As you know, real change does not come easy and does not come overnight. In order to make real change we need the world to contribute and help. On Sep. 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street started a revolution. One year later, join us for three days of education, training, and protest in New York City. http://s17nyc.org
Showing posts with label 99%. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 99%. Show all posts
Thursday, August 9
Sunday, May 20
Occupy For All Species
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By Mickey Z
"If you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed, or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not." --Moby
There I was, walking along 30th Ave. in Astoria, Queens. Just a few steps in front of me, two men and a little girl were strolling at a casual pace. The men, in their late 20s, were deep in conversation but one was clearly keeping an eye on the girl. She was no more than five-years-old but had a precocious and confident air that you could detect in a single glance.
As we all passed one of the many Italian delis that dot the Astoria landscape, the young gal looked to her left and then turned to one of the men.
"Dad," she said, giggling uncontrollably. "The sign on that store said 'We carry frozen snails.'"
With comic timing that would make any Vaudevillian drool, he replied: "I bet their hands are cold." (insert rimshot here) And dig this: his daughter got the pun. She was laughing her little head off the rest of the way down the block.
What she didn't get -- what so few of us get -- is how the tragic realities of the standard American diet are rendered invisible.
As I continued my way down 30th Ave., I saw a butcher standing in front of his shop -- chatting amiably with passersby -- his white frock stained deep red with blood.
He was casually standing there -- as he does every day -- drenched in the blood of a murdered creature but essentially nobody chose to notice the crimson splatter. Those that did notice, well, they didn't even flinch.
Behind the butcher, sheep carcasses hung from large hooks in the window... their bulging lifeless eyes seemed to stare accusingly at the butcher's back. He didn't appear to notice. Essentially nobody noticed and those that did, well, they didn't even flinch.
The next block brought me in contact with a fish store. Wet cardboard boxes filled with marine corpses piled in front... the street reeking of death. Beyond the stench, essentially nobody noticed and those that did, well, they didn't even flinch.
Looking into the fish store window, I saw a tiny aquarium tank. At least a dozen doomed lobsters were piled atop one another... their claws taped shut. Essentially nobody noticed and those that did, well, they didn't even flinch.
What happens when someone points all this out, refuses to participate, and urges others to do the same? You can be damn fuckin' sure plenty of folks will notice and, yeah... the flinching will begin in earnest.
Mic Check: We need more flinching, we need less denial, and we must make holistic connections.
"One thing to remember is to talk to the animals. If you do, they will talk back to you. But if you don't talk to the animals, they won't talk back to you, then you won't understand, and when you don't understand you will fear and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself." --Chief Dan George
The correlation between animal rights and the Occupy movement is clear. The corporate powers-that-be manipulate and twist our minds in the name of profit and they're damn sure not gonna let animal abuse get in their avaricious way.
Mic Check: If the new wave of occupants and the old guard of animal rights activists join hands, well... the 99% becomes that much more unstoppable.
As I've said over and over, the system being challenged by OWS is built, in a major way, on the exploitation of non-human animals and the eco-system. It's all connected within a culture constructed on the premise of unlimited growth and it must all remain connected within a movement aiming for holistic justice.
If you're already working to dismantle corporate power, expand freedoms, and create a safer, more sane culture, you already have plenty in common with animal rights activists.
Why not take things even further and recognize that the mighty 99% also includes non-human animals -- and the entire ecosystem itself?
Mic Check: If you're in the New York City area, join us for an afternoon of solidarity at the Veggie Pride Parade event at Union Square Park on Sun., May 27. I'm the keynote speaker and I will be connecting animal rights activists with occupiers that day.
We are the 99%. Expect us. Join us...
***
Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
Saturday, May 19
Five Facts That Put America to Shame
 |
| Child poverty has reached 25 percent in the USA. (photo: Colorlines) |
ive me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses ... I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" These words, from poet Emma Lazarus, were inscribed on the Statue of Liberty over 100 years ago. Today the golden door has a lock on it, paid for with record profits from the health care, education, and financial industries.
1. We're near the bottom of the developed world in children's health and safety.
According to a 2007 UNICEF report, the U.S. ranked last among 21 OECD nations in an assessment of child health and safety. The assessment measured infant mortality, immunization, and death from accidents and injuries.
