Paul Street: Against the Manipulation of Populism by Elitism

[girl gone mad]

Excerpts from http://www.zcommunications.org/against-the-manipulation-of-populism-by-elitism-by-paul-street">Against the Manipulation of Populism by Elitism by Paul Street:

Currently we are witnessing the emergence of an authentically grassroots, popular, anti-establishment and populist citizens’ movement against concentrated economic wealth and power. I am referring, of course, to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement of September and October 2011 and its many offshoots across the nation and continent. As the financial district occupiers have recently announced in their Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, “We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies….We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.”

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The statement of concern over corporate control of politicians per se is important. When I told one New York activist dressed up as a greedy billionaire that I’d seen similarly clad street thespians protesting the anti-union policies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in Madison last March, he was quick to make a critical distinction between OWS and the Wisconsin rebellion. “The Wisconsin thing was shut down out of subordination to the Democratic Party and the union bosses,” he said. “This is different. It’s about the whole system, which is run by and for the rich whether they’ve got Republicans or Democrats out front.” I have had direct experience and contact with the movement in New York City, Chicago, and Iowa City, and I have yet to meet an occupier who doesn’t get it that Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are front folks for the moneyed class.

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Despite the best efforts of the dominant corporate media to mock, downplay and otherwise marginalize the remarkable new populist movement, the basic populist OWS message has resonated across the land, sparking numerous copycat occupations, protests, and statements of solidarity. This is because U.S. policy and both wings of the business-managed American one-and-a-half party system are now so transparently captive to financialized corporate capitalism – so obviously under the proto-totalitarian control of what OWSers call “the top 1 percent” – that it has become impossible for a rising mass of Americans to deny the basic fact that meaningful progressive and democratic change cannot be achieved through the candidate-centered election spectacles that big money and big media stage for us every two and four years, telling us “that’s politics” – the only politics that matters. A significant mass of the citizenry is now ready to act on their basic, experience-based grasp of the wisdom in the late radical American historian Howard Zinn’s counsel that what matters most “isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating.” And organizing. As Zinn elaborated in the spring of 2008, “I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes - the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.”

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Confronted with the new and genuinely populist, anti-corporate, independent, and anti-establishment movement that has spread like wildfire from Manhattan’s financial district to many hundreds of U.S. cities this fall, the two reigning business parties have responded in different ways. Consistent with its more explicitly reactionary nature and constituency, the Teapublicans have responded with fairly unambiguous hostility beyond opportunistic statements that (in the words of a Rick Perry spokesman) “we understand frustration with the Obama economy.” Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor speaks with timeworn ruling class disdain in denouncing “the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country.” Front-running Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney calls the movement a “dangerous” expression of “class warfare.” The right wing hopeful and former Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain (wildly popular among those Tea Partiers who are not too racist to back a black man) calls OWS activists “anti-American” and shames them as lazy lumpens who should stop making excuses for their personal failures: “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the banks. If you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself.” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg absurdly accuses the protestors of trying to “take the jobs away from hard working people.” The ridiculous racist U.S. Senator and Tea Party caucus member Rand Paul (R-KY) claims to worry that occupiers will appropriate rich peoples’ iPads – imagine! At CNCBC, FOX News, and across the right-wing talk radio empire, the activists are alternately portrayed as vicious Lenninists, union thugs, drug-crazed deadheads, and social parasites. On a radio show last week, the arch-reactionary G.O.P. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) said that “e have to be careful not to allow this to get any legitimacy….I’m old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.”