Occupy Wall St movement has largely disappeared from the public’s eye, not because it has diminished in ambition or desire to spark a social revolution, but because it has been working on the next phase of it’s agenda – taking the economy back from Wall St and giving to the people. In a fascinating new project that could deliver some serious results if it catches on, “The Rolling Jubilee,” Occupy Wall Street-affiliated operatives at Strike Debt have been coordinating with the IRS, and debt-brokers world to buy up distressed debt from lenders at rock bottom prices in order to forgive it. From their site:

A bailout of the people by the people.

We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals’ debt – instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.

---

The Jubilee begins November 15
with “The People’s Bailout,” a variety show and telethon in NYC.
All proceeds will go directly to buying people’s debt and cancelling it.

Here’s their official video explaining the concept and process in greater detail:

It’s important that projects like this gain mass support, otherwise Wall St will find a way to smash it to pieces. The financial industry makes billions of dollars buying and trading debt – there’s a fortune to be made hiking interest rates on poor people and forcing them into a life time of loan repayments and abject poverty, and they won’t give up the market without a fight. So please raise awareness about this project in the hope that it captures the public’s imagination and takes off.

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Occupy Wall Street protesters in Charlotte, NC.

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (via Yahoo! News):

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) – The big protests that were planned outside the Republican National Convention last week in Tampa, Florida, never really materialized, doused in part by a tropical storm. But activists say they expect a stronger showing this week, when Democrats gather for their nominating convention in Charlotte.

If Sunday’s march in Charlotte was any gauge, those predictions might fizzle. Police said about 800 to 1,000 demonstrators paraded through the city, far less than the thousands some had predicted would gather to protest everything from big banks to the deportation of immigrants.

The 80-plus groups that make up the Coalition to March on Wall Street South held a 3-mile (5-km) march on Sunday aimed at putting a spotlight on Charlotte as the United States’ second-largest financial center, behind New York.

Activists stopped in front of the headquarters of Bank of America and utility Duke Energy to speak out against what they see as a range of injustices, including foreclosures and high student loan debt.

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OWS: Not finished yet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Occupy Wall Street movement has attempted to breathe new life into its campaign against inequities in the global financial system with a series of May Day protests across around the US.

Thousands of people turned out in New York for a day of action that culminated in a confident march down Broadway in the evening sunshine towards Wall Street, the crucible of the protest that began last year with an angry backlash against banking excess.

The stated aim of bringing business in the commercial capital of the US to a standstill went unfulfilled, but as rain gave way to a bright spring afternoon, traffic ground to a halt in lower Manhatttan as the Occupy movement‘s most anticipated day of action in months took hold.

There were some clashes with police as officers clamped down on perceived violations, resulting in over 50 arrests. There were also flashpoints at protests in other cities.

In Oakland, California, scene of violent clashes between activists and police in recent months, police fired tear gas, sending hundreds of demonstrators scrambling. Four people were arrested.

Officers also fired “flash-bang” grenades to disperse protesters converging on officers as they tried to make arrests, police said. Four people were taken into custody.

Black-clad protesters in Seattle used sticks to smash downtown windows and ran through the streets disrupting traffic. The city’s mayor, Mike McGinn, made an emergency declaration allowing police to confiscate any items that could be used as weapons.

In San Francisco, the Occupy movement was blamed for a night of violence in which cars and small businesses were vandalised. Protest organisers later attempted to distance themselves from the disruption.

In New York, threatening letters containing a white powder that appeared to be corn starch were sent to some institutions in the city. Three letters were received on Tuesday: two at News Corporation headquarters and addressed to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, and one at Citigroup. The message in the letters said: “Happy May Day”.

Read more at the Guardian….

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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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By Ben Cohen: The culture you grow up in usually has a significant effect on the values you hold. If you have moved to another country you become keenly aware of this fact as you are able to contrast the values of your own society against that of your host’s.

When people are brought up in a tolerant, cooperative society that values things like community, education and art, more often than not, they embody a least a good proportion of those values in their everyday lives. If they were brought up in a violent, intolerant society that valued war, misogyny and greed, there’s a good bet they’d instinctively behave in a way that reflected those values. This is of course an extreme comparison – culture is complicated and the more I have traveled, the more I understand that when it comes to assessing whether a culture is ‘good’,  ‘bad’, or ‘better’, it’s usually a matter of taste and opinion.

