Below is an excellent interview with Anthony DiMaggio in Counterpunch. DiMaggio author ofThe Rise of the Tea Party, due out in November 2011. He uses the “propaganda model” developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their bookManufacturing Consent to document and explain the Tea Party’s organizational dynamics for manufacturing dissent, and he compares these dynamics to those of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Before reading the interview, consider please the following: The forces powering the rage of the Tea Party — the stagnation of incomes and the increasingly unequal distribution of income — were around long before the Tea Party erupted on the national scene.
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That the distribution of income had shifted in a very fundamental way toward the wealthy and especially the super-wealthy at the expense of the bottom 80% of the working population was clearly demonstrated in a classic study by Emanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2003, updated in 2009), and subsequently confirmed by many other others, including just last week, on 25 October 2011, by the Congressional Budget Office.
It has also clear for years that inflation-adjusted wage growth that underpinned the improved living standards of great American dream machine sputtered out during the 1970s (see chart below).
So, it is simply beyond dispute that a fundamental change in the income distribution has taken place since the late late 1970s. That change is also correlated with the wave of deregulation, tax cutting, defense spending increases (with a slight interregnum following the Soviet Union’s collapse), and deindustrialization/globalization that took off after 1980 during the Reagan Administration and accelerated during the Clinton and Bush II Administrations.
Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933bn), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30m), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn't care.
Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.
Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.
Phi Beta Iota: Now that the rest of the world has seen that the US Courts are generally corrupt and will not entertain law suits against those that led the US to an elective war costing trillions and including crimes against humanity at multiple levels, we anticipate a flood of law suits against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. As committed as we are to Truth & Reconciliation (with presidential pardons when full truth has been offered to the public by the individual concerned) we fear that absent a restoration of integrity to the electoral process and to the US Government in the 2012 elections, we are in for a decade of revenge against specific individuals and specific banks now known to have betrayed the public trust.
Below are two eye opening reports/analyses by two of the best counterpunchers in Alexander Cockburn's and Jeffrey St Clair's stable of bomb throwers. The subject is Greece: its political/economic crisis and the myths surrounding average Greeks being the cause of its crisis.
In the first, Destroying the Livelihoods of Thirteen Million People: The Myth of Greek Profligacy, my friend Marshall Auerback, argues that the masses of the Greek people (the bottom 80% of a highly unequal income distribution) are being set up as scapegoats to pay for a neo-liberal austerity plan that aimed producing income deflation (instead of a currency devaluation) to improve export competitiveness. Auerback explains why this is really a plan of collective punishment that is guaranteed to fail while shredding what is left of Greece's social contract.
In the second, Naxos Hangs On By Its Fingernails: How Greeks Were Driven Back to the Land, Patrick Cockburn presents the reader with a micro-case study of what is happening to average Greeks (i.e. part of the lower 80%) on the island of Naxos, the largest and my favorite island in the windy Cyclades.
Chuck Spinney
Barcelona
Destroying the Livelihoods of Thirteen Million People The Myth of Greek Profligacy
by MARSHALL AUERBACK, Counterpunch, OCTOBER 24, 2011
Phi Beta Iota: One reason why the Electoral Reform and BigBatUSA endeavors are so important NOW, is because if they succeed in the USA, where Internet connectivity, cognitive surplus, and Occupy awaking have converged, the model can be scaled globally very quickly. At root this is about secular corruption. Pope Benedict XVI had a chance to use Assisi creatively but chose the low road.
My friend Andrew Cockburn is on a roll. One week after his brilliant article on IEDs in Harpers, he has produced another hard-hitting tubesteak, this time in Counterpunch. Andrew's targets are the Banksters, whose looting continues to push the middle class into poverty and the lower income classes into a kind of debt servitude that is reminiscent of that imposed by company stores in the West Virginia coal towns in what we had hoped was a bygone era.
Andrew's essay is important, because the problem he is describing exists against the backdrop of the Great Recession, which now, three years after the banking system started to collapse, may be on the cusp of a full blown debt deflation, triggered by another, even more catastrophic banking collapse. My introductory comments are intended to help you understand that magnitude of that danger that Andrew is describing.
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The following charts (Figures 1 & 2), based on the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve,
portray ratio of debt to gross domestic product over time. Figure 1 shows how the cumulative debt changed in the entire system, with debt expressed as a percentage of the GDP produced by the economy. The debt ratio for the entire economy should not be thought of as an absolute measure of debt burden but as an indexof that burden, and is an indicator of the comparative pressure of that debt regardless of the overall size of the economy.[1] Thus, one can compare
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changes in earlier years to those in later years. Figure 2 plots the sector burdens separately for the components in the private sector (note: since Federal Debt is arranged in bottom position in Figure 1 it is also the same shape that would be plotted in Figure 2; other categories, like state and local debt have been ignored because over time their ratio changes have not been significant enough to the alter the pattern in the figures). What do these figures tell us?
“If the Occupiers start chanting ‘Mark to Market,’” an attorney highly conversant with the darker workings of the Wall Street-Washington complex told me, “we’ll know they’re serious.” Such a call would quickly presage the collapse of our “too big to fail” banks, for it would highlight the fact that a huge proportion of the assets of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Citigroup consist of loans that will never be paid back and are therefore essentially worthless. The so called “recovery” of our leading financial institutions from the post-Lehman abyss has depended on a fraudulent valuation of these assets, but stripped of the fiction, the banks are insolvent.
Phi Beta Iota: The banks are on the brink–wildly fearful of a run on stocks and deposits–and the US Government knows they are on the brink–and is wildly fearful of nation-wide violence. Pissed off white people will make the Watts Riots looks like an effete tea party. There is good news. The close OccupyWallStreet gets to understanding the depth of the depravity of the government that enabled and enables Wall Street, the lack of intelligence and integrity within that government, the closer we get to being able to demand and secure the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, in our view the sole means by which a non-violent revolution might restore the integrity of the U.S. Government.
I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.
The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:
Phi Beta Iota: This is why US Day of Rage and Phi Beta Iota both feel so strongly that Electoral Reform is the only immediately reasonable and achievable demand. Congress and the White House are under the delusion that they are going to be in power after 2012, and that #OWS is a light rain that will disappear over the winter. We do not agree. Politics has finally become very personal to the 99%. That is what's new. The lack of intelligence and integrity in the US Government is not new, but God willing, will be old news by 2012.
