People look toward Wall Street — not toward the bankers but toward the protest marchers — with fluttering upward-turned hearts. The people watching TV wonder whether a group of purposeful innocents operating under the Occupy Wall Street rubric can change the paradigm and beat the current hyper-corrupt system?

Can kids — not the traders — beat the Street?

How innocent, how idealistic are these people, really? Let’s look at the Occupy Wall Street (tentative) list of demands. Keep in mind, the OWS is strictly a pop-culture phenomenon straight out of Andy Warhol’s silver factory on 47th Street, hordes of Candy Darlings (Candies Darling?) and Joe Dallesandros: (This is from the Occupy Wall Street dot org website and sure to change without notice)

My comments are added after each demand in dayglo reddish (and parentheses)

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Free trade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr. (Let’s take this seriously: the false assumptions here are that all the marchers are wage takers rather than wage payers and that business pricing power is non-existent.)

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to Wall St. investors. (Single payer is a good idea, but as a matter of public policy, its application has little to do with Wall Street.)

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment. (See demand one, above. If someone is paid $20 to get out of bed, it will cost everyone $30 to get into bed.)

Demand four: Free college education. (Anyone can have a free education, it’s simply ‘learning’ which requires little more than curiosity. The issue is rather, “free career accreditation”: what would this be for? So that marchers can become investment bankers? Lawyers? )

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand. (OWS stumbles: there is no alternative energy economy! Meanwhile, the other demands require participation within the fossil fuel economy so as to gain its rewards. Among these would presumably be the ‘$20 per hour minimum living wage’ and free college education!)

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now. (Thank you Paul Krugman, now get out of here.)

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants. (This is another good idea, should be advanced by the establishment.)

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment. (Nonsensical, like the proposed ‘balanced budget amendment’)

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live. ( … while demanding a guaranteed living wage @ $20/hr at the same time? ¡No problema!)

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system. (Who is independent of whom? This is also nonsense, the election mechanism isn’t a problem, the candidates are.)

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period. (Patience, children! The world’s debt will vanish all by itself because the means to repay it does not exist. We are going to talk about debt very soon.)

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies. (If you are out of debt the agencies are irrelevant.)

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union. (This appears to be a closed-shop demand, again it presumes the OWS’ers will be wage takers rather than wage payers. It may that labor unions have bought a plank of the OWS platform.)

Granted, this is a draft of proposed demands and may not have any legs within the groups that are participating. It does indicate a direction, how the intellectuals of this group are thinking. There is a grasp of a few problems — mainstream economists and policy makers pretend there are no energy problems, while OWS’s recognition of environmental degradation is astute — but the ‘way things work’ seems to elude them. The overall effect is a sense of befuddlement. Right now, the Occupation of Wall Street is for entertainment purposes only.

Befuddlement is everywhere even among ‘Serious People’ (Fabius Maximus):

 

(1) The Problem

America needs reform, as our citizens become passive consumers of government services. Become sheep, unable to make the mental and moral effort required to run the Constitutional machinery.

Unfortunately, the class that has led America — and done so well during our first two centuries — appears to have lost interest in the project. They prefer to skim the profits off the top, and hope the ship drifts along in the trade lane (and stays off the rocks). Reform must come from us, not them.

(2) The first step to a solution

It’s not a new discussion, and has obsessed Europe’s Left for generations. The form of their discussion is foreign to us, but IMO we can learn much from it — by ripping it free from its original context, much as America’s Founders did with the political theory of their time.

The first step is not knowledge. Not logic. But rage, contempt at what we have become.

 

“I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value! … I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this, anymore!”

“They’re yelling in Baton Rouge!”

It’s not just bits and pieces here and there, the general sense is nobody knows what to do! People stab around blindly, hoping to tag solutions by accident, while keeping their cake and eating it too, of course …

If hanging a few Wall Street bankers would make America’s waste-based economy flourish, bankers would be decorating lampposts and overpasses from sea to shining sea! The bankers aren’t omnipotent overlords — this is obvious as the US and EU bankers are staggering even with government support — they are irrelevant. Critics give financiers credibility they cannot possibly earn on their own: they are the stock villains in a bad movie for the reason somebody has to be a villain.

It’s not really useful to become enraged at oneself for being a livestock animal. The modern world’s energy-dependency has fatally undermined modernity, it’s insolvent. The problem is the people cannot ‘see’ how modernity is undermined or how insolvent it really is. Even the experts miss this. One reason is because there are no tell-tale gas lines or fifty-five mile per hour shortages. What is missing is credit: demand remains invisible until a transaction takes place. Uncounted are the people who cannot get credit … and cannot obtain fuel or the tools with which to waste it.

Meanwhile, the pop culture Spam has lost none of its least-common-denominator potency. We’re addicted to our Spam, we pretend it’s fun even though it makes us miserable. Popular culture validates our fuel-guzzling toys. We are collectively a large child with a hand trapped in the cookie jar, desperately unhappy but unwilling to let go of the cookies …

… our cars, our militaries, our ‘educations’ our so-called ‘health care’ our garbage food, our mindless and hateful entertainments our politics our wasteful businesses … our cars. We aren’t simply broke: broke is a temporary shortage of liquidity. We are destitute, wiped out. We have no affordable fuel, which is why we are having a worldwide crisis.

Meanwhile, the decades of wasting the gas while twiddling our pop culture thumbs has emptied us of the inner resources needed to cope with a world without toys and cheap gas. We aren’t just screwed, we are really screwed!

The sheep can’t help themselves. Think about it, not only do they lack the basic equipment to understand their place within culture, there are few places to go with the equipment if they could get it! Our predicament is baffling because it exists behind the constant, endless, interactive distraction of advertising. Like the politicians and economists, the Occupiers of Wall Street are also the children of television. They rise to the narcissistic stimulacrum of pop-culture whenever Pavlov cracks his whip. To rebel against the (pop-culture) system is to completely immerse oneself within it in an unremarkable way. Even as the material objectives retreat, participants gain cachet: They are famous for thirteen minutes!

Pop culture defines the entire modern world which is the … entire world. It is almost impossible to step away from it and find perspective: (Fabius Maximus)

 

Occupy Wall Street, Another Futile Peasants’ Protest

Summary: We learn little about the Occupy Wall Street protests from the news media, which cover it like an alien invasion (see Glenn Greenwald’s articles at Salon here and here for examples). No matter, as it’s a commonplace and easily understood phenomenon. The masses (ie, peasants, peons, whatever) grow restive in oligarchic society. Protests are holidays in which they have fun and vent their frustration. Like all mobs, they can spread or even metastasize – so the security services watch them, applying violent suppression as needed.

 

Fabius is just as much a part of popular culture — along with the entire ultra-queer US military — as is Lou Reed and Susan Bottomly. Of what use is the rage? You are damned if you do — you let slip your rage and hit the streets, the cops turn around and hammer your resume. You’ll never get that $20 per hour job …

You’re damned if you don’t — the political,economic system is completely off limits except to the trained seals who perform the way the audience expects them to. In- or out of the system, there seems to be no way forward. What remains is despair: politics/management as well as rejection of same are twin monopolies of popular culture.

What to do?

Next up: see how the big bad system can be toppled. It’s easier than you might think.