A related 2009 OECD study generally agreed, placing the U.S. 24th out of 30 OECD countries for children's health and safety. It also showed the devastating effects of inequality in our country. Despite having the second-highest average income for children among the 30 OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 27th out of 30 for child poverty (percentage of children living in households that are below 50% of the median income).
2. We've betrayed the young people who were advised to stay in school.
Over 40% of recent college graduates are living with their parents, dealing with government loans thataverage $27,200. The unemployment rate for young people is about 50%. More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010.
As Washington lobbyists endeavor to kill a proposed bill to reduce the interest rates on student debt, federal loans remain readily available, and so colleges go right on increasing their tuition.
Meanwhile, corporations hold $2 trillion in cash while looking for investments and employees in foreign countries, and American students are forced to accept menial positions. Yet delusions persist about our new generation of would-be workers. Conservatives are all bubbly about today's young entrepreneurs creating their own jobs - jobs that "don't yet exist."
3. The main source of middle-class wealth has been largely wiped out.
American homeowners owe almost as much as the students, with $700 billion of debt over and above the value of their homes.
This removes the only source of wealth for middle America, especially for blacks and Hispanics. Remarkably, for every dollar of NON-HOME wealth owned by white families, people of color have only one cent.
So when minority families were specifically targeted for high-risk, subprime loans that could be re-packaged and sold for a quick short-term profit, most of their assets were erased. Median wealth fell 66% for Hispanic households and 53% for black households. For whites the decline was 16%.
With a disturbing note of irony, Sanford Weill, the banker largely responsible for the reversal of the mortgage-protecting Glass-Steagall Act, was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for "extraordinary accomplishment and a call to serve."
4. We give prison sentences for smoking marijuana, but not for billion-dollar fraud.
About half of our world-leading prison population is in jail for non-violent drug offenses. Americans have also been arrested for handing out free food in a park. Mothers in Ohio and Connecticut were jailed for enrolling their kids in out-of-district schools. As of 2003 in California there were 344 individuals serving sentences of 25 years or more for shoplifting as a third offense, in many cases after two non-violent offenses.
How does the market deal with this steady tide of petty crime? It strives for more. The new trend of private prisons is dependent on maintaining a sizable prison population to guarantee profits, with no incentive for rehabilitation.
As the number of inmates has surged, the people who devastated countless American lives "get out of jail free." The savings and loan fraud cost the nation between $300 billion and $500 billion, about 100 times more than the total cost of burglaries in 2010. The financial system bailout has already cost the country $3 trillion. Goldman Sachs packaged bad debt, sold it under a different name, persuaded ratings services to label it AAA, and then bet against their own financial creation by selling it short. Other firms accused of fraud and insider trading were Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Countrywide Financial, and Wells Fargo. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the Justice Department had postponed the bribery or fraud prosecutions of over 50 corporations, choosing instead to enter into agreements involving fines and 'monitoring' periods.
5. You can have health care, if you pay for it.
A recent Commonwealth Fund study compared U.S. health care spending to 12 other OECD countries. The data shows that reducing our costs to the median level of spending among the OECD countries would save us $1.5 trillion a year, more than our entire deficit.
Unfortunately, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and hospital administrators won't hear of it. There's too much money to be made. Bypass surgery in the U.S. costs 2 to 3 times more than in Great Britain, Canada, France, and Germany. Cataract surgery costs 4 times more.
That's if you can pay for it. There are currently about 50 million uninsured Americans. At the otherextreme are $2,400 oxymoronic penthouse hospital suites complete with butler and grand piano. Or, for those who don't get out much, emergency rooms in the home, with private cell-phone access to "concierge doctors."
Inequality in our country is so severe that 120,000 health care workers could have been hired with the salary paid to one man. That's a $40,000 salary for 40 health care workers for every one of the 3,000 counties in the United States. Instead, $5 billion dollars went to one man who reportedly made his first big haul ($4 billion, in 2007) by conspiring with Goldman Sachs in the above-mentioned short sale subterfuge.
