There are days when I am so disgusted with politics that I can’t watch the news. While Rob sits in our family room, switching between Countdown and MSNBC, I sit in front of my computer, half-listening, trying to concentrate on what I’m doing. And then I hear that Michael Moore is on The Last Word and I’m lured out into the family room to watch him do his thing from the middle of the protest on Wall Street.
As of tonight, September 29, the protest is in its twelfth day. Until Keith Olberman started talking about this story, the mainstream media had stayed clear of it – even the venerable New York Times wouldn’t touch it, and it was happening in their back yard, sullying up the streets, you know. The Wall Street. The political donors.
So tonight we watched Michael Moore from the midst of this protest. And as usual, Moore summarized the protest, the struggle: the icons of Wall Street, the hedge fund masters, the brokers who make the deals, are paying perhaps 15% of their income to taxes, and those of us in the middle class are paying about double.
We know a few of the people in the privileged income bracket, the ones who have been benefiting from the Bush tax cuts for the last decade. For the most part, they’re nice people who recognize the inequality in the tax system and know it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line to pay more in taxes. But they’re almost peripheral to this protest in NY. This protest has all the earmarks of the sixties, when the draft united people across the spectrum because we all knew that war was amoral, a travesty that only fed the Pentagon war machine. Now those protestors are entering retirement, and their kids and grandkids are the ones protesting on Wall Street. And since there’s no draft, this protest isn’t about just war.
It’s about…well, everything that has gone wrong in the last ten or eleven years.
Why was this protest ignored by the mainstream media until the cable news folks grabbed it? For the same reason that CNN, back in 2003, ignored the fact that ten million people protested the invasion of Iraq: it didn’t serve the corporate interests. War =big business.
Here are the facts:
Not a single person responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008 has gone to jail or even stood trial. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, the banker boys on Wall Street: they’re all still free men, doing whatever these guys do once they’re no longer in the pubic eye.
It’s not just Republicans, either. Democrats in power are part of the problem. Obama appointed some of Bush’s Wall Street maestros to his team- Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, the guys who, under W gave away the farm, the homestead, the present and the future and everything else in between. Also, as Michael Moore pointed out, Obama’s largest contributor in the 2008 election was Goldman-Sachs.
The bottom line is that all the politicians are bought and paid for. It’s corporate-democracy, the best government money can buy.
To date, the wars on three fronts – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya – have cost us nearly three trillion bucks. That’s a lot of zeros. We could have every person in America fed and housed and with health care for that price. Instead, we have more than 9 % unemployment nationally, more than 16% among Afro-Americans, and around 50 million without health insurance. The housing market in many states remains so flat that according to a recent study, nearly 25% of Americans are underwater in their mortgages – i.e., they owe more than their homes are worth.
So what’s the answer?
I don’t know. But tonight I said to Rob that it may be time to put on our protest shoes again, and take to the streets, to Wall Street. Let’s occupy Wall Street, wherever we live. As Moore said tonight, we, the people, far outnumber the boys on Wall Street. The time of this inequality is done, over, history. This is how the silly Tea Party was born, funded by the Koch brothers. Let’s show these guys that the only funding we need is that of conscience.
It doesn’t surprise me that there is so little news about this. I attended the “counter-inauguration” in 2001 and all the protests in Washington leading up to the invasion of Iraq. There was practically no news coverage. What little there was usually featured a small band of counter protesters (dozens) made to look like the equivalent of anti-war protesters (thousands). Or they would find the “Free Mumia” crowd to photograph, rather than the more numerous ordinary looking people. Most people didn’t even know about the massive protests in 2001 until “Fahrenheit 911” was released.
It was all very disheartening. But, Keith Olbermann was off the air at the time and Michael Moore was a bit on the outs with most left leaning people for his hardcore support of Ralph Nadar in 2000. The Internet was big, but not as ubiquitous as now. Maybe this time the media will for forced to pay more attention.
Maybe even I will have the heart to get back out there, again.
