Alpe d'Huez said:
Seriously, you think Ed Schultz is RW? Well, I guess compared to you he is.
As I said days ago on the protesters, they may get an emotional bounce out of this, but it is going to cause zero change to legislation. Zero, zip, none. The money is so entrenched in Washington this is merely a blip on the radar screen. It isn't until politicians, and really, those with great power over them, are faced with drastic alterations in their livelihood, be that by hook or by crook, that we will see the change many of these people seek.
Two comments. First, I'd like to see you shed those points. And please do so with the compelling detail that Johnston does in his book, which I gather you have not read.
Next, remove Red from this for a moment, as I think you'd like much of
Johnston's book, Perfectly Legal. Despite what's written in that link - which comes from a liberal alternative newspaper from my home town by the way -
the thrust of Johnson's books and articles focus on rigging and warping of the tax code, and are extremely well researched and detailed. The man has an amazing grasp on the federal, and state, tax code, having studied it for over two decades. He has written several times on how small business owners are getting the shaft because they simply do not have the financial power to influence the political system the way others are. And if you do not believe that, then I'm not sure what else to say.
We can't in fact, today, say what impact the protests will have on American capitalism. There isn't going to be a revolution in the immediate future for the reason you indicate, however, what the long term effects will be is uncertain and unknowable.
There is, though, a whiff of revolution in the air, if not an actual one in effect, that has blown over from the Arab world and passed through Europe to finally arrive at the Atlantic coast of America. This in itself is exceptional, as I have already mentioned in a previous post, because where the social unrest is being generated is in the very citadel of capital at New York. Chalk it up to the
zeitgeist I suppose.
The rhetorical questions of what the protesters want, is merely an evasive tactic of the ideologues or the merely stupid to vilify, deride and dismiss them at once. What they want is simple and goes against what to them is such an obvious democratic evil:
for America to be unchained from the shackles of an economy that's become ideology. And from a type of deregulated hyper-financial capitalism that's been practiced since Reagan, in which huge amounts of wealth is generated and controlled by the few, while the inevitable counterpart of colossal losses are unloaded upon society's shoulders by increasing the national debt infinitely. They thus want government to put an end to, or at least limit the power of, the financial extremists who reign over Wall Street and hence the nation. Oligarchs who operate in ways that are exclusive to their interests and those of the super-rich. Those, in short, who FDR once called "economic royalists."
They don't know how this is to be done, only that it must be done, if the festering wound of an ever widening gap between wealth and poverty in the nation, and the rampant social inequality and injustice that this breeds as a result of the system, is to be healed. Most of the protesters are just conscientious citizens whose hearts are in the right place and not the radicals that they have been branded as in much of the press and political discourse. This only demonstrates, though, that the wound is festering and even if the short term effects will be liquidated by the same system they are protesting against and a political class that unwaveringly sustains it: the Occupy Wall Street movement nevertheless represents a welcomed US civic reawakening that hasn't been felt since the Vietnam era. Consequently, the long term effects may perhaps amount to something.
What is certain
today, however, is the thoroughly predictable and incredibly hysterical reaction from Wall Street and the super-rich in general, as well as their political cronies who support them, especially from the so called Grand Old Party, even if most of the democrats have shunned them as well (or at any rate only given them a lukewarm response.) This only demonstrates, of course, just how far the ethos of America is ideologically, politically, socially and economically ensconced within the right's mentality, which predominates over the country.
There is nothing comparable to the magnitude and behavior of the Tea Party gatherings we witnessed in 2009 and yet the congress majority leader, Eric Cantor, had no compunction in denouncing the "assaults" and "the pitting of Americans against American's" by the protesters. Only great confidence in finding support against their cause throughout the nation, could make such a misguided and hypocritical position possible. Even the GOP presidential candidates have entered within the debate, such as Mitt Romney who accused the protesters of declaring a "class war," which is another brazen flip-sided falsification of reality, while Herman Cain added that they are of course "anti-American." My favorite, in any case, is senator Rand Paul's comment that, for some strange and incomprehensible reason, the protesters have begun to take possession of iPads, because they feel the rich don't deserve them. And if you have watched CNBC, you would have heard the protesters have been "unleashed" and that they are "aligned with Lenin."
To understand all of this, you have be aware of the fact that such crazy and irrational reactions, make part of a far more wide-ranging syndrome, in which the rich Americans that amply benefit from a rigged system in their favor, react in a hysterical mode against anyone that dares expose just how rigged the system actually is. Admittedly I haven't read Johnson's books, but it sounds like he's saying the same thing.
Last year you may recall a few barons of finance got infuriated over a few meek criticisms Obama levied upon the system, accusing him of socialism (that dirty word), because he supports the so called Volcker bill that simply wants to impede those banks sustained by federal guarantees to engage in the most risky speculative financial practices. Then there's the defamatory campaign against Elizabeth Warren, a financial reformer and candidate for the Massachusetts senate seat in congress, who in a YouTube video outlined comprehensibly and eloquently her reasons for why the rich should be taxed more. There was nothing radical about what she said: it's only a modern version of Oliver Wendell Holmes' definition, according to which "taxes are what we pay to live in a civil society." Yet if you listen to the paladins of wealth, Warren is the reincarnation of Lev Trotsky. George Will declared her's to be a "collectivist program," and believes that "individualism is a chimera." Rush Limbaugh put it more caustically when he called Warren's proposal a "parasite that hates its host and that wants to kill it while sucking its blood."
And yet the protesters are the crazy and destructive "radicals."
Meanwhile the nation is in the hands of these killers and obliterators, who are the real radicals and extremists, not the protesters, that operate non stop under the protection of the government. I really can't comment any further on the dreadful state of affairs.
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