Here’s an idea I think could really gain some traction in America, a country reflexively opposed to unionism and worker rights: Linking CEO pay to the minimum wage. Hamilton Nolan wrote a heart felt piece in Gawker yesterday hammering Caterpillar for slashing wages and busting unions while raking in massive profits and raising executive pay. Nolan argues that by linking executive pay to the minimum wage, you really would have a situation where CEO’s would think twice about slashing wages and abusing their work force. With executive pay linked to the minimum wage you really would create an environment where a rising tide lifts all boats:

Pick a maximum multiple that a CEO can make. 20 times that of an average worker? 50 times? 100 times? The number is less important than the principle. Once corporate executives are tied to their workers in pay, the low man needs to get a raise in order for the high man to get a raise. The economic interest of the executive class is aligned with that of the working class.

Unions are largely political lobbying organizations already. Put that muscle to good use. A law could be written strongly enough to avoid easy loopholes. Think a law like this is a liberal pipe dream? Why? Look at our economy. Look at our unemployment figures. Look at the widening wealth gap. And look at this company, Caterpillar, brashly ordering hardworking Americans to accept less while paying executives more. There are a million more people whose interests align with unions and workers than there are people whose interests align with rich executives. A small step towards wage sanity would not be remarkable. What’s remarkable is how much inequality we’ve conditioned ourselves to tolerate.

Want to raise the minimum wage? Tie it to the maximum wage, and watch it fly.

It’s hard to see how anyone could argue against this simple principle. Die hard libertarians would claim it was excessive intervention in the hallowed market, but given their propensity to get literally everything wrong all the time, their arguments could be dismantled pretty easily. Rich people would still be rich, but the less well off would have a guarantee that they’d see a share of increased prosperity. It would also work as a motivator to inspire productivity if everyone knew for a fact that their own labor would result in a greater payoff.

I’d be interested to see how Americans would react to this proposal, so if you’re reading this (or Nolan’s piece), please pass it on to get a bit of a debate going. Stranger things have happened, and you never know – the idea might just catch on.

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Chomsky: A big supporter of OWS (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a transcript of a discussion between Occupy Wall St supporters Mikal Kamil and Ian Escuela and Professor Noam Chomsky:

Professor Chomsky, the Occupy movement is in its second phase. Three of our main goals are to: 1) occupy the mainstream and transition from the tents and into the hearts and the minds of the masses; 2) block the repression of the movement by protecting the right of the 99%’s freedom of assembly and right to speak without being violently attacked; and 3) end corporate personhood. The three goals overlap and are interdependent.

We are interested in learning what your position is on mainstream filtering, the repression of civil liberties, and the role of money and politics as they relate to Occupy and the future of America.

Coverage of Occupy has been mixed. At first it was dismissive, making fun of people involved as if they were just silly kids playing games and so on. But coverage changed. In fact, one of the really remarkable and almost spectacular successes of the Occupy movement is that it has simply changed the entire framework of discussion of many issues. There were things that were sort of known, but in the margins, hidden, which are now right up front – such as the imagery of the 99% and 1%; and the dramatic facts of sharply rising inequality over the past roughly 30 years, with wealth being concentrated in actually a small fraction of 1% of the population.

For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It’s not third world misery, but it’s not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.

All of this has now been brought to the fore. You can say that it’s now almost a standard framework of discussion. Even the terminology is accepted. That’s a big shift.

Earlier this month, the Pew foundation released one of its annual polls surveying what people think is the greatest source of tension and conflict in American life. For the first time ever, concern over income inequality was way at the top. It’s not that the poll measured income inequality itself, but the degree to which public recognition, comprehension and understanding of the issue has gone up. That’s a tribute to the Occupy movement, which put this strikingly critical fact of modern life on the agenda so that people who may have known of it from their own personal experience see that they are not alone, that this is all of us. In fact, the US is off the spectrum on this. The inequalities have risen to historically unprecedented heights. In the words of the report: “The Occupy Wall Street movement no longer occupies Wall Street, but the issue of class conflict has captured a growing share of the national consciousness. A new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults finds that about two-thirds of the public (66%) believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor – an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009.”

