STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 16 January 2012

[Demeter]

8. Everybody Needs an Occupation!

Occupying Struggle Street

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2011/10/occupying-struggle-street/?utm_source=Media+List&utm_campaign=71fcfc1a2d-RSS_DAILY_MAILCHIMP_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

The Occupy Wall Street movement has gained traction globally under the banner of speaking up for the 99% in an era of growing income inequality. But while the protesters camp out in cities around the globe, low-income earners in the US, and many other developed nations, have been camped out themselves for the past two decades – in Struggle Street. Families are now occupying the bottom rungs of the income ladder over generations, as observed by declining trends in upward mobility.

Inequality in a dynamic capitalist economy is to be expected. If equality arises as a result of variation in work effort and entrepreneurial endeavour, then its impact on social cohesion is limited, as opportunities are available for lower income individuals and families to climb the ladder of success with a good dose of hard work, entrepreneurship, and luck.

However two specific trends have arisen in the past three decades that are undermining this idealist notion of inequality under dynamic capitalism.

Inequality has increased beyond what appears reasonable from individual effort alone, and more importantly,
upward mobility, or the chances that a descendent generation will improve their position on the income distribution, has declined. Poor people in 2011 are more likely to stay poor, while the rich are likely to stay rich, and indeed, get richer...The modern welfare state evolved through a volatile history as a way to both promote and reward hard work and innovation (with private property and market pricing), and share productive gains amongst society (through redistribution policies). These fundamentally worthy goals appear to have become lost in the daily political grind, gradually becoming subverted by vested interests...What is often overlooked in debates over income inequality is that capitalism is fundamentally about risk taking. It should be difficult for the rich to stay wealthy, as preserving their wealth would involve risky investment, and some of the wealthy would lose out, while others would win. Indeed, many innovators and entrepreneurs from lower socio-economic backgrounds, who also play the risk-taking game, should rise to fill the place of the previously wealthy whose risk were realised....



ON OCCUPY OAKLAND AND POLICING AMERICA BY ABIGAIL CAPLOVITZ FIELD | OCTOBER 27, 2011

http://abigailcfield.com/?p=436

In law school I was lucky enough to be mentored by sociologist and law professor Jerome H. Skolnick. We studied policing together, co-authored a couple of papers. Policing in America is the history of power in our society, and it is important context for police-#Occupy interactions. In short, ‘undesirables’ have long been targets for violent social control tactics usually not seen, much less experienced, by everyone else. If the protesters can stay ‘desirable’ by honoring their to-date nonviolent and ethical tactics, they will win. Police brutality has sparked riots many times in American history, most famously the 1960s race riots. But the problem isn’t merely historical; remember how in 1992 Los Angeles burned because the Rodney King cops were acquitted. In 2001 Cincinnati went up in flames because cops had again killed an unarmed young black man.

One movement—Dr. King’s—was able to transform police brutality into greater social justice, through the alchemy of nonviolent but confrontational protest in the face of state violence. For example, brutality against the people marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965 led to the Voting Rights Act. The confrontation came on the Edmund Pettus bridge. The videoed violence shocked the nation’s conscience. To the extent most people were aware of people brutality, they’d always assumed it was justified in an eye for an eye kind of way. Alabama cops were sending the message: You shall not pass. You will not get a meaningful right to vote. But the police violence backfired.

Perhaps the brutality against Occupy Oakland in the early hours of October 26, 2011 will have a similarly catalytic effect. The Oakland cops’ reprised Alabama thus: You shall not be here. You will not rock the boat.

Brutality Against Protestors Exposes Underlying “Ghetto Mentality” in Policing...

Dear Occupiers,

Whatever non-violent, ethical tactics you choose, if you can keep it together in the face of police brutality and state violence, you can change the world. We all understand what your courage means; what it exposes about our government and its policies. I mean, the Americans imprisoned by that icon of repressive government, Iran, understand and support you.

From all of us, thanks for trying.

Occupy first. Demands come later BY Slavoj Žižek

...Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work...