One of the primary slogans of the Occupy movement is "We are the 99%," with the obvious implication that our fight is against the top one percent who have been destroying the economy while aggregating huge amounts of wealth in their own hands. In essence, the occupation is an act of class warfare, with the Occupiers finally trying to fight back against an elite class that has been waging war against the people for a long, long time. But they have wisely decided to adopt a peaceful, nonviolent approach to this conflict, recognizing that Gandhi and King used it successfully in leading their movements for grater social justice. Of course, the way this usually plays out is that eventually the powers that be use some type of force to try to quell the uprising, which increases public support for the movement and gives it additional momentum to help bring about the kinds of changes it is seeking. The large number of people who turned out in Oakland to shut down the port in response to the wounding of Marine veteran Scott Olsen reflects this dynamic already at work in the Occupy movement. All else equal, we can reasonably anticipate that there will be more acts of state/police (or should that be "police state") repression that will in turn stimulate more marches and bigger crowds, and an even bigger threat to TPTB that will force them to try to exert even more control. In the midst of all this, it is reasonable to assume that agent provocateurs will infiltrate the Occupiers, like they seem to have done in Oakland, to initiate violence that in turn justifies the government's use of force, presumably as part of a plan to move us closer and closer to a state of martial law. That's the New World Order conspiracy theory anyway. But don't laugh. There's some evidence behind that theory...
Anyway, one thing that I find most disappointing so far is that, even though the movement is really fighting in the name of the vast majority of Americans who have been screwed over by the banksters, lots of people seem to be either ambivalent about what the Occupiers are doing or simply think it's all kinda silly or pointless. One primary reason for this, I'm sure, is that the corporate media have not given the movement much attention, and when they do it usually isn't in a very favorable light. Of course, this is to be expected. Our so-called free press has morphed over the years into essentially a mouthpiece for the elite, a megaphone with which they broadcast their perspectives and agendas to the masses who too often seem to accept it all at face value, as a reasonable approximation of the truth. With consolidation of the media industry over the years leading to an oligarchical situation in which a small number of folks control a huge percentage of all of our media, it has become feasible for them to coordinate their message and eliminate any perspectives that fall outside the range of what TPTB are willing to tolerate. Thus, for example, zero critical assessment of the faulty and falsified "intelligence" claiming that Saddam Hussein was developing WMDs that served to justify the war in Iraq. And zero critical assessment of the BS story the elite concocted to explain the events of 9/11. (I could go on and on.) If you doubt the possibility that various media outlets could all be controlled and scripted, watch this video from Conan O'Brien:
http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=27282
Another problem promulgated by the media is that most of the talking heads want to try to analyze the movement from the old left-right paradigm, in terms of party politics and whose interests are driving it and/or being served by it. But this misses the point entirely. Occupiers come from lots of different points on that political spectrum, but the one thing that unites them is they all recognize that the real conflict is the people vs. the power, and I suspect most of them recognize that both the Republicans and the Democrats have been bought off by the banksters and are equally guilty in the decimation of our economy and on-going collapse of our society. One long term benefit of this movement, regardless of whatever else happens, is that it is heightening public awareness of the fact that the so-called 1% - the richest and most powerful - are largely responsible for the mess we're in and thus need to take responsibility and/or be held accountable.
And I have no doubt that the breadth and strength of the movement are making those guys a little nervous. I read the other day that a couple members of Congress have introduced a bill for taxing financial transactions, which is one of the concrete proposals suggested by Occupiers as a way to generate additional funds for social programs. If you buy a car, the government will charge a tax on that transaction, but banks can buy and sell millions and billions of dollars worth of financial instruments with no taxes levied at all. Even a tiny tax on those transactions, say three-hundredths of one percent (.03%), would generate huge amounts of government revenue that could be put to good use for things we need:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/wall-street-transaction-tax-revenue_n_1080493.html?ir=Business
I have no idea if their bill has a snowball's chance in hell of getting through Congress, but the point is they seem to be responding to some public pressure or sentiment on this issue, and if the Occupy movement has the effect of pushing public policy in this direction, then it will have been, to a limited extent anyway, a succesful exercise of American democracy.
See this for some thoughts on what the movement is already accomplishing:
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/6-things-that-occupy-wall-street-has.html
and this too:
http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2011/11/ows-is-trigger-for-major-shift-in.html
From my perspective, and probably that of most Occupiers, the movement won't be a success unless it results in some kind of fundamental change in the system as a whole. That's pretty vague, clearly, but there a number of such changes being advocated, and while none of them would be simple to implement, the point is that the system is flawed and needs to change, since we can't improve the economy by using the same system that got us into this mess. For me it means getting rid of the Fed and returning to a Constitutionally-sanctioned monetary system, in which a national bank under the US Treasury is able to loan money to the government interest-free, rather than having private Federal Reserve bankers siphoning off huge chunks of tax revenue as interest on the loans they make to the government. Of course, simply addressing this issue in America isn't sufficient, as it's a global problem. The whole global monetary system is controlled by the banksters who own the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the Fed and all the other major central banks around the world, and these institutions essentially control a system that functions by creating more and more debt that leaves more and more debtors paying more and more interest to these banksters.
Of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems inherent in the current monetary and financial systems that create the conditions shaping the health of the real economy. For a more sophisticated discussion of the flawed system, check out the following:
http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2011/11/collapse-of-our-corrupt-predatory.html
Mike Rivero, who runs whatreallyhappened.com, provides a simpler explanation of the basic problem of an interest-based money system here:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/11thmarble.php
If you're interested in a more metaphysical analysis of all this, here is an intriguing discussion that points to Usury, or the charging of interest, as a primary tool of Evil on this planet, ideas I tend to take seriously:
http://www.rense.com/general95/abrief.htm
Whatever the forces behind it, the reality is that the whole global economy is a house of cards that has been built too big and is now facing an inevitable collapse. The paper ("notational") value of all the debt instruments diffused among all the major players around the world is thought to be somewhere between $600 trillion and $1.5 quadrillion, whereas the size of the total real economy is only about $60 trillion. In other words, there is ten times more debt out there than the value of the whole real economy. Every bankruptcy by a sovereign government or major financial entity will trigger payments on some portion of that quadrillion dollar debt, which would trigger other bankruptcies and then more debt obligations and more bankruptcies, etc. in a domino effect that could bring the whole house of cards down pretty quickly. That's why the potential Greek bankruptcy has the rest of Europe all freaked out, since it could bring down the euro and probably the EU with it, and then look out world.
The potential irony in all this is that some version of near-total collapse could well come in weeks or even days, possibly before the Occupy movement has fully run its course. Such a collapse could put us into a situation in which radical action will be necessary, some kind of systemic reorientation, such that the kinds of changes being demanded by the Occupiers might seem more reasonable and valuable. In other words, independent of the Occupy movement, the forces already at play causing this collapse could generate a widespread need, demand, and expectation for fundamental changes that couldn't have been possible prior to this point. The collapse seems nearly inevitable. It remains to be seen whether and when any significant changes to the system are implemented.
No comments:
Post a Comment