There are certain aspects of America that I find enormously attractive as a Brit – the openness and friendliness of the people, their generosity, incredible optimism and dynamic entrepreneurialism, and the lack of a stifling European style class system. It’s a great country to live in and in general, I’m very happy here.

However, there is a side to America that I find extremely unsettling – the relentless fixation on money, the deeply corrupt political system, lack of public health care,  and the massive extremes in wealth inequality to name a few. There seems to me to be a very dangerous combination of cultural, political and economic factors that make greed and corruption a staple of American life. And sadly, I think that America is a country so beholden to the interests of the wealthy that I don’t hold a huge amount of hope that anything significant can, or will happen to change the status quo.

The roots of the problem are, I believe, cultural. America was founded on the ethos of rugged individualism – the notion that you could move to the new world, work hard and become whoever you wanted to be. This in itself is no bad thing, but combined with a political system open to the influence of money, it has become positively toxic. The current monetary system, often referred to as ‘selfish capitalism’ is a ruthless economic paradigm designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and keep the rest of the population in a constant state of insecurity so that they often have to work two to three jobs just to stay alive. This system has been sold to the public as the ultimate expression of rugged individualism – the very definition of the American way, and the only option other than communism. Of course it isn’t, but when the corporate media system owned by the same financial interests that control the political system reinforces that notion day in day out, it’s hard for the public to imagine an alternative.

There is an implied notion behind the theory of free market capitalism that human beings are inherently selfish. This has roots in Darwinian biology, and is therefore seen as a logical extension of human nature. Selfish capitalism is natural, and therefore right.

This every man for himself attitude seeps into everything we do – from who we vote for and how we treat our fellow citizens. In many countries around the world, homelessness and severe mental illness is seen as a reflection of their society and therefore unacceptable. In America, there is a disassociation and disregard for the unfortunate – just walk around any major city and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands of mentally ill and homeless people begging for money on the streets. In the selfish capitalist paradigm, they are as responsible for their own misfortune as the self made millionaire is responsible for his success. Because America is a country of individuals, the poor and mentally ill are separate from us and can be ignored.

However, for every action there is a reaction, and despite America’s brutal treatment of its poor, there is an undercurrent of extreme generosity that I have personally not seen in any other country. Americans give an astonishing amount of their own money to charities, more so as a percentage of GDP than in any other country in the world. On a personal level, there is a culture of kindness and understanding that is not manifested on a societal level – a strange contradiction that could have some interesting outcomes.

Movements like ‘Occupy Wall St’, the explosion of non-profits, and the deep mistrust of the political classes reflect the growing disenchantment with the selfish capitalism model – a sign that culture in America could be changing. And if the roots of America’s problems are cultural, a significant shift in culture could go a long way in changing the political system.

It is in the interests of the wealthy to perpetuate the selfish capitalist model. It works for them, so maintaining the status quo is a primary objective. They will continue to buy politicians, rig legislation to give themselves tax breaks and access to public money. They will continue to ensure the media doesn’t report on anything of value by focusing on ratings and profit over reporting, and they will smear anyone who suggests otherwise. But the funny thing is, the harder they try, the harder the reaction will be.

And we’re seeing it now – a sign that America’s generosity could be more powerful than its greed.

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In this weeks mailbag we discuss the role of the Occupy Wall St movement in this years election, Chez’s career at CNN, and the disastrous state of the Republican Party!

The questions:

Hey guys, wanted to know what you thought about the OWS movement. Do you think it has changed anything so far, and do you think it will play a role in the general election?
– James

Chez: The Occupy movement has certainly provided a much-needed call-to-arms when it comes to the economic injustice and often criminal behavior inflicted on America by Wall Street and the corporatist mentality. It was both a response to and a way of finally calling global attention to the way a handful of greedy assholes had screwed the planet, had done so with impunity, and had continued to do so long after the damage they caused was obvious to everyone. That said, though, I don’t think it’ll play a direct role in the presidential election simply because the Republicans — at least the ones who want to win in November — can’t risk demonizing the entire movement because they then risk demonizing the spirit of the movement. I say that, of course, even though dolts like Mitt Romney have been dumb enough to come right out and say that what the Occupiers represent is the politics of envy. But the fact that his statement was considered somewhat of a gaffe, one among many for the Romneybot, says something about what a fine line the GOP is going to have to walk in dealing with the movement; they’ll want to attack the Occupiers themselves — and have, over and over — without necessarily ripping on the spirit of the populist message they stand for. As for the Democrats, I think they’ll probably try to co-opt the message without involving themselves directly with any of the Occupy movement — in other words, no, don’t look for Occupy to play even close to the kind of role the Tea Party insurgents played with their ostensible leaders a couple of years back. The Dems will push the spirit of the outrage and possibly even try to attach themselves to that wave of populist anger in the hope of using it to their obvious advantage, but I doubt seriously that President Obama will align himself with Occupy by name. Worth mentioning, by the way, is that the exhaustingly self-righteous progressive cool kids — the Jane Hamshers and Michael Moores of the world — have already anointed themselves the True Believers in and Official Arbiters of Occupy and have ruled from on high that it’s off limits to the Democrats anyway, since they just represent the man, man!

