With the coming U.S. presidential election, 2012 offers voters, business leaders and politicians an opportunity for a joint debate over the fundamentals of capitalism in America.
By Michael HiltzikLos Angeles Times, December 31, 2011
Occupy Wall Street and its coast-to-coast spinoffs captured the headlines in 2011, but the economic debate it helped trigger should reverberate deep into 2012.
That’s the debate over the future of the American middle class. Rarely has its economic plight been an explicit issue in a presidential election, but candidates on both sides of the partisan divide are poised to make it the centerpiece of their campaigns in the coming year.
. . . . . .
Yet so far the lionization of the middle class has been largely rhetorical. The year just past was one in which the stagnation of income and wealth for the great majority of Americans continued — indeed, bit so deep that it helped fuel the Occupy movement taking as its constituency the “99%,” those left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1% of U.S. taxpayers.
. . . . . .
Confidence in the essential fairness of American life, including confidence in the social and economic safety net, underlies the optimism that fuels consumer spending. That has ebbed in recent decades. As Michigan’s Curtin put it, “For the first time since the 1930s, consumers no longer think that jobs and wages will spring back anytime soon, that the value of their homes will rebound, or that their retirement funds will soon be fully restored…. Their worsening finances were mainly attributed to job losses, reduced hours, wage give-backs, and reduced bonuses.”
Inspired by the extraordinary ignorance of all the Republican participants in the primaries, less Ron Paul, a FACT has emerged that is of such importance that I am moved to upgrade the Event Report I did on 27 September 2010, recording the wisdom and knowledge of MajGen Robert Scales, USA (Ret) PhD, speaking at the Brookings Institution. Notes taken and published with permission.
EVENT REPORT: MajGen Robert Scales, USA (Ret), PhD at the Brookings Institution, 27 September 2010
TOPIC: “The Next Generation of Small Unit Warfare [Posted with Permission of the Event Sponsor]
Robert H. Scales, Jr. is a retired U.S. Army Major General and former Commandant of the US Army War College. He now works as a military analyst, news commentator, and author.
Review: Firepower In Limited War addressed the disconnect between troops engaged in low intensity conflict, and the national and defense intelligence communities. He has also authoredFuture Warfare, Yellow Smoke: the Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military, and The Iraq War: A Military History.
Speaking to around 50 people under the auspices of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings, the presentation was summed up at the very end as General Scales offered his opinion on the essence of the four World Wars:
World War I: Chemistry World War II: Physics (especially radar)
World War III: Information (the Cold War) World War IV: Human Factors
His focus is on the reality that 4% of the “total force,” the engaged infantry, bear 80-81% of the total casualties, but receive less than 1% of the over-all acquisitions and training budget. He calls this, rather memorably, a “cosmic incongruity.”
Mark Thompson's 27 December posting, “General Newt,” alerted readers of Battleland to Karen Tumulty's pastiche of mini portraits of Newt Gingrich's martial prowess. Mark highlighted one the few passages that zeroed in on the insubstantial essence of the K Street Clausewitz.
Unable to contain my mirth, I immediately forwarded Mark's posting to to my close friend, the noted military reformer, Pierre Sprey, who replied immediately, with his usual rapier wit:
Chuck,
…What no reporter seems to have tumbled to is that Newt is dumb as an old boot. John Boyd and I had several years of “working” with him in the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, years during which Newt found it advantageous to pose as a reformer.
Within a month or so, John and I both realized that Newt had almost perfect recall of other people's intellectual-sounding ideas and phrases–and could barf them back convincingly without understanding a shred of the content. At the drop of a hat he could string together a two hour lecture on anything from concocting new war-winning technologies to optimizing grand America's strategy the 21st century. For the listening layman, the entire two hours would flow seamlessly and every idea would sound newly minted and carefully crafted. But for those of us who knew the sources of Newt's cribs, it was perfectly obvious that not one of those ideas was his, nor did he have the shallowest comprehension of any of them.
It has been clear for some time that the conduct of the banking and financial industry is one very important cause of the 2008 credit crunch. Moreover, for-profit banks by and large fail to deliver services to the poor, deepening poor people’s marginalization from the mainstream economy. The banks’ relentless pursuit of profit, an intrinsic feature of the industry (as of the broader economy), continues to expose all of us to the risk of another banking crisis that would repeat the enormous harm done last time, above all to the world’s poorest. Sadly, it’s unrealistic to expect Washington to do much to curb the industry, given the banks’ enormous lobbying sway and privileged access to senior officials, regardless which party is in power.
