Here is my Sunday column …
We should know in the coming days whether Occupy Wall Street is fading into oblivion or obviously has staying power.
In recent days, mayors across the nation have ordered a crackdown on the protesters, forcing them out of city parks where encampments are not allowed. With cold weather and the holiday season approaching, it’s doubtful that this movement can sustain its presence without a home base.
Occupy Detroit hopes to move into an abandoned building. That shouldn’t be hard to find.
Beyond the seasonal factors, OWS has failed in keeping its own pack under control. Across the nation, their gatherings were tarnished by crimes, clashes with police, deaths, nudity, public defecating, drugs and destruction of property.
Sure, there were some bad apples in the bunch. But OWS’ bigger problem is they lacked a core.
They should have focused on articulation of their views and forging their public image.
One so-called leader of the OWS in Manhattan said recently that they are a democracy and cannot toss out the troublemakers. Well, they are a political organization, not a self-identified nation, and they could have sent a message to the radicals and anarchists and socialists amongst them that they are not welcome.
More importantly, they could have created a treatise — a political agenda — that would have encouraged the rabble-rousers to fade away and would have established their standing as a serious political group with some heft.
Instead, their surprising amount of support in some public polls, despite their rag-tag appearance, has been pissed away in much the same manner that some of their members chose to engage in an affront to standard human hygiene.
With all the talk among the agitated Occupiers about capitalism as a failure and the need to tax the rich into poverty, the more sober members of OWS should have realized that this is not a national negotiation; this is about a first impression.
They could have easily drafted a liberal agenda that satisfied most of their membership while avoiding the mainstream’s label of radicalism:
* A return of the Glass-Steagall law, eliminated in 1999, that forced a separation between banks’ investment arms and their basic commercial lending operations.
* A revival of the federal income tax rates of the 1990s that required higher payments but also reigned over a booming economy.
* A capital gains tax on yields from stocks and bonds at a rate of 25 percent, a significant jump from the current 15 percent rate, but still lower than the level that applied during the Reagan years.
* A minimum wage matching the amount of 1968 — adjusted for inflation — that presided at a time of strong economic growth. In other words, $10 an hour.
* A ban on right-to-work laws that undermine good-paying union jobs.
* An infrastructure “bank,” overseen by the government, which relies upon bonds and other long-term funding sources to finance job-creating improvements to highways, bridges, tunnels and airports.
* A tariff system that takes away the entire Chinese advantage of manipulating their currency — but no more — so that their imported goods do not enjoy an unfair price advantage in the American consumer market.
* And a “Wall Street sales tax” that imposes a 1 percent levy on all trades involving derivatives. With some exceptions, derivatives do not aid industries but merely serve as a casino-style financial bet by the well-heeled. Depending on which estimate you believe, a 1 percent tax on the many variations of derivatives sold on Wall Street could generate an extra $1 trillion in annual federal revenue.
I don’t necessarily agree with this agenda, but it serves as a reasonable, coherent statement of left-wing goals in 2011.
In particular, I cannot fathom why OWS did not immediately latch onto a tax on derivatives — which are mere on-paper transfers of millions of dollars, often serving as a tax dodge, that do nothing to create jobs or improve the economy. In addition, the idea of a financial transactions tax — a tiny levy on every stock trade — is gaining steam across the globe.
Of course, this is an overall agenda that would horrify the average conservative Republican. It would also give pause to more than a few liberal Democrats.
But it is a starting point that would say to middle America, “When we call ourselves the disadvantaged 99 percent, here is a way of establishing fairness, of leveling the economic playing field, for all of us.”
Unfortunately, the Occupiers don’t seem truly devoted to a democratic process of leveling the landscape. They seem more interested in endless marches that disappear on the horizon.
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