You know, now that I think about it, take back what I said about the Republicans. They’ll continue to either violently shake their fists at and belittle any expression of populist anger aimed at Wall Street or simply ignore it altogether — because they’re fucking insane (see question #3).

Bob: I’ve honestly been a little ambivalent about OWS. While I like and support the spirit of fighting against income inequality, I’ve had ongoing concerns about the scattered and undefined goals of the movement. How do they plan to change the system without a defined set of legislative goals? Is there anyone stepping forward with a defined agenda? In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve also been skeptical about the practical impact of on-the-ground protests. Often they can be rudderless and ineffectual, and OWS runs the risk of losing public support unless it gives the public something substantive to push for. In other words, yes, we get it — the 1% doesn’t pay its fair share in taxes and it doesn’t sacrifice enough when the economy shrinks. We know the gripes, we just don’t know how OWS intends to repair the problem, therefore how can we support a movement in a full-throated way if we’re unsure of how it intends to achieve change. And there aren’t any leaders to tell us. I certainly don’t want to support a movement that pushes for communism or the destruction of the economy. OWS might not have that in mind, but without expressed goals, who knows?

Ben: I think the Occupy Wall Street movement has been incredibly important for the sole reason that it has shown Americans that genuine popular resistance is possible. The culture we live in works to isolate us through a mixture of relentless commercialism and fear. On a minute to minute basis, we are urged to buy our way into happiness with fancy products sold to us by people more successful and beautiful than ourselves. The end result is a deeply paranoid and greedy culture where people simply don’t believe that they can, or should, work together for a common purpose.  The spectacular theft of a gigantic proportion of the country’s wealth by Wall St was a step too far though, and the population reacted with a coherent and (somewhat) organized uprising. There are many structural problems with OWS – no one knows exactly what they want, or who is leading them, but they symbolize a unified resistance to the dominant culture. I think they can have an effect in the general election if they get specific, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Hey Chez, I read on your Wikipedia page that you were fired from CNN. Would you ever go back to working in the MSM after the way you were treated? And Bob,  would you ever become an MSNBC personality?
– Stewart Wright

Chez: For the right job and the right money? Yeah, of course. I’m not stupid. Now as to whether any of the mainstream press outlets would have me back — that’s a different story. I’ve always maintained that it was CNN’s prerogative to fire me; I was an employee at their company and I broke the rules. My argument at the time was that the network didn’t actually have a rule in place to break, at least not one that took into account the rise of social media. I was proven right, I think, by the fact that not long after firing me, CNN put together and released a new set of guidelines and restrictions for its employees in how they can and can’t avail themselves of online communication. The new rules were and are, needless to say, draconian and thoroughly unfeasible in the current media climate. Still, I had some idea that what I was doing could be perilous to my job — I just didn’t think the response would be so swift, severe and ultimately short-sighted for the company. As for how they treated me, though — they made me a name, albeit a minor one, and helped me make a career out of media criticism, writing, producing non-news shows, and generally doing something other than busting my ass at what was a pretty crappy job in cable news. So there’s that. But yeah — throw enough money at me and promise you’ll stay at least somewhat out of my way and let me work and I’d go back.

Bob: I would love to be on MSNBC, though I don’t know if they’d ever hire me. I’ve been quite critical of their daytime programming and even if that never came up, I really don’t like doing television — at least not the standard cable news format. I’ve appeared on MSNBC and CNN, but it wasn’t productive or interesting. I like to carry on spontaneous conversations and debates, and cable news isn’t really formatted for spontaneity. I’d love to do a show one of these days, but it would have to be a format I was comfortable with.