Mexican drug cartels, in a disturbing new trend, are luring young people from Southern California to smuggle drugs across the border and carry out other illicit work for the criminal enterprises, according to law enforcement officials and youth activists.
The result: More than 5,000 young people, most of them Latinos, have been held in San Diego County jails over the last two years, according to KPBS San Diego.
Phi Beta Iota: Crime in Southern California has been directly influenced by the US wars in Central America and Colombia, and by CIA and DEA sponsorship of strategic drug suppliers into the USA. The US Government consists of good people trapped in a very bad system, in which a two-party tyranny prevents the government from having intelligence and integrity–or a strategy–in the public interest. When citizens see that both the government and the major banks are corrupt, the benefits of participating in organized crime take on new alure. A rise in crime is a direct consequence of a drop in government legitimacy and efficacy.
Below are four documents that provide interesting insight into the kinds of energies and proposals that get born through Occupy Wall Street's collective thinking process of working groups and General Assembly deliberations.
The first document is a “Statement of Autonomy” passed by consensus at the OWS General Assembly (GA) November 10th. It clearly states the non-partisan nature of the movement and their resistance to being co-opted or manipulated – and it names the standard by which a statement can be considered to speak for Occupy Wall Street. Beyond that, the encourage people to “Speak with us, not for us.”
The second document is an unusual OWS statement of position on a political issue – electoral reform. Most efforts to get OWS to take a stand on a specific issue don't make it to or through the General Assembly process. But this issue did: It was passed by consensus on December 10th. Interestingly, it is not a lobbying document, but an invitation for citizens to educate themselves, dialogue about, experiment with and take action on a broad range of approaches to electoral reform.
The third document is a 9-point vision statement crafted by the OWS vision and goals working group. They submitted it to the OWS General Assembly in late November, but it was not approved. It is apparently in that limbo between the work of a focused group – the vision and goals working group had 40 people in it – and the broader feelings of the General Assembly. The fact that it hasn't been authorized by OWS-as-a-whole intrigues me, and makes me wonder what were the concerns that came up during the GA deliberations that impeded consensus…
Progressive filmmaker and author Michael Moore participated in the working group that created that vision statement. After it, he crafted his own 10-point set of goals and demands that he felt were consistent with the vision statement and offered an agenda that OWS could rally around. I've found no signs that it was approved by either the working group or the General Assembly. Again, this seems another sign of OWS's reluctance to restrict their impact to a set of focused demands.
For information on all the proposals that have been placed before the OWS GA – whether they were passed (either through consensus or modified consensus), not passed, tabled, discussed, or withdrawn – see http://www.nycga.net/category/assemblies/proposals-past
Looking over the list on that page, it seems that, in general, proposals having to do with logistics, on-the-ground actions, or support for other Occupy-related efforts have a greater chance of approval than proposals for policy positions. Although the whole OWS population tends not to readily agree on policy proposals, most such proposals were developed by working groups who, themselves, came to consensus about those proposals. I suspect the working groups' deliberations have considerable impact on their members and others, even when their recommendations don't make it through their General Assembly, and so it is not in vain. I suspect action often develops out of these working groups, especially when they connect up with comparable working groups in other Occupy sites or with groups already working on the issue in question.
All these proposals are easy to scan and make for interesting reading, revealing much about the thinking of OWS activists. I think we're seeing a rich and complex fabric of change activity being woven for 2012 on a loom of deeply serious conversations.
Thanks to Ron Paul, the Conservative movement is having an identity crisis. The old guard of the Conservative movement, which also happens to be the Republican Party establishment, still clings to the old creation myth of the Conservative movement. Namely, that there was no opposition to the New Deal-Liberal consensus until William F. Buckley and National Review came along in 1955, saving America from the American left, social democracy, moral turpitude and international Communism.
The modern gatekeepers of the movement, and the Republican Party officials, who fancy themselves as the keepers of the last word on the acceptable range of debate within the movement, cannot understand why the Ron Paul movement is more concerned with actually shrinking the size of government than with waging endless wars for endless peace. They cannot fathom that people claiming to be part of the American Right might actually be interested in rolling back government power to tax, wiretap, spy, arrest, imprison and feel up American citizens. This runs contrary to everything they have ever imbibed about what it means to be Conservative in America.
