreciation that our mutual interconnectedness means that my wellbeing cannot be purchased at the expense of yours. Love seeks to bind together what has been torn asunder by blind self-interest.

A sad truth is slowly becoming self-evident: When we privatize and domesticate love, it is endangered in every sphere, public and private. Our marriages, partnerships and families cannot endure, let alone flourish, when an unregulated financial industry crashes the economy, puts mothers and fathers out of work and renders families homeless. Love is gravely imperiled when we permit the structures that humanize our lives to fall apart.

Ethicists, philosophers and theologians do well to remind us that institutions and corporations cannot love, even when the latter are declared to be persons. Hence, the public philosopher and prophet Cornel West reminds us that "Justice is what love looks like in public." When the ideal of love is made flesh in equitable structures, when corporations are rendered accountable to the public good, love becomes a "hard" and exacting good.

Of course, what needs also to be shredded is the very dichotomy between the soft and the hard -- a deceptive duality that obscures from view that we are all vulnerable creatures whose purchase on life is exceedingly fragile, especially when the life that we build together has about it no humanity, no heart and no accountability. In the end, we are all soft and fleshy creatures who must invest collectively in the difficult work of love made into justice if we, our children, and generations to come are even to have an inhabitable planet.

But how is such transformation possible if our impoverished imaginations continue to treat love as an airy confection, a sweet private balm that can, at best, sooth the wounds that we must necessarily suffer in the brutal jungle of public life?

We shall live by love, rightly understood, or die without it.

Occupy This, Today

Colonized by Corporations

This op-ed by Chris Hedges was first published by Truthdig on May 15, 2012.

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying—is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations. They were never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been. They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language of oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view. Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than useful idiots. “This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years,”Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.” This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and fairness that is essential to all successful revolutionary movements. The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not go away. It may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of the movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems of power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through habit, routine and inertia. The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites, are useless in dissecting what is happening within these movements. They view reality through the lens of their corporate sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival. Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow transition it is almost impossible to measure progress.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks.” “When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites and join the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful revolution. It does not matter how sophisticated the repressive apparatus. Once those who handle the tools of repression become demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent. Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death. Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back, the dying regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army, including George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army. Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The object is to try to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite what the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote, “unwittingly build new ones.” And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all our energy and commitment.  If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.

Occupy This, Today

Report: "Over-Consumption" Threatening Earth

Published on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 by Common Dreams. 

 

Humans are using 50 percent more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless fundamental changes are made in the way we produce energy, food, and if we cannot curb our consumption of other natural resources that number will continue to skyrocket, according to a new report. Released today by the the World Wildlife Fund, The Living Planet Report, warns that if humans cannot shift their behavior by 2030, even two planets will not be enough to support modern society.

High income nations -- which translates into high levels of consumption -- are doing the most damage to the planet per capita. The report names Qatar as the country with the largest ecological footprint, followed by its Gulf Arab neighbours Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Denmark and the United States made up the remaining top five, calculated by comparing the renewable resources consumed against the earth's regenerative capacity.

Though the WWF's survey follows many others as it paints a grim scenario of the cumulative pressure humankind is putting on the planet, and the consequent decline in the health of the world's forests, rivers and oceans, it also makes note of the many available solutions.

"We do have a choice," write Jim Leape, WWF International's director general. "We can create a prosperous future that provides food, water and energy for the 9 or perhaps 10 billion people who will be sharing the planet in 2050."

The Living Planet Report finds:

• Biodiversity continues to be lost: Populations of species continue to decline, with tropical and freshwater species experiencing the biggest declines. Learn more
• The U.S. has the fifth largest ecological footprint in terms of the amount of resources each person annually consumes. We rank only behind Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Denmark in the global rankings of the Ecological Footprint. Learn more
• Resource scarcity is already being experienced across the globe, as 2.7 billion people around the world already are forced to cope with water scarcity during at least one month a year.

Occupy This, Today

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

By William Deresiewicz. Published May 12, 2012, in the New York Times Sunday Review.
 

There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law. 

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted as much nearly three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.” 

“Private Vices, Publick Benefits” read the book’s subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm — a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are — Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By “pride” Mandeville meant vanity; by “luxury” he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we’d say, was fraud: “All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.” 

In other words, Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught. 

I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests. 

There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself. 

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “job creators,” a phrase begotten by Frank Luntz, the right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand. The rich deserve our gratitude as well as everything they have, in other words, and all the rest is envy. 

First of all, if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It’s neither party’s goal to benefit the other, but that’s what happens nonetheless. 

Also, entrepreneurs and the rich are different and only partly overlapping categories. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurs; they are executives of established corporations, institutional managers of other kinds, the wealthiest doctors and lawyers, the most successful entertainers and athletes, people who simply inherited their money or, yes, people who work on Wall Street. 

MOST important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage — or a student loan, or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business. 

Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are not. “Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us. 

Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was “invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, / When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”

Five Facts That Put America to Shame

Written by Paul Buchheit and published on Monday, May 14, 2012 by Common Dreams

(Painting: 1886 by Edward Moran)

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" These words, from poet Emma Lazarus, were inscribed on the Statue of Liberty over 100 years ago. Today the golden door has a lock on it, paid for with record profits from the health care, education, and financial industries.

1. We're near the bottom of the developed world in children's health and safety

According to a 2007 UNICEF report, the U.S. ranked last among 21 OECD nations in an assessment of child health and safety. The assessment measured infant mortality, immunization, and death from accidents and injuries.

A related 2009 OECD study generally agreed, placing the U.S. 24th out of 30 OECD countries for children's health and safety. It also showed the devastating effects of inequality in our country. Despite having the second-highest average income for children among the 30 OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 27th out of 30 for child poverty (percentage of children living in households that are below 50% of the median income).

2. We've betrayed the young people who were advised to stay in school

Over 40% of recent college graduates are living with their parents, dealing with government loans that average $27,200. The unemployment rate for young people is about 50%. More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010.

As Washington lobbyists endeavor to kill a proposed bill to reduce the interest rates on student debt, federal loans remain readily available, and so colleges go right on increasing their tuition.

Meanwhile, corporations hold $2 trillion in cash while looking for investments and employees in foreign countries, and American students are forced to accept menial positions. Yet delusions persist about our new generation of would-be workers. Conservatives are all bubbly about today's young entrepreneurs creating their own jobs -- jobs that "don't yet exist."

3. The main source of middle-class wealth has been largely wiped out

American homeowners owe almost as much as the students, with $700 billion of debt over and above the value of their homes.

This removes the only source of wealth for middle America, especially for blacks and Hispanics. Remarkably, for every dollar of NON-HOME wealth owned by white families, people of color have only one cent.

So when minority families were specifically targeted for high-risk, subprime loans that could be re-packaged and sold for a quick short-term profit, most of their assets were erased. Median wealth fell 66% for Hispanic households and 53% for black households. For whites the decline was 16%.

With a disturbing note of irony, Sanford Weill, the banker largely responsible for the reversal of the mortgage-protecting Glass-Steagall Act, was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for "extraordinary accomplishment and a call to serve."

4. We give prison sentences for smoking marijuana, but not for billion-dollar fraud

About half of our world-leading prison population is in jail for non-violent drug offenses. Americans have also been arrested for handing out free food in a park. Mothers in Ohio and Connecticut were jailed for enrolling their kids in out-of-district schools. As of 2003 in California there were 344 individuals serving sentences of 25 years or more for shoplifting as a third offense, in many cases after two non-violent offenses.

How does the market deal with this steady tide of petty crime? It strives for more. The new trend of private prisons is dependent on maintaining a sizable prison population to guarantee profits, with no incentive for rehabilitation.

As the number of inmates has surged, the people who devastated countless American lives "get out of jail free." The savings and loan fraud cost the nation between $300 billion and $500 billion, about 100 times more than the total cost of burglaries in 2010. The financial system bailout has already cost the country $3 trillion. Goldman Sachs packaged bad debt, sold it under a different name, persuaded ratings services to label it AAA, and then bet against their own financial creation by selling it short. Other firms accused of fraud and insider trading were Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Countrywide Financial, and Wells Fargo. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the Justice Department had postponed the bribery or fraud prosecutions of over 50 corporations, choosing instead to enter into agreements involving fines and 'monitoring' periods.

5. You can have health care, if you pay for it

A recent Commonwealth Fund study compared U.S. health care spending to 12 other OECD countries. The data shows that reducing our costs to the median level of spending among the OECD countries would save us $1.5 trillion a year, more than our entire deficit.

Unfortunately, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and hospital administrators won't hear of it. There's too much money to be made. Bypass surgery in the U.S. costs 2 to 3 times more than in Great Britain, Canada, France, and Germany. Cataract surgery costs 4 times more.

That's if you can pay for it. There are currently about 50 million uninsured Americans. At the other extreme are $2,400 oxymoronic penthouse hospital suites complete with butler and grand piano. Or, for those who don't get out much, emergency rooms in the home, with private cell-phone access to "concierge doctors."

Inequality in our country is so severe that 120,000 health care workers could have been hired with the salary paid to one man. That's a $40,000 salary for 40 health care workers for every one of the 3,000 counties in the United States. Instead, $5 billion dollars went to one man who reportedly made his first big haul ($4 billion, in 2007) by conspiring with Goldman Sachs in the above-mentioned short sale subterfuge.

The result of ignoring the health needs of the greater population, according to a report in the Annual Review of Public Health, is that "the health rankings of the United States have declined substantially when compared with other nations."

Conclusion

Privatization simply hasn't worked for health care, mortgage banking, higher education, or prison management. There is little incentive for profit-motivated firms to invest in disadvantaged or underemployed Americans. That's why taxes are necessary -- to provide for the common good, and to return some of the gains from 60 years of productivity to the great majority of Americans who contributed to our growth. Unfortunately, the golden door on the Statue of Liberty seems to have an invisible hand holding it shut.