Hi Ben, Chez, Bob, I’m curious to see what you think about the future of the Republican Party. It seems they become more extreme each year, so where does it end? Will moderates ever dominate the party again? I dont think they will ever beat the Democrats if they continue to act like this.
-Mary S.

Ben: Hi Mary, I think that the Republicans are suffering from a severe lack of vision for the future. The major problem is that competing factions don’t agree on where they want to go – the Religious Right wants to go back to the 1950′s, the Tea Partiers want to get rid of the government, the hard Right wants to continue destroying the Middle East, and the moderates simply want to win elections. Elections are won in the center, and the party just has too many extreme wings going in different directions. I say this without hyperbole, but I believe the current incarnation of the Republican Party is completely insane. In any other modern democracy, they’d be considered borderline fascists and relegated to the fringes of political debate. No mainstream politician in the UK, France or Germany could openly disagree with global warming, discount evolution, or try to redefine the definition of rape in order to limit abortions. Both parties have to cater to all its members to get the vote out, but the Democrats have a far easier time given their ‘extremists’ would be considered pretty centrist anywhere else on the planet. The GOP on the other hand has to appeal to racist, anti government lunatics to get votes, then tack carefully back to the center without alienating them. It’s next to impossible to do, and it means they’re screwed for at least a generation when it comes to winning general elections.

Bob: The Republicans are rapidly marginalizing themselves by clinging too closely to the far-right base. The consequence is a fractured, factionalized, regional party with very little appeal to the moderate, undecided voter. And as we’ve seen in recent elections, the moderates choose the winners — not the far-left or far-right. So to answer your question, I don’t think moderates have any influence in the party anymore. The ones who are getting anywhere are doing so by pandering to the far-right. Now that’s not to say they won’t ever win an election. The Democrats are saddled with being “the responsible party” and that means they have to make tough choices in order to govern. They’re bound to piss people off. Likewise, it’s really easy to be the Republican bumper-sticker salesman on the fringes saying things people want to hear, even though those things aren’t functional policies. A good example is Ron Paul. He says lots of things that appeal to voters across the board, but never in the history of the world has there been a successful libertarian government with a prosperous economy and happy citizens. So there’s always a shot that a Republican will come along who keeps the far-right in their cages and who pays attention to the middle. That might be Jeb Bush, but who the hell wants another Bush presidency? The party is a mess right now, and, short of the Democrats defeating themselves, it’s really going to take a Republican rock star with just the right appeal to be successful.

Chez: I’ve written about this subject quite a bit lately. What we’re witnessing right now are the death throes of the Republican party as we’ve known it for the past few decades. It simply can’t survive much longer in its present incarnation; it’s literally being demographically pushed to extinction. It’s inevitable. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently, the GOP has been the party of older, white Christians — particularly older, white Christian men — for years, and the question for a while was, “How would the party respond to political reality, namely the fact that the United States is becoming browner and more integrated ethnically?” The smart thing to do would’ve been to reach out to those (for the time being) minorities and try to get them under the tent. Unfortunately, that’s not at all what happened. The election of Barack Obama was the confirmation of the far-right conservatives’ worst fears:  that they were losing the country that the slavishly lionized Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, had bequeathed to them and them alone. Obama’s rise represented the apotheosis of the threat that had been encroaching for years — the one that finally arrived. That’s where all that “take our country back” crap came from. What has to happen next, if the Republicans are to survive as a party, is a William F. Buckley-style repudiation of the fringe rather than a wholehearted, full-throated embrace of it. Will that happen? Probably not for a while. Until the Republicans finally realize that they can’t win national elections like this and that they have no choice but to tell the crazies among them to sit down and shut the hell up.

Got a question for next week’s mailbag? Email us at thedailybanter@gmail.com!!

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By Ben Cohen: The departure of Greg Smith, the executive director and head of Goldman Sachs’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has made huge ripples in the financial industry. While there have been other Wall St bankers quitting the industry out of disgust, none have been as high profile as Smith, and none have published the reasons for their departure in the New York Times. Smith tore into his former employer, accusing the company of ripping off its customers and promoting  dangerous culture of greed.

