The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.
The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation's almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.
The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.
Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can't be revived.
But the biggest question in our nation's capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It's whether Congress's so-called "Supercommittee" -- six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings -- will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.
Have your eyes already glazed over?
Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won't raise taxes on the rich -- not even a tiny bit.
President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his "jobs bill" - which would, by the White House's own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who'd rather have full-time jobs.
Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.
The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn't been this wide since the late 1960s.
The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can't pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists' wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven't a clue or couldn't care less.
I can't tell you when the collision will occur but I'd guess 2012.
Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose "Arab spring" is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more - and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.
Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world's political economy -- 1968 and 1989?
I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game -- an economy that won't respond, a democracy that won't listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.
Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
Miles Mogulescu: Where Does the #Occupy Movement Go From Here?
Why not? Why is no one telling the banks to pay us back? They owe it. Are we really here to be slaves to the banks? That seems to be the mindset of these mental migits
http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-money/2011/07/29/its-time-for-banks-to-pay-back-their-debt-to-the-rest-of-us/
A minimum wage full time worker aged 20
A widow living on Social Security aged 75
Both have an annual income of about $15,000
They are among the 50% that the Republicans are forever bleating "pay no taxes." But the actual true statement is that they "pay no federal income taxes."
However, both pay over $5000 in other taxes, like Social Security, sales, gas and real estate taxes - over 30% of their meager incomes, and no .. they do not qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit or Food Stamps. They have to live on under $10,000 after taxes. On the other hand Warren Buffett pays only 11% of his 8 billion dollar investment gain .. yes, including his share of indirect corporate taxes .. leaving him $7,200,000,000 in investment gains in a recent year.
The other taxes people like the minimum wage worker and Social Security benficiary pay are conveniently ignored by the Republicans when they claim millionaires can not pay a penny more in taxes as long as so many "pay nothing."
See the details and the solution: http://fairsharetaxes.org
Author and Publisher, GoddessMedia, see our site http://occupyworldmovement.com
The mortgage brokers saw an opportunity to generate commissions from the closing costs for mortgages and the investment bankers needed the vehicles to provide funding so they created the derivatives and swaps to provide this. Nearly 85% of all subprime mortgages were created by the mortgage companies that sold them to investors - of the $14 trillion in total mortgages these guys created more than $650 trillion in derivatives and swaps...that is what caused the risk to our economy and it still exists today to a great extent. This happened during a period from 2006 until 2007 - and Reich was not part of that group.
Greenspan understood that this was a risky approach to create jobs but found nothing else to do it. The collapse found Greenspan saying he made a mistake in believing that business could self-regulate... did we learn anything from that?
It's time for the middle class to make the GOP fade out the way the once powerful Whig party was faded out in the 1850s. If the GOP continues to favor the 1%, the GOP should only be given 1% of the vote.
Election 2012 Bumper Sticker: GOP = Greedy One Percent
The fact that people and society on the whole is suffering because of the shift in concentration of capital (disguised as wealth) . How capital's define is incorrect. The concept of a free market is a lie.
Anyone professing "free markets" needs education. With any constraint or regulation in a market, its no longer free, its manipulated by rules. Other constrains; price barriers preventing purchases, capital as profits leaving markets burdens the market, again making it not free. Even the rules of trade, especially futures trading, make the markets not free. Free markets don't exist.
Capital leaving markets reduces the number of people that can be employed supporting it. Experienced today in the western world.
Cira 5500 bc is some of the earliest known uses of currency. Like today, currency was an abstraction for capital... HOWEVER, the unit of backing capital was not gold, or silver,,, but a unit of labor.
Using labor as the unit of capital backing currency allows the individual contribute and democratizes capital, capital without manipulation by the 1%.
How much is labor worth ??? Well a CEO of a global corporation's labor worth? The same as a street sweeper in India..If you want more than everyone else, the democratic capital base can vote on giving some of their capital to you. So capitalism works, just no exploitation.
They have decided to drastically reduce the pay for workers in this nation, the one where they own the government.
They are poised to bring in millions more "undocumented" workers with no civil rights or voting rights to
do that cheap work for them.
A stage has been reached where schemes like Social Security/ Medicare/ Welfare etc an no longer be sustained alongside ever widening conflicts and a rapacious appetite for ever lower bottom lines, high stock prices and mammoth comp packages.
The people at the top thought that people at large being financial ignorant would continue to be the goose that laid golden eggs, but they foreclosed on the geese and their supply of golden eggs dried up. So what to do? And now the geese are quacking.....Oh Dear!
Fact. If first Reagan, then Bush I, then Bush II, that is 20 years of conservative leadership not to mention that Grand Old Republican Bill Cllinton, have ben busy de-regulation and making government smaller. . .
Shouldn't we all be richer, not just the top 1%?
OOOOOOOOPPPPSIE, De-regulation is just another lie, like the creative thinking
supply side cut taxes and revenue will increase.
Where is the revenue increase?
Where are all the benefits of all the R. Reagan/W. Bush de-regulation, we know there was plenty.
—Robert Reich, Financial Times, Jan. 29, 2008
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4049
Where Has All the Income Gone?
Middle American incomes rise substantially even while inequality increases
BY THE MINNEAPOLIS FED
I am Ifshin.