Occupy This, Today

Occupy This, Today

Next OB General Assembly on Saturday

The next Occupy Brookings General Assembly will be held from 10:30 - noon, this Saturday, May 19, at the Brookings United Church of Christ, 828 8th St. South.

Please note the temporary change in location due to the library's being booked.

The public is invited to participate.

Harry Belafonte on Nonviolence, Occupy Wall Street

Note: If the viewer isn't visible below, click here to watch.

Occupy This, Today

May is "Move Our Money Month"

Photo by Alan Cleaver.

May is national "Move Our Money Month." It's meant to encourage ordinary people to invest their money in their communities instead of in the “too big to fail” banks whose risky investments helped tank the economy.

A report from the firm Javelin Strategy and Research found that between November 2011 and January 2012 5.6 million people moved their money out of big banks and into local banks and credit unions.

Please consider joining them!

Here are some tips on how to make the move, courtesy of FearLess Revolution:

What You Need To Do Before Walking Into Your Big Bank Branch

1. Go through previous big bank statements to see exactly which accounts you have. Be sure to check the names on each account. If you are closing a joint account with two holders, it makes a difference whether the word joining your names is "and" or "or." If the account in your name is in your name and someone else's, you will both need to go in and close the account. If the account is in your name or someone else's, either of you can close the account. Some big banks may vary on this policy, so it's best to call your big bank to find out exactly what you need to do prior to walking into your local branch.
2. If you have any loans with a big bank, look closely at your statements and paperwork you signed at the time of closing. There very well might be penalties that will trigger a higher interest rate if you close your checking account. Big banks excel at offering customers lower interest rates on mortgage and auto loans if you open a checking account and maintain a minimum balance. A primary checking account is a bank's ultimate goal to securing your, ahem, loyalty. A primary checking account also leads to, on average, the opening of three additional accounts with that financial institution. Decide whether or not you can or have the willingness to pay off the outstanding loan balance. If you do not pay off the loan balance, call your bank to ask about escalating fees or rate increases by closing your checking account before walking into your local branch to close the checking account.
3. Stop using your deposit accounts ASAP. You need to allow everything to clear the accounts completely before you close them. This clearing process takes about two weeks to complete. Keep close tabs online to see which transactions are still outstanding.
4. Research non-profit credit unions. You will need a place to deposit your money, so perform this research before closing your big bank accounts. A good resource for finding credit unions is Find A Credit Union. Make your decision on which non-profit credit union you will join before walking in to the big bank branch to close your deposit accounts.

What To Do When You Walk Into Your Big Bank Branch

1. Approach a branch teller and tell him/her that you would like to close your accounts. The teller might hand you off to a customer service representative due to the bank's account opening and closing protocol. Or the teller might hand you off because they don't want to tie up customers' wait time in the teller line.
2. If the bank employee asks why you are closing your account, decide in advance the reason you're going to provide. You can tell them you're unhappy with big banks. You can tell them you're a part of the 99%. Or you can decline to give them a reason. The most important thing is to remain focused and not do anything imprudent that will keep you from accomplishing your goal of closing your deposit accounts and walking out of the big bank branch with your money.
3. Once the account closing process begins, ask the bank employee if you have any cash reserve accounts tied to your deposit accounts. It doesn't make sense to keep a line of credit open that was tied to your soon-to-be closed account.  
4. The bank employee will ask if you would like to receive your money in the form of a check or cash. If you want to make it rain outside of the big bank branch, request to receive cash. If you don't want to make it rain, we advise you to request a check.
5. The bank employee will either give you a confirmation letter of your accounts being closed or they will mail it to you. Once you receive the letter, keep it on file for up to five years.
6. Walk out of the big bank branch.

What To Do After You Have Closed Your Big Bank Deposit Accounts

1. Shred all remaining checks and debit cards. This is an essential step. If you mistakenly use the checks or debit cards, you will be going back to the big bank branch—except this time it will be to clean up your mess.
2. Go to the non-for-profit credit union you selected prior to closing your deposit accounts at the big bank. Open the accounts, get a new checkbook and debit card, and shake the employee's hand, or even give him/her a hug.
3. Sync up your new deposit account information (ABA routing number and account number for checks, card number, expiration date, 3-digit security code for debit card) to any relevant accounts that require automatic payments. For example, if you automatically pay your car insurance on a monthly basis with your checking account, be sure to sync up your checking account with your car insurance company. You may also want provide your new account information for online products such as iTunes, eBay, and PayPal.
   
4. Stand in front of a full-length mirror. Admire yourself. You've earned it.
   

That's all there is to it. Sounds like a lot, and perhaps it is. After all, big banks played a role in making this process difficult because it acts as a deterrent for people to withdraw their money and close their accounts. But if you stick to this guide and remain focused on your goal, you can impact meaningful and measurable change by participating in "Move Our Money Month."