Meanwhile, coverage of the Occupy movement itself has been varied. In some places – for example, parts of the business press – there has been fairly sympathetic coverage occasionally. Of course, the general picture has been: “Why don’t they go home and let us get on with our work?” “Where is their political programme?” “How do they fit into the mainstream structure of how things are supposed to change?” And so on.

And then came the repression, which of course was inevitable. It was pretty clearly coordinated across the country. Some of it was brutal, other places less so, and there has been kind of a stand-off. Some occupations have, in effect, been removed. Others have filtered back in some other form. Some of the things have been covered, like the use of pepper spray, and so on. But a lot of it, again, is just, “Why don’t they go away and leave us alone?” That’s to be anticipated.

The question of how to respond to it – the primary way is one of the points that you made: reaching out to bring into the general Occupation, in a metaphorical sense, to bring in much wider sectors of the population. There is a lot of sympathy for the goals and aims of the Occupy movement. They are quite high in polls, in fact. But that’s a big step short from engaging people in it. It has to become part of their lives, something they think they can do something about. So it’s necessary to get out to where people live. That means not just sending a message, but if possible, and it would be hard, to try to spread and deepen one of the real achievements of the movement that doesn’t get discussed much in the media – at least, I haven’t seen it. One of the main achievements has been to create communities – real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange, care for one another, and so on. This is highly significant, especially in a society like ours in which people tend to be very isolated and neighbourhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.

There’s an ideology that takes a lot of effort to implant: it’s so inhuman that it’s hard to get into people’s heads, the ideology to just take care of yourself and forget about anyone else. An extreme version is the Ayn Rand version. Actually, there has been an effort for 150 years, literally, to try to impose that way of thinking on people.

During the onset of the industrial revolution in eastern Massachusetts, mid-19th century, there happened to be a very lively press run by working people, young women in the factories, artisans in the mills, and so on. They had their own press that was very interesting, very widely read and had a lot of support. And they bitterly condemned the way the industrial system was taking away their freedom and liberty and imposing on them rigid hierarchical structures that they didn’t want. One of their main complaints was what they called “the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but self”. For 150 years there have been massive efforts to try to impose “the new spirit of the age” on people. But it’s so inhuman that there’s a lot of resistance, and it continues.

One of the real achievements of the Occupy movement, I think, has been to develop a real manifestation of rejection of this in a very striking way. The people involved are not in it for themselves. They’re in it for one another, for the broader society and for future generations. The bonds and associations being formed, if they can persist and if they can be brought into the wider community, would be the real defence against the inevitable repression with its sometimes violent manifestations.

How best do you think the Occupy movement should go about engaging in these, what methods should be employed, and do you think it would be prudent to actually have space to decentralise bases of operation?

It would certainly make sense to have spaces, whether they should be open public spaces or not. To what extent they should be is a kind of a tactical decision that has to be made on the basis of a close evaluation of circumstances, the degree of support, the degree of opposition. They’re different for different places, and I don’t know of any general statement.

As for methods, people in this country have problems and concerns, and if they can be helped to feel that these problems and concerns are part of a broader movement of people who support them and who they support, well then it can take off. There is no single way of doing it. There is no one answer.

You might go into a neighbourhood and find that their concerns may be as simple as a traffic light on the street where kids cross to go to school. Or maybe their concerns are to prevent people from being tossed out of their homes on foreclosures.

Or maybe it’s to try to develop community-based enterprises, which are not at all inconceivable – enterprises owned and managed by the workforce and the community which can then overcome the choice of some remote multinational and board of directors made out of banks to shift production somewhere else. These are real, very live issues happening all the time. And it can be done. Actually, a lot of it is being done in scattered ways.

A whole range of other things can be done, such as addressing police brutality and civic corruption. The reconstruction of media so that it comes right out of the communities, is perfectly possible. People can have a live media system that’s community-based, ethnic-based, labour-based and [reflecting] other groupings. All of that can be done. It takes work and it can bring people together.