He wrote:

What are three quick ways to become a leader?a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Goldman Sachs has been vilified by the media and pounded relentlessly by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Paul Krugman. The Occupy Wall Street movement has also focused much of its attention on the bank, making it about the most despised institution in America. The stock price hasn’t budged much since Smith’s departure, leading insiders to believe the uncomfortable affair was an annoying but inconsequential glitch. But just as Wall St only thinks short term, it may not have thought too deeply about the longer lasting effects. Taibbi, the journalist responsible for labeling Goldman a ‘Vampire Squid‘ believes Smith’s departure signifies the beginning of something more powerful than the popular movements going on around the country:

Real change was always going to have to come from within Wall Street itself, and the surest way for that to happen is for the managers of pension funds and union retirement funds and other institutional investors to see that the Goldmans of the world aren’t just arrogant sleazebags, they’re also not terribly good at managing your money…..

The only way to break this cycle, since our government doesn’t seem to want to end its habit of financially supporting fraud-committing, repeat-offending, client-fleecing banks, is for these big “muppet” clients to start taking their business elsewhere. Right now, many clients stay because they think that even if Goldman takes a bite out of them here and there, the bank still has the smartest guys in the room. But as Forbes writes this morning, this incident may turn Goldman into such a pariah that the best young bankers won’t want to work there anymore.

The impetus for change comes from culture – and predicting when massive shifts in culture happens is difficult to do. Nobody foresaw the explosion of the Occupy Wall St movement, just as no one saw the Arab Spring coming. The seismic change in the Middle East started when a young street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest of continuous harassment by the police and the confiscation of his wares. While war, political tension, and economic uncertainty across the region provided the fuel for the movement, one single event ignited protests that changed the political dynamics of a region.

The resignation of Greg Smith may or may not be the beginning of something big, but more and more of these events are happening and one of them could provide the tipping point for an irreversible change in culture. Smith’s  resignation was an important act of defiance, and a signal to other employees that they too can stand up for what is right. Another big name executive leaves, unable to live with the havoc Goldman or any other insidious banking institution is wreaking upon the economy, the shift in culture may become too big to stop. The conditions for serious change are there; the economy is still extremely fragile with high unemployment, massive job insecurity and spiraling inequality. Who knows when or where the ignition will happen, but as Goldman continues to disregard their clients and the well being of the economy, it is becoming clear that they are living on borrowed time.

Change does not necessarily come from within institutions – it is unlikely that Goldman Sachs will suddenly go back to its more ethical roots. But when no one believes in the institution, it may simply fall apart.

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Occupy Wall St kicks off a new series of protests. From OccupyWallSt.org:

• 5:40PM EST: via @F29PDX: “Here’s what’s happening now: March in Las Vegas; direct action in Rockland, MA; march in Norfolk, VA; Rally in Gainesville, FL, rally and march in Phoenix, AZ; Rally in Minneapolis, MN; protest against Fletcher-Daniels in Kansas City, MO; and march in Portland! Follow Shut Down the Corporations for more updates tonight.
• 5:10PM EST: Two arrested at huge march in Portland. Occupy Las Vegas shuts down Walmart.
• 4:20PM EST: UC-Davis protesters shut down a U.S. Bank. Heavy police presence in Portland as police on motorcycles and bicycles try to cut off march and force protesters onto sidewalks. Some Occupiers have broken through police lines. Crowd estimated in 1000s. (Portland livestream). Oakland is off to shut down some banks. (Oakland livestream). Occupy DC has returned to Walmart construction site to continue protest.
• 3:50PM EST: General Assembly underway at occupied university in Barcelona. Anti-ALEC demos getting started in more cities and towns across the US. Occupiers in New Hampshire will target Koch brother-funded Americans for Prosperity. Numbers grow in Portland despite rain. Occupy Boston heading to City Hall to demand: “No HIKES! No CUTS! No Layoffs” in public transit at 6pm.

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A Brit reports on what it is like to get sick in America:

When I finally wobbled out of the shiny lobby of the Beth Israel, clutching a bag of drugs, follow-up advice and complimentary hospital toiletries, I understood what it really means to be without means in America. Those who are wealthy enough to afford decent healthcare have their needs met in relative luxury, while those who are poor live in fear of getting ill, worrying that one misadventure might leave you with yet more debts to pay off.

No amount of fresh towels and edible breakfasts can make up for the feeling that your health is less important than the capacity of your chequebook. Which is why children and pensioners are still standing in Manhattan's financial district with placards telling the world they cannot afford healthcare, as police patrol the perimeter. And why, when I got out of hospital, I went straight back down to Liberty Plaza to stand with them.

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