The Occupy Handbook, out next week. From the Amazon.com book description:
Analyzing the movement’s deep-seated origins in questions that the country has sought too long to ignore, some of the greatest economic minds and most incisive cultural commentators - from Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, Robert Reich, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gillian Tett, Scott Turow, Bethany McLean, Brandon Adams, and Tyler Cowen to prominent labor leaders and young, cutting-edge economists and financial writers whose work is not yet widely known - capture the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in all its ragged glory, giving readers an on-the-scene feel for the movement as it unfolds while exploring the heady growth of the protests, considering the lasting changes wrought, and recommending reform.
SWAT Raids, Stun Guns, And Pepper Spray: Why The Government Is Ramping Up The Use Of Force
America’s police departments have been moving toward more aggressive, force-first, militaristic tactics and their accompanying mindset for 30 years. It’s just that, with the exception of protests at the occasional free trade or World Bank summit, the tactics haven’t generally been used on mostly white, mostly college-educated kids armed with cellphone cameras and a media platform.
Police militarization is now an ingrained part of American culture. SWAT teams are featured in countless cop reality shows, and wrong-door raids are the subject of “The Simpsons” bits and search engine commercials. Tough-on-crime sheriffs now sport tanks and hardware more equipped for battle in a war zone than policing city streets. Seemingly benign agencies such as state alcohol control boards and the federal Department of Education can now enforce laws and regulations not with fines and clipboards, but with volatile raids by paramilitary police teams.
According to Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, the number of SWAT raids carried out each year in America has jumped dramatically over the last generation or so, from just a few thousand in the 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s, when Kraska stopped his survey. He found that the vast majority of the increase is attributable to the drug war — namely warrant service on low-to-mid-level drug offenders. A number of federal policies have driven the trend, including offering domestic police departments military training, allowing training with military organizations, using “troops-to-cops” programs and offering surplus military equipment and weaponry to domestic police police departments for free or at major discounts. There has also been a constant barrage of martial rhetoric from politicians and policymakers.
Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a “war,” and the consequences are predictable.
On Occupy Wall Street and Participatory Democracy
Participatory democracy can mean a lot of things, but Occupy Wall Street is certainly one of the things it means. I think others are correct to understand that when OWS protestors shout “This is what democracy looks like”, they are staking a claim for a particular vision of democracy that is opposed to the more sedentary, passive, poll-driven vision of representative interest-group democracy. It’s a vision in which democracy is not polls, campaigns, lobbying groups and PACs, but mike checks, general assemblies and direct action, in which people don’t just reactively register their preferences but go out into the public arena to engage each other, to develop and advocate and realise their visions for what society ought to do and be.
The larger point, though, is that calls for OWS activists to settle down and get busy with the humdrum mechanics of representative democratic politics misunderstand who many of these activists are, and what they want out of democratic political engagement. Many of those who came out for the demonstrations are mainstream people who’ve been radicalised by the situation, but at the movement’s core, you have a lot of people who basically believe that democracy is in the streets. In this they are the descendants of a vital utopian strand in American political history. And it’s not surprising that these are the kinds of people who’ve succeeded at putting inequality on the national political agenda, where more conventional interest-group, lobbying, think-tank or campaign-based efforts had failed.
[…]
The participatory-democracy folks have never gone away; they’ve always been out there, from Emma Goldman and the Industrial Workers of the World to the New Left to Adbusters and OWS. And they’ll always be out there, because their kinds of utopian transformations are never going to be realisable projects. But the fact that they’re unrealisable doesn’t mean that people who are willing to invest their lives in striving for utopian transformation should stop. There will be a lot of people who got involved in OWS who now shift into more pragmatic applications of effort in the representative democratic sphere, and that’s great. But people who want to gather in spontaneous camps, hold come-one come-all general assemblies and try to radically re-envision the entire global social and economic system should keep on doing that too. They’re never going to see anything that we who think in terms of mainstream politics would understand as a “victory”. But they are a wellspring to which conventional representative politics periodically turns for inspiration and momentum, when the conventional mechanisms run out of torque.
Jeffrey Sachs and Niall Ferguson Debate Occupy Wall Street
CNN:
On GPS this weekend, historian Niall Ferguson squared off against economist Jeff Sachs on occupy Wall Street. Here’s a transcript of what they had to say (you can also watch the lively debate in the video above):
Fareed Zakaria: Jeff, you were at Occupy Wall Street. You’ve in a sense lent it support. Why do you do that? What do you think is going on there?
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, I think they have a basically correct message that when they say “we are the 99 percent,” that they’re reflecting the fact that the top one percent not only ran away with the prize economically in the last 30 years, but also took the power, manipulated it, twisted it, broke the law. Brought the world economy to its knees actually, and it’s time to correct things. And I think that that’s what Occupy Wall Street is really about. The fact that every marquee firm on Wall Street broke the law in a major way, it’s now paying a series of fines. Some people are going to jail. People are disgusted about this.
