Score One for OWS
The Republicans have decided to back the payroll tax extension, fearful of being painted as anti-middle class in the coming elections.
As Kos noted in a tweet, there’s no way this happens without Occupy Wall Street. This is concrete evidence of how OWS has changed the discussion in America. Remember 6 months ago? The Republicans were in full ascent, talking tough, showing no compromise, going all-in for the 1%. Now we have recalls in Wisconsin, the irrelevancy of the Tea Party governor in Maine, the repeal of SB-5 in Ohio, and now this. Republicans are starting to run scared. Democrats need to start pushing them hard, keep them on the retreat.
We should score another win for the “Occupy” protests, this time in where I live. I think the story is interesting because it might also point to some new mobilization strategies.
Helping out evicted homeowners is interesting. It’d be nice to see this formalized so that those being evicted can call on supporters instead of just the random case of this.
Indeed. I’m reminded a bit of Cesar Chavez’s organizing strategies or those of the early Welfare Rights Movement. Basically, they tried to link organization to small but concrete benefits for the participants, thus linking efforts to get, say, a new winter coat for a welfare recipient with democratic activism.
I would agree that this is an excellent approach. Your basic low-information voter won’t understand, or care, about things like reforming the filibuster. But they can understand saving people from being thrown out of their homes; they can understand helping families to feed their children.
Interesting. I guess there is evidence that the “Occupy our Homes” protests are in fact part of the broader planning and strategizing of the protests, which is an illustration, once again, that they are way ahead of me, and that they don’t need folks like me to make suggestions about what they ought to be doing.
Democrats need to start pushing them hard, keep them on the retreat.
Yes, YES, YES!!!! We should go all-in for a kinder gentler neo-liberal paradigm.
Strike while the iron is warm.
Democrats need to start pushing them hard, keep them on the retreat.
Yes, YES, YES!!!! We should go all-in for a kinder gentler neo-liberal paradigm.
Strike while the iron is warm.
Not to rain on the parade, but I’m not sure that “Republicans Vote for Tax Cut” really qualifies as any sort of victory.
Particularly the tax that is earmarked directly for Social Security. This cuts SS funding completely in half. Make this permanent, and SS really is in crisis.
The Social Security tax is regressive. They’re cutting a regressive tax, and paying for it with a tax increase on millionaires.
I hear what you’re saying, but what you’re talking about, in response to that, is accounting.
The method of paying for the tax cut extension isn’t settled. Democrats want a tax on millionaires; Republicans will be lets say unenthusiastic about this method. The article explicitly mentions that axing unemployment benefits is being considered, as well as other bad things.
The tax cut extension is a good thing in a vacuum, but it’s unclear whether the total package it’s a part of will be worthwhile. Keep an eye on it and wait and see.
That said, it does seem like OWS has contributed to a change in tone about the prospects of good government.
If that actually happens, I will be… surprised. But in the good way!
What I expect to happen is either it isn’t paid for at all or is ‘paid for’ by slashing social spending elsewhere.
I hear what you’re saying, but what you’re talking about, in response to that, is accounting.
If you diss the accountants I will get Herbert to cut you.
Whoa. Whoa.
Whoa, Dog. I’m just sayin’ here…
It’s cool, man. Don’t get crazy. No need to bother the H-Dog.
Didn’t the H-Dog get gunned down a couple of years ago?
Then I will send Zombie H-Dog to eat Joe’s brains. Don’t fuck with accountants – we have charts and graphs and shit, and we will fuck you up.
TOTAL VICTORY! NEVER MIND THAT MALACLYPSE FIREBAGGER!
C’mon. Bipartisanship aside, I’m certain Obama will veto anything that threatens the long-term stability of Social Security.
What makes you think that? (Genuinely curious, because I’d like to share your confidence.)
Based on the source, I suspect it was sarcasm.
Ah.
Richard Eskow engages in some conspiratorial thinking.
The Long Game
Either way, this proposal opens up avenues to a lot of unpleasant possible outcomes in upcoming negotiations. Here are a few of them:
Republicans could accept the tax cuts, but refuse the tax hikes for millionaires. If the Democrats cave on that issue, Social Security’s Trust Fund will be funded with even larger money transfers from the overall Federal government’s budget. That’s a breach of the Trust Fund’s firewall, which hadn’t occurred in the program’s 75-year history until last year. That’s when Democrats, led by President Obama, introduced the payroll tax cut.
Which leads us to the next danger…
Republicans could accept the tax cuts but insist that the Trust Fund’s shortfall not be covered by general funds.That would turn Social Security’s mild, easily remedied long-term imbalance into a more urgent problem — which is just what the anti-Social Security crowd wants. That opens the door for politicians from both parties to raid the Trust Fund’s $2.6 trillion surplus for other purposes.
