"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." President Obama, December 14, 2009.
Was the President signaling that it was time for progressives to form a visible protest movement against "fat cat bankers"? Did he all but invite us to march on the recent White House/bankers meeting?
Well, whether he invited us or not, where were we?
All the big boys showed up except for the chairmen of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley who feared airport delays - they know their time is much more valuable than the President's.
What a perfect opportunity to show our displeasure with those who have so callously wrecked our economy, who have reaped the benefits of welfare for the rich, and who now are boasting record profits while unemployment reaches record highs.
In the Sixties this kind of protest was a snap. At the very least, you could count on a swarm of hippies arriving with plans to levitate the White House - something they actually tried to do to the Pentagon in 1968.
But we don't do that stuff anymore. Why is that?
Many who responded to my recent posts have come up with a number of answers. Here are a few:
Bruce Levine provides a more chilling explanation. ("Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?") He believes we may be suffering from "abuse syndrome." He writes:
"U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses. They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shutdown and escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes."
I don't buy it. We've been abused many times before, yet, we've managed to recover the collective will to fight back. From 1930 to 1933, many Americans were worse than abused -- they were broken. During the Great Depression, millions of people were ashamed because they couldn't support their families. They felt humiliated to be standing on bread lines. They had little understanding of the economic system that was failing them, so they blamed themselves.
It's hard to imagine that the depressed and the downtrodden could rise up to change America. But they did. In a few short years the country was in motion, alive with sit-down strikes, union organizing, and protests of all kinds.
The point is not to glorify unions, or praise the profound New Deal changes they helped to usher in. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the "abused" quite suddenly became activated on a very large scale. Could it happen again?
We have two possibilities. The first is that the modern world has so changed us that passivity and apathy have become embedded within our very nature. Perhaps our will has been curbed, channeled and controlled by consumerism, visual stimuli and ideological education. This might make the activism of yesteryear totally irrelevant to our current predicament.
The other possibility is that human nature has not changed. Rather, certain kinds of organizations and organizers have faded from our political landscape- the kind who dedicated their lives to massive social change. History is not a cookbook. But the record clearly shows that massive social change doesn't happen by accident. I choose to be in this camp.
Throughout the Depression, even during its darkest times, dedicated organizers believed that the system as a whole needed dramatic change. They were very different than our current crop of community organizers who focus primarily on "winnable" issues, (Obama included when he was organizing in South Chicago). Modern community organizers feel uncomfortable with big picture issues that require solutions that seem beyond reach. They feel that striving towards such lofty goals will disempower their community participants who need concrete changes in the here and now. Better to fix the local potholes than howl about banker bonuses.
But Depression-era organizers enjoyed the howling. They had big ideas: They wanted to challenge the financial elites and put an end to the rule of bankers and plutocrats. They had a dream of a fairer world where unemployment no longer destroyed lives. They thought everyone who wanted to work should be able to find a decent job. If the private sector couldn't deliver, then it was the duty of government to create jobs. They were espousing big picture New Deal-like programs long before Roosevelt came to office.
For years before and during the Depression thousands of radical organizers (some who were Communists and many others who were not) worked towards big picture social change for a long, long time. At some point, for reasons we don't fully understand, something clicked. And once it did, it couldn't be stopped.
Hard times alone didn't create the upsurge in activism. We were four years into the Depression before large scale actions started to spread. The CIO, labor's new mass organizing vehicle, didn't form until Roosevelt's second term. So neither hard times, nor Roosevelt's election can explain entirely the renewal of mass activism.
If we look at any of our major movements, from abolition to populism to civil rights, we will find long periods when apathy and disheartening quietude were pervasive. Yet the hard-core organizers somehow endured.
The point is this: The debilitating apathy can turn into vibrant activism even when the odds are impossibly long. But that kind of change doesn't fall from the sky. It takes hard work, usually fueled by new generations of young people who believe that our nation can do better, much better. They provide the spark that raises expectations.
Institutions also are critically important, especially now. If just a handful of progressive unions organized demonstrations at banks and bankers' meetings, it might unleash the pent-up anger and frustration felt by tens of millions of Americans. Just three unions, the Service Employees International Union, the California Nurses Association and the United Steelworkers could easily put together large demonstrations just about anywhere, anytime. If they collectively committed to at least five large mobilizations against Wall Street in 2010, the abuse syndrome might begin to unravel. (See Bob Borosage's convincing call for demonstrations.)
Our mission is clear: We must find ways to tap into the human spirit which stands ready to transform unbridled personal greed into a massive quest for the common good.
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.
Follow Les Leopold on Twitter: www.twitter.com/les_leopold
Exactly true. But in the world I live in, via tv, consumerism, shrinks, teachers, lost parents, college debt, etc., it is exactly that army of young progressives that we are losing.
