What Does Occupy Want? Part 2 - They Still Want Back What Was Stolen, And Not Just The Dream

While riding in the carpool I was subjected to Ronn Owens on KGO radio criticizing the Occupy movement for not having clear short-term demands, such as calling for specific legislation, or backing a specific presidential candidate.

This is a classic misleading argument - change the other side's position into something that is easier to attack than its real position. Owens is right that Occupy is not asking Congress to pass a bill - but that is because the goal of the Occupy movement is much broader. It is after a fundamental shift in our society's values, to refocus on human needs instead of accommodating corporate greed. Our elected government needs to be a part of that systematic change, so while passing a bill might be good (if it helps people instead of corporations), it is only a little piece of what is needed, a small step in the right direction.

The erosion of human values for the benefit of corporate interests has gone on for years, and is embodied in numerous laws enacted over the last 30-odd years. But those laws are not the disease - they are just a few of the symptoms. The disease is deeper, and more pervasive. So passing a bill or two, no matter how good, won't do it. Repairing the damage will be a longer term, ongoing process. Symbolic gestures are not enough - we need real change.

Changing some laws is part of the process, but how those laws are changed is important. It cannot be a corporate-whore Congress and President grudgingly giving in to a list of demands forced on them by public protest. Congress and the President must be on board, acting willingly and positively to treat our current corporate parasite infestation. If they did that, then passing some bills would be a sign that we might be on the road to recovery.

If Congress and the President took the following steps, I would take it as a positive sign that they are heading in the right direction. This is just my list of things that would relieve some of the symptoms of our malaise. It is not the cure, or the whole treatment, but even so it should make us feel better.

1) Enforce the the anti-trust laws. This would help keep businesses from becoming "too big to fail."

2) Undo the recent changes to bankruptcy that make it easier for corporations to duck out of labor agreements, and that make it harder for people to get relief from credit card debt.

3) Encourage the production of food that is healthy for us to eat, rather than encouraging the industrialization of the food industry. Heavy pesticide use, high fructose corn syrup, and genetically modified crops benefit big agribusiness at the expense of the small family farmer and those of us that eat (last I checked that was everyone).

4) Bring back something like the Glass-Steagall Act (enacted after the last big crash caused by banks getting out of control) that kept banks from becoming too big and engaging in overly speculative practices.

5) Require banks and other mortgage lenders to hold the loans they make, instead of foisting them off on others. Lending practices would suddenly become a lot more conservative - no "liar loans" and other speculative products, and lenders would not want to push people into loans they could not afford.

6) If we won't do #5, then we need effective regulation of derivatives markets (where the mortgages end up after being sliced and diced), which was quashed by the Clinton administration. The meltdown of the derivatives markets based on crappy mortgages was a major cause of our current financial crisis.

7) Stop the vilification of public employees and their pensions. They don't make that much money, and they did not cause our current problems. Wall Street hates the California public employees pension system since it has billions of dollars that Wall Street wants and it demands good corporate behavior.

8) Undo some of the recent limitations on class actions that prevent the thousands of people ripped off by corporations for $5 or $50 or even $500 at a time from having any effective recourse. You can't get a lawyer to help you sue a big corporation for $500.

9) Rein in corporate tax shelters. GE and other big multinationals can avail themselves of tax schemes that allow them to legally pay little or no tax on billions of dollars of income. You and I can't do that.

10) Make health care and higher education accessible and affordable. This should be a no-brainer, and would provide far more benefit to Americans (and our economy) than two wars, and at a lower cost. But no, we chose the wars instead. Something is seriously wrong here.

There are more, but that is a start. Occupy has not specifically asked for these things, but these steps would show that our society is moving in the right direction. Ronn Owens asked for legislation, so here is a sampling. But it is not enough.

What Does Occupy Want? They Want Back the American Dream Stolen by Wall Street

Things used to feel fair: if you worked hard, chances were pretty good that you could support your family, buy a house (in most places), get medical care, and maybe send your kids to college. But no more. There are now lots of hard-working Americans who can't buy a house, don't have health insurance, and can't afford to send their kids to college.

This means that the American dream - the dream of opportunity, of getting ahead and earning a better future for your children - is broken. That dream, that hope, for all Americans, however real or unreal it was, kept America going through good times and bad. But now, more and more Americans (and there were always some) are realizing that the dream is empty, and how hard they work does not matter. They see nothing in the future but an endless struggle to stay alive, to feed their family, keep the car running, to pay the rent and the utilities.

Unless you are Peter Darbee, who got a $35 million severance package when he resigned as CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Company after a gas pipeline explosion killed eight people and the company's stock price took a dive. Or John Paulson, who made billions of dollars from his special deals with Goldman Sachs - deals designed to blow up in others' faces.

No wonder people are pissed off. How did we get to this point? It took a while, and there were plenty of warnings, but both Republicans and Democrats kept us on a steady course toward disaster for working Americans, and enabled the plundering of our future by ruthless Wall Street buccaneers. A craven Congress blinded by money heedlessly gutted the nation's defenses against the sheer greed that would ultimately cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars - and one precious dream.

From Reagan and his "trickle down" economics that blessed the rich keeping more and sharing less, through Clinton's quashing of attempts to think about regulating the derivatives markets, to Bush 2 and Obama, the Republicans and Democrats in the White House and Congress share the blame.

Neither Republican nor Democratic presidents enforced the anti-trust laws designed to keep banks from getting "too big to fail." Both Republican and Democratic congresses willingly - even proudly - eliminated the protections put in place after the 1929 stock crash and the Great Depression. Both Republicans and Democrats ignored the clear warnings: the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in the 1990s, and the few bold voices telling them "this is a bad idea." Instead they kept listening to the siren song of Alan Greenspan and the big corporations urging them to blindly trust in unregulated markets - regardless of the real-world evidence.

While things were going okay for most people (even if they weren't getting super-rich like the top 1%) they were content to just live their lives. The Occupy movement (and to a lesser extent, the Tea Party movement) is a sign that things are no longer going okay for most people in America. People are pissed off that they got ripped off, and particularly pissed off that the very government that is supposed to protect them from getting ripped off opened the door to the robbers.

Yes, we want the dream back. But now we want back more than just a dream. This time it needs to be real.