The result of ignoring the health needs of the greater population, according to a report in the Annual Review of Public Health, is that "the health rankings of the United States have declined substantially when compared with other nations."
Conclusion
Privatization simply hasn't worked for health care, mortgage banking, higher education, or prison management. There is little incentive for profit-motivated firms to invest in disadvantaged or underemployed Americans. That's why taxes are necessary - to provide for the common good, and to return some of the gains from 60 years of productivity to the great majority of Americans who contributed to our growth. Unfortunately, the golden door on the Statue of Liberty seems to have an invisible hand holding it shut.
Saturday, May 5
Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1%
Published on Monday, April 30, 2012 by Common Dreams
We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.
1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes
That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700). Here are the details:
Internal Revenue Service figures show that the very rich paid 23% of their incomes in federal income taxes in 2006. The middle class paid about 8% of their incomes in federal income taxes. Based on U.S.Congressional Budget Office figures, the very rich pay just under 2% of their incomes toward social security, while the middle class pays just under 10%. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the very rich pay about 7% of their incomes in state and sales and property and excise taxes, while the middle class pays approximately 10%. Another year of Bush tax cuts will reduce the taxes of the very rich by at least 3% more than the middle class.
So total taxes for the very rich are 29% of their incomes (23% + 2% + 7% - 3%). Total taxes for the middle class are 28% of their incomes (8% + 10% + 10%). These figures agree with CTJ's 2011 estimate of total taxes paid.
2. Tax Rates Are Too High
In 2009, the United States ranked 26th out of 28 OECD countries in total federal, state, and local taxes as a percent of GDP. Only Chile and Mexico had lower tax rates.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows." For taxpayers in the top 1%, the tax burden has fallen dramatically in recent years.
At very high income levels, beginning at about the million dollar range, federal income tax actually becomes regressive. Effective tax rates level off at about 25%, and then go down from there. This is because all incomes over $388,000 are subject to the same 35% maximum. The $4 billion hedge fund manager pays no more, percentagewise, than the $400,000 doctor. In fact, even less. At the highest levels most of the income comes from capital gains, which are taxed at 15%.
How about corporations? Even worse. They paid only 12.1% in 2011, dramatically lower than the 25% average since 1987. According to U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) figures, they're paying about a THIRD of the inflation-adjusted share of GDP paid by corporations in the 1960s.
Compared to foreign countries, U.S. corporations paid a smaller rate of income taxes than 24 of 25 OECD countries analyzed by the Office of Management and Budget and the Census Bureau.
Most stunning is the shift in taxpaying responsibility from corporations to workers over the years. For every dollar of workers' payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.
3. Tax Cuts Boost the Economy
In the 1970s, University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. The delusion has persisted to this day.
Soon after the Reagan tax cuts, in 1984, the U.S. Treasury Department came to the logical conclusion that tax cuts cause a loss of revenue. A 2006 Treasury Department study found that extending the Bush tax cuts would have no beneficial effect on the U.S. economy.
Other sources confirm that economic growth was fastest in years with relatively high top marginal tax rates.
The reality is that supply-side, trickle-down economics simply hasn't worked. Various economic studies have concluded that the revenue-maximizing top income tax rate is anywhere from 50% to 75%.
4. Eliminating Tax Breaks for the Rich Wouldn't Significantly Reduce the Deficit
First of all, just eliminating the Bush tax cuts on the highest-earning 5% of Americans could knock $150 billion off the deficit. Congressional Budget Office data shows that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the return of substantial budget deficits in recent years.
But there's so much more. The IRS estimates that 17 percent of taxes owed were not paid, leaving an underpayment of $450 billion.
Most of the annual $1.3 trillion in "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers. Oneestimate is $250 billion a year just to the richest 1%.
Another $100 billion could be retrieved by collecting taxes from Fortune 500 companies at the 26% rate paid from 1987 to 2008. CTJ puts the figure at over $200 billion.
Worse yet is the loss from tax havens, which the Tax Justice Network estimates as $337 billion.
Despite some overlap in these figures, it all adds up to a pretty good chunk of the deficit.