Republicans might insist that some percentage of the ‘tax cut’ be invested in private Social Security accounts. Republicans have been trying to privatize Social Security for a long time. These hostage negotiations budget negotiations could give them the chance to finally get their foot in the door on that topic.
Democrats might ‘compromise’ on the COLA reduction, a Social Security benefit cut that both the White House and some other Democrats (including Dick Durbin) have been pushing all along. They call it an ‘adjustment,’ but their proposed method for calculating cost of living (COLA) adjustments is a benefit cut, pure and simple, that would lower an already-inadequate formula and take money out of people’s pockets. It will probably be revived in these debates.
God dammit jeer, stop making sense. It’s way to early for me to start drinking.
If it helps, jeer was quoting someone else who was making sense…
What Murc said.
thus linking efforts to get, say, a new winter coat for a welfare recipient with democratic activism.
I, for one, applaud this kind of activism. You will note it has nothing to do with Democrats pushing Republicans “hard” (ahem).
Imagine the push Ben Nelson will make.
Murc, the payroll tax is paid for by an increase in a tax for the rich, or so I heard.
I don’t really think it was any movement. I think it’s mostly people in power getting very concerned about deflationary spirals, and who have told the republicans to get in line on the payroll tax.
No, that’s the Dem revenue-neutral proposal. Here’s the Republican counter from the same article:
So I think that Eskow is probably heading in the right direction. The Dems will politically have to vote for the payroll tax cut extension, and the Republicans won’t have to vote to make it up in a meaningful way.
The breadth of the effect OWS has had on politics is what strikes me.
They’ve moved the political environment in a way that goes beyond advancing a particular agenda. At least for now, they’ve changed the perspective across the whole spectrum. They certainly weren’t rallying for a payroll tax cut extension, but it was greeted differently by Congress because of the changes OWS has brought.
This is why I think people who harp on specific action items from OWS miss the point.
I think this is precisely right. In this sense, I agree with bobbyp above: I don’t think the value of OWS (or really, any social movement) ought to be measured solely in terms of electoral politics or legislative victories. They seem to be shifting the perspective, as JfL puts it, and for the first time in my lifetime, issues of inequality, student debt, and so forth have now become live political issues.
for the first time in my lifetime, issues of inequality, student debt, and so forth have now become live political issues.
Yes. This is all very strange to me, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
Problem with thinking about a change in the Zeitgeist of common perspective, is that it’s about *everything*.
Well, ultimately it does. Electoral politics and legislative victories are how things ultimately get resolved on live political issues. I mean, recalls in Wisconsin, the irrelevancy of the Tea Party governor in Maine, the repeal of SB-5 in Ohio, and now (payroll tax cut) are all about electoral politics and legislative victories. Those are the things you win, when you win.
What I’m seeing is OWS changing the circumstances under which electoral politics and legislation happen.
I’m not sure I disagree. However, I do think I put rather more emphasis on extra-institutional forms of politics than you do. Policies, laws, and decisions are important, but for democrats (small d) it is equally important to have a citizenry that takes up, receives, and interprets these phenomena. OWS’s successes in changing people’s perceptions of things is therefore important not just because it might lead to this or that policy proposal, but because it might also help create a populace that makes that policy into a lived and concrete reality, or one that continues to be more active in organizing and developing its rights. In any case, as I said, this isn’t a disagreement (I don’t think), but a different emphasis.
That’s a good point. For years I’ve been pessimistic about the possibilities of popular ideas which don’t favor the rich becoming law. Going back to the Clinton era health care debate, PR spending could always get a sufficient number of people confused about issues, so that nothing complex which favored the majority could pass. Things just got worse, as the right wing took over the news media and corporations became “people”.
My faith in people hit a nadir a few months back, when it seemed that we as a nation came to a consensus belief that the deficit caused all of our financial problems. The banking scandal vanished from public discourse. Empowering the rich and punishing the poor became the path to recovery.
The OWS people won’t let the media rewrite history. They won’t let our government forget the most important issue of the day. They won’t let the rest of us sleepwalk into economic feudalism. If we’re going there, we’ll have to do it wide awake.
Actually, this was a lot like what was happening in the 60s and early 70s. I agree with gmack about the ability to shift the conversation in really profound ways. It is rather surprising and quite refreshing.
Right on! Next I’d like to see all those unemployed students with massive debt from student loans tell the banks, in unison, to stick it up their asses. DEFAULT. EN MASSE. It’s better than Kyle using his platinum card to pay everyone’s debt so people can start spending again.
Or, more plausibly, Move Your Money.
I like the new ads Bank of America is running: “Hey, sixty or seventy years ago, we used to loan to small businesses! Love me!”
It’s not just the Republicans who are running scared, and who need to have the pressure kept on them.
You know, you’d be surprised by the number of small financial institutions in your zip code.
I’ve been banking at a credit union for over a decade now. I will absolutely never go back to the big banks unless they convince Congress to outlaw CUs.
Which, now that I think about it, doesn’t seem too terribly implausible.
Don’t give them any ideas.
My credit union has a sign up “Join the 99%”. I told the teller I liked the sign, and that started her up. She talked about how the big banks are ripping off their customers hand over fist. Virtually every aspect of banking at a big bank is worse financially for the small customer.
Bankers make a lot of money because they are good at robbing their customers, not because they are good at finance. They essentially came right out and stated it publicly recently after the debt card fee fiasco. If they want to make money, they have to come up with better ways to take their customers money without them noticing it. Everyone associated with the business knows that is how it works.
Not all bankers. There are ethical, responsibly-run, small banks.
I insist on this point, because it lets the TBTF banks off the hook if we treat their actions over the past decade as the natural outcome of banking. It’s not.
The problem with your position is, many if not most of those “godo guy” banks are wholly-owned subsidiaries of larger conglomerat money center banks.
Kinda mitigates your point. A little.
You do have to know who you’re dealing with, but “most” of them are not owned by the big banks.
Did you see the tool I linked to above? It lists both small, locally-owned banks and credit unions. The banks it lists have been checked out.
Well, I put in my zip and it lists, among many others, the Dime Savings bank, which at one point rivaled only Citibank for the number of branches and assets under management.
Bad management and overexpansion caused it to crater. Not sure I’d put my money in any of their 34 branches (and have to pay an ATM fee every time I want to withdraw).
Like I said, “many” smaller banks are subsidiaries. I hedged with “if not most” and clearly that was wrong. I should have gone with my gut.
Also:
Keep in mind that mutual banks, like credit unions, are owned by the depositors.
Something that could stand to be pointed out more is that, traditionally, it is really very, VERY hard to be good at finance, and that it is hard to make shitloads of money at it even if you are.
Traditional commercial banking is centered around using deposit capital to make loans and then making profit on those loans. It is hard, grueling work. You have to vet potential loan candidates very, very carefully, and a single bad year of defaults can end up taking you the better part of a decade to amortize out. It was a business in which serious-minded people spent their entire working lives squeezing out modest returns.
Traditional investment banking is even harder, because you actually have to see investment opportunities BEFORE all your competitors do. Once something becomes ‘hot’ your profit margin VANISHES.
Well, “modest” compared to what the Big, Giant Brains in the financial industry make in today’s America.
Bankers had the nice houses in the neighborhood. The slightly larger ones, on the nice corner lots.
As opposed to flying in from their island for meetings.
It’s something to consider, but… a lot of college grads aren’t straight-up unemployed. They’re underemployed, and that makes your ‘go to hell’ strategy more problematic.
If you’re literally a stone that blood can’t be gotten from, you can tell them to fuck off. If you’re employed in any capacity? They can simply grab the money right out of your paycheck before you even get your hands on it. And also raid your bank accounts.
I take credit for that. Every time I see him in the news I send him an email telling him to shut the f up.
I’d actually love to see some links to stuff about the Maine governor being shown to be irrelevant. He seemed like one of the scummiest of the teabag governors, but he dropped out of the news after a certain point… :/
I read something recently that even Republican legislators in the Maine Congress are ignoring him, but I don’t have a link for it now.
From my POV LePage came out of the corner full stupid and got punched hard a couple of times. He wisely dialed it back to half stupid and now tries to keep a lower profile.
The thing about LePage is his hard scrabble story is a compelling one for many Mainers.
For Maine news I type “BDN” into the search, it is the Bangor paper. The comment section is where the real news is. People don’t drive to Portland to get parts for the skidder and many don’t get news from there either.
Bangor Daily News? Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on it.
There aren’t enough people north of Sabattus, never mind people who can read, to keep a newspaper afloat.
And for skidder parts, you go to the Oliver Stores on Rte 100 in New Gloucester. Almost to Portland.
You’re right about Portland and the parts of course. But Bangor is the second largest city in Maine.
As far are illiteracy rates, again you are correct. I want to respond in some witty fashion but only two words come to mind.
Addison is not an honest person. If he says this today it is only so that he can claim that the Obama prevented the deal from going through when all they wanted in return was three poison pills, two turtle doves, and the Preznit to be nice to them.
How I wish my reaction to that sentence could be anything other than a bitter chuckle.
This is all unpossible. As long as the Rs have 50%+1 of the House and Snowe and Nelson in the Senate, nothing the least bit liberal can pass. It’s in the Constitution. I know, because I read it on a group blog somewhere.
Dont like to throw cold water on the celebration but I don’t think there is any agreement yet. The Republicans say they want to maintain the payroll tax extension but haven’t agreed on a way to fund it and are opposing what the Dems want – a surtax on millionaires. They want cuts somewhere else to pay for it. So right now, there is NO agreement