Actually, I’ve seen things done in various places that are models of what could be followed. I’ll give you an example. I happened to be in Brazil a couple of years ago and I was spending some time with Lula, the former president of Brazil, but this was before he was elected president. He was a labour activist. We travelled around together. One day he took me out to a suburb of Rio. The suburbs of Brazil are where most of the poor people live.

They have semi-tropical weather there, and the evening Lula took me out there were a lot of people in the public square. Around 9pm, prime TV time, a small group of media professionals from the town had set up a truck in the middle of the square. Their truck had a TV screen above it that presented skits and plays written and acted by people in the community. Some of them were for fun, but others addressed serious issues such as debt and Aids. As people gathered in the square, the actors walked around with microphones asking people to comment on the material that had been presented. They were filmed commenting and were shown on the screen for other people to see it.

People sitting in a small bar nearby or walking in the streets began reacting, and in no time you had interesting interchanges and discussions among people about quite serious topics, topics that are part of their lives.

Well, if it can be done in a poor Brazilian slum, we can certainly do it in many other places. I’m not suggesting we do just that, but these are the kinds of things that can be done to engage broader sectors and give people a reason to feel that they can be a part of the formation of communities and the development of serious programmes adapted to whatever the serious needs happen to be.

From very simple things up to starting a new socio-economic system with worker- and community-run enterprises, a whole range of things is possible. The more active public support there is the better defence there is against repression and violence.

How do you assess the goals of the Democratic party as far as co-opting the movement, and what should we be vigilant and looking out for?

The Republican party abandoned the pretence of being a political party years ago. They are committed, so uniformly and with such dedication, to tiny sectors of power and profit that they’re hardly a political party any more. They have a catechism they have to repeat like a caricature of the old Communist party. They have to do something to get a voting constituency. Of course, they can’t get it from the 1%, to use the imagery, so they have been mobilising sectors of the population that were always there, but not politically organised very well – religious evangelicals, nativists who are terrified that their rights and country are being taken away, and so on.

The Democrats are a little bit different and have different constituencies, but they are following pretty much the same path as the Republicans. The centrist Democrats of today, the ones who essentially run the party, are pretty much the moderate Republicans of a generation ago and they are now kind of the mainstream of the Democrat party. They are going to try to organise and mobilise – co-opt, if you like – the constituency that’s in their interest. They have pretty much abandoned the white working-class; it’s rather striking to see. So that’s barely part of their constituency at this point, which is a pretty sad development. They will try to mobilise Hispanics, blacks and progressives. They’ll try to reach out to the Occupy movement.

Organised labour is still part of the Democratic constituency and they’ll try to co-opt them; and with Occupy, it’s just the same as all the others. The political leadership will pat them on the head and say: “I’m for you, vote for me.” The people involved will have to understand that maybe they’ll do something for you, that only if you maintain substantial pressure can you get elected leadership to do things – but they are not going to do it on their own, with very rare exceptions.

As far as money and politics are concerned, it’s hard to beat the comment of the great political financier Mark Hanna. About a century ago, he was asked what was important in politics. He answered: “The first is money, the second one is money and I’ve forgotten what the third one is.”

That was a century ago. Today it’s much more extreme. So yes, concentrated wealth will, of course, try to use its wealth and power to take over the political system as much as possible, and to run it and do what it wants, etc. The public has to find ways to struggle against that.

Centuries ago, political theorists such as David Hume, in one of his foundations for government, pointed out correctly that power is in the hands of the governed and not the governors. This is true for a feudal society, a military state or a parliamentary democracy. Power is in the hands of the governed. The only way the rulers can overcome that is by control of opinions and attitudes.

Hume was right in the mid-18th century. What he said remains true today. The power is in the hands of the general population. There are massive efforts to control it by less force today because of the many rights that have been won. Methods now are by propaganda, consumerism, stirring up ethnic hatred, all kinds of ways. Sure, that will always go on but we have to find ways to resist it.

There is nothing wrong with giving tentative support to a particular candidate as long as that person is doing what you want. But it would be a more democratic society if we could also recall them without a huge effort. There are other ways of pressuring candidates. There is a fine line between doing that and being co-opted, mobilised to serve someone else’s interest. But those are just constant decisions and choices that have to be made.