5. A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) Would Hurt the Economy
This fallacy would have us believe that a tiny tax on financial transactions is going to hurt the economy, even though the underlying reason for our economic collapse was the excessive, reckless, unrestrained, free-for-all trading of trillions of dollars of speculative derivatives.
The inventiveness of this fallacy is impressive, with claims of lost jobs, harm to ordinary investors, and the threat of exchanges moving overseas. The Wall Street Journal calls the FTT a "sin tax."
An FTT isn't likely to interrupt the global trading frenzy or cause any sudden defections from financial megacenters. The United Kingdom has had a tax on stock trades for decades, and the London Stock Exchange is humming along as the third largest exchange in the world. The CME Group, made up of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, had a profit margin higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation from 2008 to 2010.
On the contrary, the FTT has extraordinary revenue-generating potential, on a global scale. The Bank for International Settlements reported in 2008 that annual trading in derivatives had surpassed $1.14 quadrillion (a thousand trillion dollars!). For the U.S. alone, revenue estimates by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Chicago Political Economy Group approach a half-trillion dollars annually.
And at the more basic level of simple fairness, it should be noted that while an American mother pays nearly a 10% sales tax on shoes for her kids, millionaire investors pay .002 percent (2-thousandths of a percent) for a financial instrument. That kind of tax disparity is what really hurts.
1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes
That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700). Here are the details:
Internal Revenue Service figures show that the very rich paid 23% of their incomes in federal income taxes in 2006. The middle class paid about 8% of their incomes in federal income taxes. Based on U.S.Congressional Budget Office figures, the very rich pay just under 2% of their incomes toward social security, while the middle class pays just under 10%. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the very rich pay about 7% of their incomes in state and sales and property and excise taxes, while the middle class pays approximately 10%. Another year of Bush tax cuts will reduce the taxes of the very rich by at least 3% more than the middle class.
So total taxes for the very rich are 29% of their incomes (23% + 2% + 7% - 3%). Total taxes for the middle class are 28% of their incomes (8% + 10% + 10%). These figures agree with CTJ's 2011 estimate of total taxes paid.
2. Tax Rates Are Too High
In 2009, the United States ranked 26th out of 28 OECD countries in total federal, state, and local taxes as a percent of GDP. Only Chile and Mexico had lower tax rates.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows." For taxpayers in the top 1%, the tax burden has fallen dramatically in recent years.
At very high income levels, beginning at about the million dollar range, federal income tax actually becomes regressive. Effective tax rates level off at about 25%, and then go down from there. This is because all incomes over $388,000 are subject to the same 35% maximum. The $4 billion hedge fund manager pays no more, percentagewise, than the $400,000 doctor. In fact, even less. At the highest levels most of the income comes from capital gains, which are taxed at 15%.
How about corporations? Even worse. They paid only 12.1% in 2011, dramatically lower than the 25% average since 1987. According to U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) figures, they're paying about a THIRD of the inflation-adjusted share of GDP paid by corporations in the 1960s.
Compared to foreign countries, U.S. corporations paid a smaller rate of income taxes than 24 of 25 OECD countries analyzed by the Office of Management and Budget and the Census Bureau.
Most stunning is the shift in taxpaying responsibility from corporations to workers over the years. For every dollar of workers' payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.
3. Tax Cuts Boost the Economy
In the 1970s, University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. The delusion has persisted to this day.
Soon after the Reagan tax cuts, in 1984, the U.S. Treasury Department came to the logical conclusion that tax cuts cause a loss of revenue. A 2006 Treasury Department study found that extending the Bush tax cuts would have no beneficial effect on the U.S. economy.
Other sources confirm that economic growth was fastest in years with relatively high top marginal tax rates.
The reality is that supply-side, trickle-down economics simply hasn't worked. Various economic studies have concluded that the revenue-maximizing top income tax rate is anywhere from 50% to 75%.
4. Eliminating Tax Breaks for the Rich Wouldn't Significantly Reduce the Deficit
First of all, just eliminating the Bush tax cuts on the highest-earning 5% of Americans could knock $150 billion off the deficit. Congressional Budget Office data shows that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the return of substantial budget deficits in recent years.
But there's so much more. The IRS estimates that 17 percent of taxes owed were not paid, leaving an underpayment of $450 billion.
