A new progressive era

[Political Waves]

I'm sure you all know that the #occupy movement in New York, Oakland and many other areas all experienced a coordinated attack last night. This didn't surprise me. As Eric said in the Tuesday e-mail, it's something of a miracle they've let it last this long. Still, the movement is not hampered by the loss of a squatters camp -- in fact, it's just beginning to catch fire in imagination. 

 

The part that upset me the most -- not that police action of this sort will EVER be ho-hum in my book -- is the trashing of the people's library and some 5,000 or so books. Call me old fashioned but that's glaring fascism. I expect Bloomberg will look back on this with regret. Here's a petition from FreePress asking the Mayors not to do similar press "blackouts" in defiance of the First Amendment.

 

The read today talks about this new movement of ours, and how history informs it.

 

In other news, Elizabeth Warren continues to be a person of considerable interest to most of us -- someone who is willing to stand up against big money to champion the middle class. One of our readers, Sherril, sent in a link we should take a look at. It comes from a Lefty website called naked capitalism and is certainly worth your attention:

 

Elizabeth Warren's Jobs Plan: War With Iran

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/elizabeth-warrens-job-plan-war-with-iran.html

 

After reading it through, I went on a hunt for info regarding Warren's politics and what SHE might tell us of them. I found a couple of pieces that gives you a sense of her, in her own words. One from UC Berkeley gives us a personal snapshot of the way her mind changed regarding public behavior; perhaps her politics did at that time as well. I don't know. But I'm still trusting my instincts on this. We need her voice -- one of the few that can demystify finance for us and explain why returning to regulation works for us all.

 

Perhaps Warren is a liberal, perhaps not -- after thirty-odd years traveling down a conservative-leaning slipstream, it's difficult to define "liberal" at this point. But here's the thing -- I write about politics on the ground. Basically, I write about establishment politics. Ms. Warren's run for the Senate indicates that she means to become an ESTABLISHMENT politician. There it is there and surely she's a cut above what we've come to know as 21st century politicians. What I've observed about the majority of politicians that come from both a legal and academic background is that they respect the law above all things, even when the law is ill-advised. That's one of the foibles we face with Obama, who finds himself unable to influence much within the system but refuses to flex muscle on the edge of it -- and perhaps we'll face the same with a Senator Warren. But both are influencing for a shift in law through the proper channels. Warren -- some say -- more aggressively than Obama -- and ALWAYS a candidates prerogative.

 

Influencing power is the the best we'll EVER get out of the establishment and, with an energized populist movement shoving it forward, perhaps it's all we'll need to redefine our political intent for the next leg of this journey. Obviously, removing the obstructionists, lobbying cartel and gangsters would give us a system that might begin to repair itself and -- again obviously -- nothing can happen until that's accomplished.

 

I wanted to address this because as the left gets more and more radical, I'm not expecting my emotions -- hence blogging -- to go into 60s attack-mode, as it once did. And that's not because I'm not left of left, because I am. In fact, years back -- when I was breathing fire into your in-box over Dubby several times a day -- I put out a post that contained a little quiz one could take to plot themselves on the political graph. Digby re-posted it recently, so I took it again and found I'd gotten more progressive than I was five or six years ago. And -- Lord knows -- I've continued to whine and spout about the broken system and its need to completely revamp itself for years.

 

Still, this time it's different. I believe that if we're waking up, all of us -- looking around one morning, suddenly surprised to find that we can no longer tolerate a policy or behavior, or questioning those who insist we comply with something we no longer identify with -- THAT will be reflected in the establishment.

 

The establishment isn't the enemy. It's just the process by which we self-govern. THIS time it's an inside job -- as we individually make the internal changes of consciousness, bureaucracies and organizations will make the internal adjustments reflecting a new understanding, bringing the policies and laws that reflect that new consciousness to pass. So yes, I fully support the conflict that AWAKENS us all to the power that tries to stamp out free speech and civil liberty, but I'm also fully aware that it is WITHIN the system itself that change must assert itself.

 

As the article I'm posting today suggests, the insistence on change comes from the grassroots. The ultimate change will be enacted into law by those within the establishment. As much as we'd like to put the "establishment" behind us, it is simply the collective enactment of that elusive dream designed so long ago, hijacked by the worst of what the old paradigm projected upon us.

 

A new paradigm must overlay the old and that will be a new global dream of justice and compassion. A new establishment, I suppose ... because, like religion becoming a solid expression of a transcendent experience, so must it be with government.

 

Therefore, as regards establishment politics, today -- the couple of Warren links I spoke of above and an opinion piece from the NYTimes.

 

Jude

 

 

A Saint With Sharp Elbows

In her race for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, is Elizabeth Warren running against Scott Brown and Obama?

Jason Zengerle, RSN

Nov 13, 2011

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/69-69/8398-focus--elizabeth-warren-a-saint-with-sharp-elbows

 

 

Law, Poilitics and the Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: a Conversation with Elizabeth Warren

Conversations with History, UC Berkeley

2007

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people7/Warren/warren-con0.html

 

 

The New Progressive Movement

JEFFREY D. SACHS, New York Times opinion

11/12/2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-new-progressive-movement.html

 

OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

 

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

 

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

 

Washington still channels Reaganomics. The federal budget for nonsecurity discretionary outlays — categories like highways and rail, education, job training, research and development, the judiciary, NASA, environmental protection, energy, the I.R.S. and more — was cut from more than 5 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the 1970s to around half of that today. With the budget caps enacted in the August agreement, domestic discretionary spending would decline to less than 2 percent of G.D.P. by the end of the decade, according to the White House. Government would die by fiscal asphyxiation.

 

Both parties have joined in crippling the government in response to the demands of their wealthy campaign contributors, who above all else insist on keeping low tax rates on capital gains, top incomes, estates and corporate profits. Corporate taxes as a share of national income are at the lowest levels in recent history. Rich households take home the greatest share of income since the Great Depression. Twice before in American history, powerful corporate interests dominated Washington and brought America to a state of unacceptable inequality, instability and corruption. Both times a social and political movement arose to restore democracy and shared prosperity.

 

The first age of inequality was the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, an era quite like today, when both political parties served the interests of the corporate robber barons. The progressive movement arose after the financial crisis of 1893. In the following decades Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson came to power, and the movement pushed through a remarkable era of reform: trust busting, federal income taxation, fair labor standards, the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage.

 

The second gilded age was the Roaring Twenties. The pro-business administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover once again opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess, this time culminating in the Great Depression. And once again the pendulum swung. F.D.R.’s New Deal marked the start of several decades of reduced income inequality, strong trade unions, steep top tax rates and strict financial regulation. After 1981, Reagan began to dismantle each of these core features of the New Deal.

 

Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington.

 

None of this will be easy. Vested interests are deeply entrenched, even as Wall Street titans are jailed and their firms pay megafines for fraud. The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old.

 

The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park.

 

The new movement also needs to build a public policy platform. The American people have it absolutely right on the three main points of a new agenda. To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.

 

Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. And the candidates that turn down large campaign checks, political action committees, Super PACs and bundlers will be well positioned to call out their opponents who are on the corporate take.

 

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun. ++

 

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.”

 

 

 “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

~ Barack Obama

 

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