This transcript was originally published on InterOccupy, an organization that provides links between supporters of the Occupy movement around the world.

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President Ronald Reagan: A Legacy of Economic Inequality

By Ben Cohen: Last Friday one of our readers asked why the Republican party is so extreme. I answered in the mailbag that the financialization of the economy and  wealth inequality was one of the major factors behind the militancy seen in today’s Republican party:

I’d argue that the financialization of the economy that basically started under Nixon and really took off under Reagan is the primary reason why the Republican party is so extreme. The effects of financialization have been severe on much of the population as it has created serious poverty and extremes in wealth inequality. In order to keep half the population voting for them, the Republicans amplified wedge issues like abortion and gay rights to distract them from the massive amounts of wealth they were losing under their leadership. As the wealth divide has become more extreme, so have the measures to keep the Republican base motivated to vote. It’s a vicious cycle – the less money the government spends on things like education, the less informed the population are and the easier they are to manipulate. Idiots like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann serve as marketing tools rather than anything else. The brains behind the GOP are probably just as scathing about them as liberals behind closed doors, but without them, they lose their base.

Bob Cesca and Chez Pazienza had different takes on the question, arguing that Reagan’s deal with the religious Right in the 80′s, the rise of Fox News and and the election of an African American President drove the party over the edge. I don’t disagree with them as there are obviously many cultural elements to the Republican party’s current state of disarray, but I do think the issue of financialization and wealth inequality is the underlying cause of the GOP’s extremism, and I believe it is a topic is worth expanding on.

The financialization of the economy essentially shifted the US to a debt based monetary system where trillions of dollars were borrowed and lent out astonishing ratios on Wall St. The effect was a boom and bust economy that created and destroyed massive amounts of wealth in very short periods of time. While corporate America was privvy to bailouts from the government when bubbles burst, the majority of the population has lived with increasing insecurity, debt and poverty.

While the financial services industry accelerated during the 80′s, real industry collapsed in America as manufacturing jobs were shipped abroad as a result of free trade agreements drafted by banking institutions. De-industrialization had a severe effect on the middle classes as it eradicated well paying blue collar jobs and halted social mobility almost completely. Living standards were artificially maintained through access to credit while wages stagnated or declined, and costs rose.

When Wall St lost faith in the housing market in 2008 and the debt called in, the economy was almost destroyed leading to an even bigger increase in inequality and poverty. As access to credit became more difficult, the facade of wealth disappeared for most Americans and the reality of the modern economy finally sank in.

The Republican Party has wedded itself to this theory of economic deregulation, making them the party of business because they cater exclusively to their needs. While their policies have made the rich richer and effectively plunged millions of people into debt and poverty, they have had to adapt their message to continue bringing in votes. Republicans encourage the blame of ethnic minorities, secularism and government for the country’s woes, not an economic system that works exclusively in the interests of the rich and the expense of everyone else. This has been made easy due to the erosion of the US education system – another victim of severe underfunding and increasing privatization. Without the tools to understand what is happening to them, many Americans have turned to religion and extremism to make sense of their fracturing country. Ronald Reagan caught onto this back in the 80′s forging links to the evangelical community, and the relationship has become more entwined ever since. It has been convenient in terms of getting out the vote in recent times, but it has given rise to a new breed of Republican so extreme that it is now hurting them when it comes to national politics.

Bob Cesca’s point that media outlets like Fox News have contributed to the current extremism in the Republican Party is correct, but I would go further in saying that Fox didn’t create extremists – it just catered to them. The network exists only as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and their programming reflects the need to draw voters with extreme views. They hire presenters like Sean Hannity and Michele Malkin because they are extremely effective at manipulating viewers into believing the Republicans serve their interests.

But the Republican Party now finds itself in a very tricky predicament – it must continue to cater to the extreme fringes of its party in order to get votes out, while maintaining links with the center in order to get their national candidates elected. Wealth inequality is literally forcing the party to be extreme as it has no other way of reaching poor white people, making them unelectable in the process – a ironic twist of fate they can only blame themselves for.