Most of the annual $1.3 trillion in "tax expenditures" (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers. Oneestimate is $250 billion a year just to the richest 1%.
Another $100 billion could be retrieved by collecting taxes from Fortune 500 companies at the 26% rate paid from 1987 to 2008. CTJ puts the figure at over $200 billion.
Worse yet is the loss from tax havens, which the Tax Justice Network estimates as $337 billion.
Despite some overlap in these figures, it all adds up to a pretty good chunk of the deficit.
5. A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) Would Hurt the Economy
This fallacy would have us believe that a tiny tax on financial transactions is going to hurt the economy, even though the underlying reason for our economic collapse was the excessive, reckless, unrestrained, free-for-all trading of trillions of dollars of speculative derivatives.
The inventiveness of this fallacy is impressive, with claims of lost jobs, harm to ordinary investors, and the threat of exchanges moving overseas. The Wall Street Journal calls the FTT a "sin tax."
An FTT isn't likely to interrupt the global trading frenzy or cause any sudden defections from financial megacenters. The United Kingdom has had a tax on stock trades for decades, and the London Stock Exchange is humming along as the third largest exchange in the world. The CME Group, made up of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, had a profit margin higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation from 2008 to 2010.
On the contrary, the FTT has extraordinary revenue-generating potential, on a global scale. The Bank for International Settlements reported in 2008 that annual trading in derivatives had surpassed $1.14 quadrillion (a thousand trillion dollars!). For the U.S. alone, revenue estimates by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Chicago Political Economy Group approach a half-trillion dollars annually.
And at the more basic level of simple fairness, it should be noted that while an American mother pays nearly a 10% sales tax on shoes for her kids, millionaire investors pay .002 percent (2-thousandths of a percent) for a financial instrument. That kind of tax disparity is what really hurts.
Monday, April 30
Saturday, April 28
May Day's Radical History
What Occupy Is Fighting for This May 1st
American general strikes—or
rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los
Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general
assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.
The last real general strike in this
country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city,
was in Oakland, California in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has
suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of
general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we
refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or
explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American
working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have
suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think
about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with
a past we've mostly forgotten.
So it makes sense that this year’s call
for an Occupy general strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls
on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by
American workers, crushed by the American government, incubated abroad,
and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.
The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday
is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour
day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the
labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.
Perhaps the first nation-wide labor
movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to
agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a
natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day
allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue
education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work
day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers
celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new
lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a
broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized
together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even
religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour
Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and
strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its
first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work
hours.
The demand for an eight-hour day was about
leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power.
When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours,
they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government
regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers
sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through
declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions
they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over
their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a
demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage
increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up
their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the
beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.
The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into
effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens of thousands of Chicago’s workers
celebrated in what a newspaper called “the largest procession ever seen
on the streets of Chicago.” But the day after, employers, en masse,
ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11
hours. The city erupted in a general strike--workers struck, and those
who didn’t leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues
roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs.
After several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied
working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they
controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long hours.
The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive decline
in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such numbers for
almost two decades.
The Illinois law and its defeat, however,
were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in
Chicago. This one was more radical and was dominated by immigrant
workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad
workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers took
control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard
and local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President
Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army and brutally repressed the
strike. They also remembered the state was rarely if ever on the side of
the worker. Yet they also remembered the brief shining moment when it
appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.
So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor
Union again demanded an eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like
August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed movement demanded “eight
for 10”--that is, eight hours’ work for 10 hours’ pay. Throughout the
winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of small
victories, largely in German butchers’ shops, breweries and bakeries,
where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then
they issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a
general strike and not return to work unless employers agreed to an
eight-hour workday.
The demands of the militant Chicago
anarchists coincided with a massive upswing in other militant movements.
Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling against a monopolistic
railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly organizing and
spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than capitalistic,
society. “What happened on May 1, 1886,” writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible historian
to have written about it, “was more than a general strike; it was a
‘populist moment’ when working people believed they could destroy
plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new ‘cooperative
commonwealth.’”
