The reason many liberal and progressive elites
hate the occupy wall street folks is simple: they have bypassed the old left leadership. The old left is not making any money off this, is not leading it, so they hate it because it challenges them.
The old left exists to bring in money and keep paying themselves. This is as true of union leadership as it is of the majority of environmental organizations. The leadership of almost all of these organizations is deeply corrupt. All they care about is whether they can fundraise off of something. If they can’t, they despise it. They will, and do, regularly sell out of the interests of their own supposed constituents, in order to make their personal lives easier, to get richer, and to keep hobnobbing with important people.
Movements which bypass the old left, like Occupy Wall Wall Street or Wikileaks, or Anonymous, are MORE of a threat to the old left leadership than the right wing, the Tea Party or the Republicans. Those forces are all good for the old left, they use fear of them to drive donations, and to convince their followers to vote Democratic, for which they are then rewarded with access, pats on the back and small amounts of money. A genuine left wing alternative to the old left leadership is an existential threat to them, and thus they attack them.
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“I hear you — and so many others — when you ask for greater clarity and leadership from this movement, but I sincerely believe that it’s not time for that yet.”
I think you are right. But the waiting is hard.
Bill H.
My point is that most people don’t have the time nor inclination to be policy junkies. They don’t follow track bills through Congress, they switch the channel when the political talking heads come on the air, they don’t follow Politico or the online political sources. For better or for worse, they believe they have personal lives to lead. You may believe that they should be more “responsible citizens” or whatnot, but that’s the way that most people are. Not only in the US, but everywhere else too.
Does this leave them vulnerable to being manipulated by slick operatives? You betcha. However, we once had the Fourth Estate that could act like a partial block on that–to point out the outright lies and deceptions to those not political junkies. Now they too have been largely bought or intimidated into “fairness”. To make matters worse, over the past forty years or so bought-and-paid-for “belief tanks” (Gary Trudeau’s moniker) have been created whose job is to give an veneer of academic respectability to back up the lies. The fact that the publications of said belief tanks aren’t worth toilet paper in real academic merit matters little in news reporting, as the refuting of their “facts”don’t generally hit the newsfeeds.
So–even if everyday citizens were more involved and more captured by the political process, it takes a lot of expertise to recognize the crapola when they see it.
That’s what makes the Wall Street protests the right thing to do politically. Most people aren’t policy wonks, but they do see when they get screwed they’re told by the current House to ‘fuck off and die’ (in essence) whereas when a bankster stubs his toe those same Congresscritters run with trillions of public dollars to soothe his pain. President Bipartisanship (if he were a real liberal) have tapped into this anger for good cause but decided to ‘look forward not backward’. Now people are moving without him or without the leadership of the old Left. That’s a good thing.
StewartM
Dcblogger:
Medicare-for-all would save the *country* $350 billion (in public and private spending on health care). I don’t dispute that, and that’s what the gist of the article is.
But it still would require additional taxes, no?
(A lot of people can’t seem to get over the fact that you come out better if your taxes go up by 10 % but what you have to pay out to one or more private entities goes down 20 %).
StewartM
Let me try one more approach here. A question was asked, “Then why are corporations banging on the doors of Congress demanding that…?” A better question would be to ask, “Why are our legislators paying any attention to those demands?” Another good question might be to ask, “Why are we ourselves not banging on the doors of Congress making demands?”
Corporations do not harm us when they ask Congress to grant them favors, Congress harms us when they grant those favors.
Stewart M.
Then our democracy has failed. It takes me a matter of four minutes or so per week to read Davis’ voting record and determine whether or not the advertisements she runs reflect an accurate picture of who she is. If most people cannot spend four to five minutes per week determining the fate of their nation, then the “garnd experiment” has failed.
Bill H.
That sounds like someone who’s a whiz at computers talking about how easy it is to install an OS or to compile a program or to install a new video card. What takes you 5 minutes might take someone else an hour or more. Some might not have the first clue of where to find such information, nor how to interpret what it means. (Look at the number of people who get tricked by legalese or misleading sales pitches into signing up for things that they didn’t intend to sign up for).
I know such people. A friend who was unemployed and receiving benefits but a low-information voter (no high school degree) signed up as a friend on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page because he genuinely thought she would help him and millions of others unemployed. I gently set him straight. That, and the people who vote the way they do for trivial reasons, are indeed problems with democracy. I personally think that the current US political map is largely the way it is because Republicans still benefit from what I call “grandfather voters” (“I vote Republican ’cause my granddaddy always did”) in the West and Midwest whereas the Democrats are still reeling from the loss of their “grandfather voters” in the white South.
But has it ever been any different? I don’t think so. People always have gotten more politically involved in bad times and less so in good times. And they based their votes and support on trust as much as on anything else. That is another reason for the collapse of progressive politics, as liberals have demonstrated in the Age of Reagan that they aren’t to be trusted to really enact what they say they favor. Heck, they can’t be trusted even to unapologetically defend their political philosophy. The end result of “me too!” Third-Way “liberalism” is that most people come away with the idea that the conservatives were right all along.
As some have pointed out here, nearly everyone–even most (not rich) conservative voters, despises Wall Street. Making them the focus of an attack is possibly the best way politically to win people over and to change the dynamics of the debate in America.
Because you’ll get the usual form letter from your Congresscritter repeating ad nauseum the usual rightwing talking points. The only way they respect your demands is that you are able to remove them. Even before Citizens United incumbency already offered most congresscritters effectively the title of “Congresscritter for Life”. Now it’s even worse.
StewartM