I see elsewhere people saying that protests are ineffective, the protesters look like idiots, etc. Guess they don’t know about what happened in Egypt, in Libya, elsewhere in the Mideast this year.
They suggest we just write our congress people if we want change. Oh, yeah, that would work. We should write Tea Party hero Allen West, our congressman. That’ll work.
If you want change through the system, you need a lot of cash. That’s why there are thousands of lobbyists in Washington paying out and getting what they want. That may sound cynical to the politically naive, but that’s where things stand.
I am glad to see the spirit of activism arising again, at this 11th hour, not only for democracy in our country, but for the future of the world. I marched in 1970 with 300,000 people in San Francisco, and had the same experience, with 300,000 people, in 2003 in protest against the invasion of Iraq (which accomplished nothing except the death of thousands of young American, and millions of Iraqis, as well as bankrupting us……much like Vietnam did.) But I worry about the power of the media and disinformation now. I am still amazed at how that march in 2003 had virtually no effect on the powers that be whatsoever. In 2009 I joined Cindy Sheehan before the white house with some 300 people – and in many ways, the media treated us as if we were kind of “cute”, and archaic. That really scared me, to think that anyone protesting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, or war in general, was somehow barely worth taking seriously.
For some more hopeful thoughts on activism, here’s a great article a friend passed on about the October2011 movement. It’s an interview with Dr. Margaret Flowers, a co-founder of the October2011 Movement which will peacefully “occupy” Washington DC beginning on Oct. 6, just published in TruthOut, the gold standard of the alternative news in my opinion.
https://www.truth-out.org/american-autumn-will-depend-people-not-parties/1316462749
Those of us who remember the 60s, who protested then, are not the same people we are now. Our ideals may be the same, our needs for fairness may be the same. But we are not the same. We know we’re looking for what is just and right, that the struggle continues. But now the battle is waged on the internet and on the streets. I think that could have a wondrous effect!
so disappointing , just a couple of capitolist’s
Who’re you talking about, Whoot?
Occupy Portland, OR starts a week from today. I will be taking time off work to be there!! It’s time… we have put off protesting as long as possible. Nothing else is working. We have to DO something!
We’ve spotted this conservative cynical response on the Internet to the Wall Street protesters. “If you can’t be part of the solution, PROTEST! And become part of the problem. Good strategy.”
Wait a minute, are the Righties saying it’s only okay to protest when it’s Tea Party reactionary protest?! LOL Some people just don’t make much sense and get all tangled up in their ideas. These are the kind of people who hide behind fake e-mail addresses and call other people cowards.
John Stewart did a great segment on the disconnect happening in the GOP this week. They are all over the place, and constantly canceling themselves out. His premise – it is not all of their political hopefuls that are the problem – it is their constant flip flopping on issues.
Missed the stewart segment, but it was terrific.
The Economist (magazine/media outlet) yesterday released a statement that shows the disconnect between the protesters (we-the-people) and Wall Street:
“Occupy Wall Street has no Clear Message.”
No clear message???!!!
So they pretend there is nothing there— just like climate change— and they won’t have to do anything about it.
And they think they are so smart.
I’ve been following Micheal Moore. I really admire what he is doing. He’s had to live w/ 5 seal team guards because of death threats. On CNN, talking to Piers Morgan, he said he can’t let that stop him.
Good post, Trish.
I’m with you, Trish! It’s time to take to the streets.
I just donated to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, btw.
She’llmake a fantastic senator – and then a prez in 2016!!
Make it so….
Well put, JAG. But I wonder if all the money that went to bail out Wall Street, which caused the problem, had instead gone to Americans making less than say $75,000 adjusted income,if we wouldn’t have been better off. Even if it was only $5,000 a family that money would’ve gone back into the economy rather than into the banker’s treasure troves, much of it held overseas. Just a thought.
https://occupywallst.org/ is the official website. There are others for other cities around the country. It’s time to send a message.