Four days later, it all came crashing
down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick
Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into
an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an
outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest
the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his
speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the
charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd.
“But we are peaceable!” Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t.
Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the
course of American history changed.
To this day we do not know, nor will we
likely ever know, who threw the bomb. Some say it was an agent
provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn’t an anarchist,
it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who made
bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know
that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled
by the police bullets.
We also know that the effect of the
Haymarket bombing was far greater on the labor movement than it was on
the police.
Eight anarchist leaders were rounded up and put on trial
for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever given that any
of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was presented
that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and
seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences
commuted, and a third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and
militant of them—cheated the hangman by chewing a detonator cap and
blowing off his jaw. The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons,
Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They
went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the
international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted
out his famous last words: “The time will come when our silence will be
more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
Before that happened, the state ensured
more silence. The strike collapsed. Police around the country raided
radicals’ homes and newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered.
In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s
rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and
conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until
the 1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act
of 1938 to finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.
May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the
international and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that
May 1 be celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket
Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the
International adopted the day as an international workers’ holiday. In
countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1 became
the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations,
often with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May
Day remains an official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to
India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.
Yet in the United States, with some
exception, the workers’ tradition of May 1 died out. Partially this was
because the Knights of Labor had already established a labor day in
September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland,
glommed onto the Knights’ holiday in order to diminish the symbolic
power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared “Americanization Day,”
and later “Loyalty Day” in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the
holiday. Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight
Eisenhower added “Law Day” to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at
the Haymarket anarchists who declared, “All law is slavery.” Today, few
if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although both are on
the books—but the origins of May Day are largely forgotten. Like
International Women’s Day (March 8), which also originated in the U.S.,
International Workers’ Day became a holiday the rest of the world
celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at all.
Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been
rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years. In 2006,
immigrant activists organized “a day without an immigrant,” a nationwide
strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps the largest
demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants,
mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and
in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for
immigrant workers.
It is appropriate that when the Occupy L.
A. first issued its call for a general strike this May 1, it said the
strike was “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on
foreclosures, and peace.” The order was significant, for migrants in
the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the voices
the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And
regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general
strike, in which cities grind to a halt and workers control what
activities occur, is unlikely—we can, through a national day of action
for the working class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We
have a opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through
new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded
us.
Jacob Remes teaches history and public affairs at Empire State College, SUNY’s college for adult learners.
[SOURCE]
Saturday, April 14
6 People You Need to Start a Revolution
Photo Credit: Oregon DOT
It's a good time to remember that mass movements are — by design and necessity — big and diverse, encompassing lots of different kinds of people who bring all kinds of skills, resources, interests and priorities to the table. As progressives, we've always believed that that diversity is our most important strength.
There's not enough that can be said about the genius of Occupy at raising America's awareness of the corporatization of our culture, and defining and framing the predations of the 1 percent against the 99 percent as the defining conflict of our age. But now it's time to take the message out of the parks and streets and into the American mainstream. If the goal is to build a truly diverse nationwide movement that will change the foundations of the American economy, getting more established groups like MoveOn.org, Rebuild the Dream and the labor unions involved can only be a good thing.
For the revolution to spread, the Occupy protestors need to be joined by other people — very specific kinds of other people, in fact. Centuries of social change theorists going back to Marx and before have figured out that successful revolutions require certain recurring character types and skill sets. History tells us that the relationships between these very different groups are more often than not fractious and prickly -- and, in fact, revolutions (like the French Revolution) can very easily fail when they're seized and overwhelmed by vicious infighting between people who are nominally on the same side.
(A sober reminder: The Terror was, at its core, a purge against "co-optation": Robespierre was determined to preserve the purity of the revolution at all costs. A majority of the people who went to the guillotine, including, ultimately, Robespierre himself, were on the side of the revolution.)
At some point, we have to decide we're going to trust each other, or this new revolution simply isn't going to work. Based on the patterns of history, there are six categories of people without whom no modern revolution has ever succeeded. And that success only happened when members of all six groups were able to put their personal misgivings aside, honor and value the irreplaceable knowledge each one brought to the table, and consciously built up enough mutual trust to bring about the future vision all the parties shared.