We need activists who recognize this so we can get them back. We need activist parents, teachers, shrinks. We need activists in the media who do more than report corruption. They need to inspire with models of resistance.
Activists must learn the craft of morale building and healing and support.
Les, keep up your good work. Let's everybody else realize what we can do—Bruce Levine
Les says, “I don't buy it.â€
Yeah, Les, what a damn buzzkiller that Levine is.
Seriously, Les, what don’t you buy? That many people feel helpless to effect change, just like spouses caught in an abuse syndrome?
I know these people. These are regular people. Young people. Good people. Smart people looking for a way not to be helpless.
Activists often seem afraid to acknowledge that state of helplessness, as if acknowledging that state will sanction inaction. But the good, smart people I know caught up in this state of helplessness are not moved to action by someone lecturing them about history. I wish they were so moved -- that would be an easy fix.
Activists must realize that though we’ve been in tough times before that there are certain forces in society that have made people more broken and weaker. New institutions that have broken some people and made others feel weaker, including so-called “progressive institutions†such as schools and my own mental health profession which have subverted rebellion. Progressive parents break their kids spirit every day – I see it – by shoving psychiatric drugs down their throat because they won’t do their homework -- Bruce Levine.
We need the PROGRESSIVE AGENDA that Michael Moore had listed in Capitalism.....there are 10 points and only 10 and we can make that our MANTRA....if the rest of the world can have those 10 points then we should also....
Anyone who knows what is really going on in the U.S. Government today can only conclude that America is no longer a republic.
The truth is the American people are no longer being represented because their representatives have sold their votes to the Robber Barons: THIS IS CALLED TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and we all know what our founding fathers did when they realized how unjust and unfair this was; THEY CAUSED A REVOLUTION AND OUR FOUNDING FATHERS BECAME REVOUTIONARIES!!!
Today, any Patriot worth their salt must once again rise up against the tyranny of a lawless, corrupt government and organize; TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT AND ESTABLISH A NEW GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE!!!
Is anyone in the U.S. Congress or Obamaland even curious as to why during the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression America's financial markets are making enormous profits since these financial markets are not loaning out those bailout funds to the American people for the interest???!!! In other words; "Where the hell are all these profits coming from???!!!
There is no question that alot of this money is coming from the U.S. Taxpayer and alot of it is coming from America's financial markets doing their favorite things; playing swindle games by manipulating and rigging the financial markets and if anyone actually believes that these criminal shenanigans won't lead to another financial meltdown, THINK AGAIN!!!
Many Americans are getting the eerie feeling that the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress's theme song is the same as the Bush Administrations; "REALITY IS NOT FOR ME AND IT MAKES ME SAD DISNEY BOYS AND DISNEY GIRLS I AM COMING BACK"
And, unlike in the 60's when we had a relatively free press, protest marches are deliberately under-reported. Unless you are a teabagger, in which case five people can make up a "march". The MSM has a pro-corporate "narrative". That makes marches less useful than say online activism and working hard to get progressive candidates elected.
Now you do have a point about unions. But anti-union tactics have become much more sophisticated than during the Depression. The first thing that should be done is a crackdown on illegal immigration, not on the workers but stiff fines on the companies that hire them. Once factories have a workforce that isn't in fear of being deported, workers will have an easier time of it standing up for their rights.
Unfortunately, with Internet technology the higher up the payscale one goes, the less leverage for striking one has. Still, it can be done, as the WGA showed us. We need more professional guilds with negotiating power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Barz%C3%B3n
Ann Minch's nascent debtors' revolt movement may be it. http://www.debtorsrevoltnow.com
Part of the role of the mainstream press is to convince each person that their troubles are the
result of their own personal failings instead of an imposition by the many on the few with the
purpose of further enriching those few. Plutocronyistikakistocracy in action.
If people got smart, there would be a "Bonus Army" type march on Washington. Bob Chapman is predicting that California goes Chapter 9 in early January. Who knows what happens then?
our civic duties to watch the shenanaghans going on behind closed doors. we trusted the media
to be our watchdogs, as they were being corporatized, and honest journalists were being retired, and
shunted aside, for newer, cuter and "read-only" chair fillers. we are to blame and like all really big mistakes there are consequences to be paid. that would be us - now.
Big Brother needs to be brought down and put measures in place to never let it happen again.
Many of our best and brightest have been ruined, we must not let their suffering go in vain.
Keep up the fight until we win!
Things really have not changed that much. We patted ourselves on the back for a few civil rights victories, and the end of the Vietnam war, but the job was far from finished. I fear we let up our guard to soon, and now it is worse than before, only they are smarter.
That's more like it, IMHO.