May I be a tad unpopular for a moment? I believe in the big picture you are right Trish. The whole thing is run by the military industrial complex and the banksters and they only care about themselves. But at the same time, the melt-down that began in 2008 would have taken us ALL down. So when Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke crammed their solution down the throat of Washington, I think they were scared, very scared, that everything would break. That was about 3 years ago. Things are still very much in trouble, but most of us managed to feed our families for the last 3 years. The next 3 years is another matter and it may be that they made things far worse because it couldn’t get to the bottom quickly so that we could start rebuilding. But from where I stand, the decisions weren’t just selfishly motivated to support their cronies. None of the big players have all that much to lose, since they will be the only ones left standing to buy everything up when it does all crash down. So you see they win either way. They will take the extreme left and the extreme right and make money which ever side wins.
I hope this doesn’t offend anyone. I don’t know the answer about what to do either.
and how in the world i missed michael moore i do not know! darn it!
Gyps, I liked seeing Michael Moore down there. Now I want Michael Douglas in Liberty Park. – R
for sure, rob! 😉
UPDATE: Last week’s NYT article scoffing at the protesters (that one by Ginia Bellafante) ended by noting what NYT editors apparently thought was the towering irony that some of the protesters use Apple computers; NYT business writer Andrew Sorkin today invokes the same trite mockery, ending his column with the pierecing observation that he saw “two of them walking over to the A.T.M. at Bank of America.” Apparently, you’re not allowed to protest rampant criminality on Wall Street and the corruption of corporatist control of the political process unless you keep your money under your mattress and communicate by carrier pigeon — at least not without incurring the derision of those wicked satirists at the NYT.
NOW we’re talkin’!!! stand up speak up and act out!!! power to the people!!!
Wow….I was blown away by this post this morning. Thank you so much for writing this. I would love to join in by putting my protest shoes on again too. There has been such a climate of fear brewing in this country that protesting at my age now seems a lot scarier than it did when I was young. The forces out there have created this sense of fear to keep me quiet….but no more. I’ve gained a lot of strength and encouragement watching these young brave kids protesting on Wall street…and I applaud them. If we could get this going in every state the media would not be able to overlook it any longer. As you know…I recently put up a link that gave towns in the US that were putting on the same peaceful protests, and the post was taken down. Now I can not even find the website that gave the protest information. But if there is a protest happening near me…I think my fringed moccasins are making their way out of the back of the closet for another run. Thanks again for this post.
Love that image of “fringed moccasins.”!
so what do you mean – the post was taken down? by you? by whom?
love your moccasins too – with jean cut-offs and halter top, i assume? 😉
Hey Gypsy…cut offs and a halter top would surely get me arrested! lol! I have no idea how that post disappeared. It was off my list of posts in dashboard too.
that sounds like google censorship – of the website
I don’t see any Tea Party people out there. Gee, could they be on the side of Wall Street? Hmm.
Hadn’t heard about these demonstrations – it doesn’t seem to be in the UK media. One thing that puzzles me is how these finance bods are only “paying perhaps 15% of their income to taxes.” How do they get away with this?
You mentioned ‘those’ wars. Its a bit off subject but I saw this opinion in today’s newspaper:
“… but it can be said that since 1948 under the then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, American foreign policy has included a united Europe, but excluding the UK as a subservient tool. So far so good for the Americans.
What they didn’t bargain for was despite it’s shortcomings how successful the euro would become as a trading currency. The final straw was in 2004 when Iraq and Iran planned to start trading their oil in euros – which would have an adverse effect on the dollar.
Isn’t it strange how the U.S with Britain’s help, decided to invade Iraq before this could happen?”
Was this perhaps another reason for the Iraq war?
Really interesting, Mike. I don’t think I’ve read about this eruo/dollar thing before. I can still see Blair, passionately defending Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
Mike, The Guardian has been covering it in the UK. You can check their website.
Thanks – the Guardian is one of those papers that would publish this sort of thing. I’ll take a look.
Thank you, Trish! I’ll come with you!
For what it’s worth, they were covering it up here, but it’s local….disgusting it wouldn’t have made it nationally till just recently.
Good thing there’s cable news. They started covering it first.