Activists
There's no doubt about it: you need rabble-rousers, organizers, rally makers, protest leaders — the people who know how to turn masses of people out into the streets, keep them there for as long as it takes, and get the rest of the country (media, politicians, the man and woman in the street) to pay attention to what they're saying. In every generation, this requires different skills, different technologies, and different tactics. But without these people, you don't have a movement.
That's the piece of the equation that progressives haven't been great at for a long time, and that Occupy revived for us with tremendous originality and flair. They kicked open the door, went in, and dragged America to the table for a new conversation. When the activists move, history gets made.
Intellectuals
But even the best activists can't move the masses if they don't have a coherent story to tell, clear arguments to make, and game-changing policy changes to demand. Every successful movement has a compelling, factual story about why change must happen and well-reasoned theory for how that change must occur. This R&D function is what intellectuals bring to the revolution.
In the current moment, the progressive movement's intellectuals are its think-tankers, bloggers, speakers, professors and authors — the people who've been honing critiques of corporatist economy, politics and culture over the past few decades. Over time, they've quietly been dreaming up a new vision for how a truly free, secure, sustainable, and just American society ought to work.
In every successful revolution, the intellectuals are the people who hang onto the map of where we're going, and keep us from drifting off course when the chaos of change threatens to blow us into dangerous deeps. They know, better than anybody, how this new order goes together and what we'll need to do to build it.
Artists
It's a tragic truth that the kinds of imaginative people who can envision new societies — the intellectuals — are typically not the same people who know how to communicate those visions to the great mass of people. In fact, the intellectuals are often crummy at it. To get people off their butts and out into the streets, you need professional storytellers — writers, artists, songwriters, poets, filmmakers, actors, ritualists — who are gifted at grabbing people by the guts and not letting them go.
Artists are the ones who transform the intellectuals' ideas and visions into heart-level imperatives brimming with deep historical and personal meaning. They're the ones who can inspire vast numbers of people to make the necessary sacrifices, to feel intense bonds of solidarity, and to understand that the work of revolution is the most important work of their lives. You can't do that with a treatise. It takes a manifesto, a movie, a theatrical ritual, a marching song.
Emma Goldman said: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Our artists are the ones who make sure that we keep dancing, even when things are at their darkest. Without artists keeping them engaged in the grand story of their own quest, people lose focus and wander off. But with that encouragement, they'll dance bravely straight into the abyss, even if they know death is waiting for them there.
Insiders
The activists, intellectuals and artists are all loath to admit it, but the bare fact is that no revolution succeeds without a cadre of shrewd political operators who intuitively understand how power works, and are ready to rush in and deftly pull exactly the right levers the minute they're left unguarded by the powers that be.
This fact is going down really hard across the progressive movement right now. Here we are, trying to purify the nation from its corruption by the money power. It's natural that we'd be the most suspicious of the people in our own midst who best understand how that power works. We worry that this familiarity somehow taints their intentions and bends their sympathies. It bothers us that they know how to speak to evil on friendly terms in its own native language, and are willing to negotiate compromises with it. We doubt that they're really as committed to the idea of revolution as the rest of us are, and feel constantly uneasy about where their true loyalties lie.
These are all very valid concerns, and they should be attended to. Of all the groups, this one is far and away the hardest one to trust. After all, they sit across lunch tables inside the beltway exchanging funny stories about their kids and dogs with people from Heritage, AEI and Cato! They go to parties hosted by billionaire banksters! They've got lobbyists on speed-dial!
And yet we need trustworthy and committed insiders every bit as much as we need our activists, intellectuals and artists. Insiders are our eagle-eyed scouts and spotters. Without access to the thousand small details they know about how the system works — the people, the rules, the gossip, the way power and money flows — our strategies to undermine it are doomed to failure. They're also the ones most likely to notice subtle change signals coming from inside the power centers, alert us to rare windows of opportunity when they open, and tell us what we need to do gain maximum leverage over events.
Love 'em or hate 'em, trust 'em or keep a close eye on 'em, it's all fine, and the best ones completely understand and expect this. But at the end of the day, we will not succeed with our inside operators. No revolution ever does. It turns out that if you want to dismantle the master's house, it actually does help to have someone on your side with a journeyman's knowledge of the master's tools.
