What Should Happen With Occupy Wall Street?
A note to Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash of The New York Times. If you are going to put this in your article, put it in quotes and attribute it properly or keep it out of the news section of the paper:
Without a coherent message, the crowds will ultimately thin out, Wall Street types insist — especially when the weather turns colder. They see the protesters as an entertaining sideshow, little more than flash mobs of slackers, seeking to lock arms with Kanye West or get a whiff of the antiestablishment politics that defined their parents’ generation.
I don't think it is incumbent on #OWS to have a coherent message. They are people who feel that their freedoms are being constricted due to the corruptness of others. They are joining together to push back against that feeling. They win just by showing up and eschewing violence. If the NYPD and branch managers at Citibank can't figure that out and stop dehumanizing the protestors, then #OWS will win even more.
There are plenty of policy changes that could satisfy the protestors, even if they are not articulating them themselves. I can only speak for myself. At a gut level, I would like policy makers to:
- Stop justifying action to prop up individual institutions based on vague notions of what will happen to the broader economy.
- Stop using bailouts in lieu of bankruptcy.
- Stop taking any political contributions from the financial sector, period. What was true of the health sector during health care reform is even more true of the financial sector today.
There hasn't been much occasion to test #1 and #2 as of late, so I would need to see more politicians take the pledge on #3. In terms of specific reforms, I would like to see policy makers enact the key ideas of the Squam Lake Report:
- Capital ratios for all financial firms that increase with the size of the firm, the illiquidity of its assets, and its reliance on short-term liabilities for funding.
- The use of regulatory hybrid securities to enable instant recapitalization of financially distressed firms in the event of a systemic crisis. (A requirement that each firm have enough such securities among its liabilities so that it would be well capitalized based on the requirements in #1 in the event that its existing equity had zero value would suffice.)
- Compensation holdbacks from top executives at financial firms that vest on a long-schedule and are held in cash.
If the FSOC or the Congress had the guts to do this, the "Wall Street types" wouldn't have to rely so much on colder weather to clear out the protestors.
Another day, another two media cretins ...
Copied below is the "Declaration of Occupation" prepared by the #OWS. It is the model of a coherent message. It suggests that our much publicized "exceptionalism" is, in fact, the massive chasm between what we say we are ... as opposed to our grim reality.
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Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
http://tinyurl.com/3h856wg
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.
We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity. They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit. They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power. Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.
There's this marvelous thing called Google...
...that notes that, on 30 September (which is rather a long ways ago), the First OFFICIAL Release from Occupy Wall Street (shouting theirs) was posted, a document patterned after a certain previous Declaration. (I didn't count to see whether there are 27 "They haves," but strict adherence to precedent shouldn't be necessary.)
Four days later (4 Oct)--we're still at least a week before the NYT article--they released a possibly-final version of the Declaration of Principles.
Two days previous (28 September) there was a list of Eight Proposed Demands for Congressional Action.
I have no idea if any of the above are final, but I note that several of the proposed demands are (well, were in my day) standards of conservative thought, and that your list dovetails well with them.
That took me less than ten minutes, on a slow machine, while multitasking, including reviewing a couple of other references that turned out to be secondary and tertiary discussions. I would assume a pair of NYT reporters, their assistants and/or researchers, their editors, and the paper's copyeditors could have found all of this and more (e.g., Nexus/Lexus searches, the NYT archives).
Instead, they published something that didn't even pass the most rudimentary "sniff test" of a busy professor several hundred miles away.
NYTs Kristof gets it.
America’s ‘Primal Scream’
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-americas-primal...
You're mistaken if you think
You're mistaken if you think this only about banks. Banks and the overly large financial sector as a whole are major problems. But the protesters are also concern with inequality in general. The growth of FIRE relative to the rest of the economy has contributed to inequality, but it isn't the only factor.
A somewhat different
A somewhat different manifesto : http://99percentmanifesto.blogspot.com/2011/10/manifesto.html
Thank you for hating capitalism
Keep it up, we'll have you out on the street holding up a giant paper maché fish in no time.
The Rich Make the Poor Suffer
The rich are getting richer because of their influence on the regulatory process.
The main demands of the protesters should include re-instating the Glass-Stegall act and limiting pay of all CEOs and executives in the financial industry. Without the bailouts most of them would be on the streets instead of collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars.