We need equality under the law. From now on, laws that apply to the private sector must apply to Congress, including whistleblower, conflict-of-interest and insider-trading laws. Trading on nonpublic government information should be illegal both for those who pass on the information and those who trade on it. (This should close the loophole of the blind trusts that aren't really blind because they're managed by family members or friends.)
No more sweetheart land deals with campaign contributors. No gifts of IPO shares. No trading of stocks related to committee assignments. No earmarks where the congressman receives a direct benefit. No accepting campaign contributions while Congress is in session. No lobbyists as family members, and no transitioning into a lobbying career after leaving office. No more revolving door, ever.
This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party's mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been "Occupying Wall Street" long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.(via Nancy Folbre)
Just spoken to a couple of lads from MF Global. Am therefore not in mood for another round of "the bankers have not suffered!", thaksveymuchI think he has a point. Bear Stearns gone. Lehman gone. Wachovia gone. Merrill Lynch* gone. Washington Mutual (Woot!) gone. Etc.
Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.
Emphasis added.We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.
It seemed to me both then and now that the big problem with the global justice movement of that era wasn’t that the issues it was grappling with were too complicated for the average person to understand, it’s that the movement’s analysis was mistaken. The late 1990s were a very prosperous time for America. And the analysis that the spread of global capitalism to what we used to call “the third world” would be immiserating for those countries was wrong. China has not been immiserated. Nor has India. Nor has Brazil. Nor has Turkey. Africa’s just wrapped up a very solid decade. It’s true, as Dani Rodrik will tell you, that none of the development success stories (except maybe Chile) has come from a carbon copy implementation of the full Washington Consensus. But it’s even more true that none of the development success stories have come from developing a radical alternative to participation in a globalized market economy.
The Battle in Seattle was in 1999. Ralph Nader's third party candidacy was in 2000. 9-11 and Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.By contrast, the main analytic points of Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots are correct. Policymakers promised us broadly shared prosperity and macroeconomic stability. We didn’t get the former, and now we can see that we didn’t get the latter either. Having failed to deliver prosperity or stability, the global elite pivoted to the claim that owing to the lack of past prosperity it would be irresponsible to return us to macroeconomic stability without first cutting pensions. It’s crap, and people shouldn’t stand for it. And in America, at least, it’s already working. Conservative politicians are expressly talking about inequality, and the Obama administration has gone back to talking about aggregate demand instead of grand bargains. There’s more to life than being right, but being right helps a lot. And that’s the main difference here.
Full employment is no small demand to make. The bourgeoisie hates it, because it would strengthen the bargaining power of the working class. It, plus the other planks of an expanded welfare state mentioned in the Demands draft, would give people the confidence and freedom to think about a better world. This isn’t fictional: it happened in the 1970s, as the transformation of consciousness among middle-class college students spread into the working class. Quality of work life—in a real, not a GM sense—became a central concern in organized labor, at least among the rank and file. It was one of the things that alarmed elites, leading to the crackdown of the late 1970s and early 1980s.I liked how Nick Rowe referred to people from the "concrete steppes" here in the context of targeting NGDP levels.
The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside the other "encampments" of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square earlier last spring. To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation.
Keith GessenIn Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was obvious. The demand that "Mubarak must go" proved powerful enough to encompass all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid's Puerta del Sol and Barcelona's Plaça Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more complex. The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic complaints -- regarding debt, housing, and education, among others -- but their "indignation," which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans, "Democracia real ya," or "Real democracy now."