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By Ben Cohen: I was interviewed on the RT Network last Thursday on wealth inequality in the US and the shifting perception about the American dream. You can check it out below:

I think the change in the public’s attitude towards social mobility could really spark tangible change in America. The excesses of individualistic capitalism, debt and insecurity is having a serious psychological effect on the population, and increasing awareness about it could lead to a ground swell of popular movements to change the status quo. The sense of change is palpable, and we don’t know how it will manifest, but it’s clear the current system is completely unsustainable and something will have to give.

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The chart below dispells the myth that America has a strong middle class – it doesn't, and the sooner people realize this the better (via Cesca):

Americans must realize that the 'American Dream' is a now a myth in order to redress the massive inequalities and stagnant social mobility that defines the modern economy. It is a bitter pill to swallow but a necessary one. Free market capitalism has failed and a new model must be implemented if a brighter future is to be had. To me, the 'Occupy Wall St' movement symbolizes a waking up – a possibly defining moment in US history where mass awareness and non violent protest coalesce to bring down corrupt power structures that have outstayed their welcome.

The economic inequality seen in America today is unsustainable. While Americans may not be fully aware of it, the reality will always trump the myth when there isn't enough money to pay the bills. If we continue along the same trajectory, that reality will set in so fast that Americans will have no choice but to overthrow the current monetary system. And that day seems to be approaching fast.

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Image via Wikipedia

Paul Krugman compares the Right's nonsensical arguments against global warming and economic inequality:

Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies that global warming is happening, but denying that humans are responsible (c) denying that anyone denies that humans are causing global warming, insisting that the real argument is about the appropriate response.

I’m not sure there are three levels (yet) on inequality, but we definitely have (a) right-wingers denying that inequality is rising and (b) denying that anyone is denying the rise in inequality, but attacking any proposal to limit that rise.

Obsfucation is the name of the game here – the Republicans say alot of different things according to their audience and hope that no one calls them out on their blindingly obvious contradictions. In the 24/7 news media age, this is pretty easy to do. The public doesn't really pay attention to what politicians are saying, they pay attention to how they are saying it. As long as Rick Perry appears Presidential and has his hair in the right place, it doesn't really matter what comes out of his mouth.

This means that policy plays a secondary role in politics, and when you don't have any policy, you make up for it with over the top rhetoric and acting. This is the primary reason candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have made it so far in the Republican primaries. They are caricatures of politicians – so over the top and ridiculous that you couldn't invent them – and the reason why uneducated middle Americans who have been subjected relentless Fox News propaganda buy into them.

It's hard to know what to do to counter this dangerous trend. Do you argue with facts, or attempt to beat them at their own game? The latter might work in the short run, but I don't think it can be a long term strategy to combat the GOP's descent into utter madness.

One hopes that truth will prevail. We might just have to wait a while for it to work.

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The massive protests going on around the country and now the world are a sign that people have well and truly had enough of the deeply corrupt monetary system that benefits an extremely small minority of the population.

The protesters refer to themselves as 'The 99%' – an accurate reflection of their demographic that now encompasses virtually every class in society bar the mega rich. Those extraordinarily wealthy individuals own a disproportionate amount of the country's resources (the top 1% own roughly 40% of the country's wealth), and the gap is widening year after year.

The exploitative system works because the political system doesn't. Politicians can only get into office by raising money in order to run campaigns, so those who pay for them expect kick backs. The credit card industry will back a candidate and expect favorable legislation in return, and those serious about getting into power will ensure they craft their platforms in collaboration with the wealthy institutions  even before they get going.

The result is a system geared towards protecting the interests of the wealthy, and not the public.

There are many things the government can do to alleviate poverty and economic inequality – bolstering welfare, putting more into schools and healthcare etc, but at the end of the day, only moderate reform is possible if the rich get to craft legislation.

How do we go about creating a system that works in the interests of the public? One simple answer: Get money out of the political system. Then maybe we could build a government that functions for 99% of the population rather than the 1%.

The protests have the power to do this – enough people on the streets for a long enough period of time has the potential to seriously affect policy. While the protesters do not seem to have a unified message as yet, the issue of campaign finance reform seems to be gaining more and more attention.

That one simple demand could literally change the world – a cause definitely worth fighting for.

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