Supportive Elites
Marx may have been the first one to notice that revolutions only really take off when they're backed by a group of disaffected elites -- both economic and intellectual --who are willing to bring their connections, influence, organizational skills, money, fame and other resources to bear.
Either because of upper-class birth or sheer dint of talent, these people have been trained from childhood to lead society's important institutions. In a stable society, they're typically very well-rewarded by the status quo for this service, and thus don't have any incentive to rock the boat. But one of the hallmarks of a society that's descending into revolution is that the rewards system fails everybody, and these are the very people with the most of all to lose. Always, we see what we see now: a few greedheads get all the money, and people of real merit, skill and talent get the shaft.
Alongside them, there are also a handful of rich people with strong social consciences whose theory of wealth follows Paul Wellstone's rule: Everybody does better when everybody does better. They know that their own prosperity depends on a strong middle class and are willing to get into the fight to protect the nation's future. When these two groups get angry enough to abandon their privileges and join the fight, everything changes.
If the other groups are building the fuse, it's the elites who carry the matches. They bring enough cultural and financial gravity to leverage a local uprising into a major revolution. They add ballast and weight to the revolution's efforts, slicing through obstacles and putting massive momentum behind every new action. The connected ones gather support for change in the halls of power, and like the insiders (who often play an important role in convincing them to step up), they are skilled at anticipating and countering the big counterattacks when they come. The famous ones get the media to pay attention to the cause and sometimes to say nice things about it. The rich ones ensure that the revolution has beans, boots and bullets -- because at the end of the day, the fight can last only as long as these people's resources do.
The Masses
And finally, we come to the basic truth: You cannot have a mass movement without the masses. Margaret Mead said that a few truly committed individuals can change the world. But they never do it alone; they do it by getting a big enough slice of society engaged and ready for the fight.
How big a slice? Good question. A rough answer would be about 15 percent of the country. That's about the number of Americans who identify with the Tea Party. It's also the number of Americans who participated in the American Revolution (and also about the number of active Nazi Party members in prewar Germany). At 15 percent, almost everybody in the country knows someone in the group personally. It's enough to win a few elections in various corners of the country, putting you on the political map. It is, in short, enough people to create some pretty serious cultural and political ripples.
By this measure, we're already doing fabulously well. Various polls over the past year have found that Americans' sympathy for Occupy has at times run as high as 70 percent. This suggests that progressives are now telling a story that Americans are ready to hear and that makes sense to them. A lot of people are interested in what we're doing and wondering how they might get involved.
But Boomer-era progressives are worried. They know all too well from their own experience how easy it is to lose the sympathy of average Americans when we appear to threaten their sensibilities, even if they share our goals and values. But they also know that as long as we keep the focus on the broader story, rather than the small dramas, we have the first real chance in years to change the way America works.
The broader story the masses want to hear from us is this:
America's greatness and prosperity was built on the strength of her working and middle classes. Together, we — the 99 percent — built the world's strongest democracy, enforced the rule of law, provided for the common defense, promoted the general welfare, established an ever-rising standard of justice, ensured domestic tranquility, and secured the blessings of liberty for many generations of American families.
Now, our 99 percent way of life is gone, devoured by an elite 1 percent who took over our own government and used it against us to seize both the personal and the common wealth amassed for us by generations of our ancestors and provided to us by the bounty of this land.
We want our American birthright back. We want to restore rule by the 99 percent. We want the elites to return our futures and our government to us. We will challenge them by every means we can find until this happens.
We are not going away. Their 1 percent's dream of an American feudal state is over. Our American dream of sustainable prosperity and opportunity for the rest of us is now beginning — again.
That's not a story any one of the above groups can ever tell on its own. It will take all of us — activists, intellectuals, artists, insiders, elites and the masses — combining our common will and focus to bring that future about. And the sooner we can start honoring the specific and necessary skills and strengths each of us brings to the process, even when they're different from our own, the sooner we'll be on our way to the next American Dream.
Sara Robinson, MS, APF, is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates.
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