Fareed Zakaria: But isn’t what has caused the one percent or five percent of the top to do well, these very broad forces of technology, the information revolution which have empowered global knowledge workers, which have empowered capital rather than labor? So if it’s all these much bigger structural forces, is it going to be remedied by some kind of political solution like a Buffett tax?
Workers’ Wages Fall, Corporate Profits Soar
By Benjamin Landy
Henry Blodget, the Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider, has compiled an excellent series of graphs this week illustrating the various ways that the distribution of wealth has grown more unequal over the last fourty years. Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests, Blodget highlights the ongoing economic injustice: middle class wages remain stagnant and the unemployment rate hovers near historic highs, but corporate profits and incomes for the nation’s wealthiest members are reaching levels unseen since the late 1920s.
I combined two of Blodget’s more powerful graphs and reconfigured them to compare the change in wages and corporate profits as a percentage of GDP since 1960.
The data is shocking: with the exception of a brief respite from 1967 to 1972, workers’ wages have been steadily declining as a share of the economy for over fourty years. At just 14 percent, wages have never been lower as a percentage of the economy than they are today.
Corporate profits, meanwhile, have never been better. As a percentage of the economy, today’s profits are surpassed only by a brief period in 2007, just before the stock market crashed, propelling the US economy into the Great Recession. If the current trend continues, they will soon be even higher.
And just in case you were wondering who is benefiting from those skyrocketing corporate profits, here’s a reminder:
It’s not the middle class.
Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as or the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.
Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations, 1776.
[via The Conscience of a Liberal]
Krugman:
Small quibble: under current conditions, with a large debt overhang, the AD curve should be upward-sloping!
Thanks, Professor.
Graph of the Day: An ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Primer
By Benjamin Landy
As the Occupy Wall Street protest builds strength in lower Manhattan, inspiring offshoot movements to “occupy” Boston, Los Angeles, and numerous other cities, the mainstream media are finally beginning to address Americans’ growing discontent over income inequality, debt, corporate greed and corruption—a conversation dominated until very recently by the Tea Party. Unfortunately, class privilege remains an uncomfortable topic in most media circles, and the hard facts about rising income inequality go largely unreported.
Here, for those wondering what all the fuss is about—or those simply wanting to learn more—is the single most important graph concerning U.S. income inequality.
In the graph on the left (click to expand), it is difficult to discern any appreciable increase in real income for all but the top 15 percent of taxpayers since 1979. But while middle class wages have remained stagnant for the last 40 years, top incomes have skyrocketed, more than tripling in the same period. The graph on the right reframes this dramatic shift in terms of percent share of total income, illustrating a stark divergence between the most wealthy Americans and nearly everyone else.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. For much of the twentieth century, the United States had a strong middle class. Incomes for all Americans were rising as wages tracked producitivity growth. Then, beginning around 1973, these two trends decoupled. Political scientists continue to debate the exact reasons—lower taxes on the rich, deregulation of business, a widening gap between the technological skills of the labor force and available jobs—but productivity soared while only the incomes of the top ten percent continued to rise in tandem. The middle class, as it had existed since the end of the Second World War, began to decline. The top one percent, meanwhile, now control a substantial majority of the nation’s wealth: In 2010, the 400 wealthiest individuals held more assets—in stocks, home equity and other investments—than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined. The average wealth of the top 1 percent was nearly $14 million in 2009, down from a peak of $19.2 million before the financial crash.
When you look at the data, it’s not hard to see why so many Americans are upset, nor why Republican strategists are so concerned by the effectiveness of the protesters’ populist slogan, “We are the 99%.” It’s hard to defend tax breaks for millionaires when Congress is slashing budgets for social programs that help the poor, especially when the threshold income to join the top 1 percent is $516,633—about ten times median income.
That anger is now beginning to take form. When I walked down to Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district last Wednesday to observe the thousands who had gathered there to protest, what I repeatedly overheard was some variation of “I’ve been waiting for this to happen.” And while it is too soon to say whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will grow into the Left’s answer to the Tea Party, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party are at least sitting up and taking notice. We’re long overdue for a national conversation about the unprecedented income inequality in this country, and Wall Street—the symbolic center of the financial world—is as good a place as any to start it.
I saw this at Occupy Wall Street on Wednesday, too. Brilliant.
Pic via @elliottjustin
Chris Hedges at Occupy Wall Street: Full Interview
A fascinating interview with author and war correspondent Chris Hedges, formerly of the New York Times, at Occupy Wall Street last week. Full transcript here.
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
Part IV:
Part V:
Part VI:
#occupywallst
