In recent weeks "occupy the Wall Street" (OWS) protests have captured the public imagination but the punditry is still behind times cavilling at the lack of a clear message.
" What do these protesters want?" they wail.
The simple answer is less corruption and more accountability among the elites particularly the financial elites.
But that message seems to not get through to the media coverage which lazily ( in case of the main street media) and deliberately ( in the case of Fox news) refuses to acknowledge the explicit and implicit message of the OWS. Take the case of recent coverage of events: After a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls !
As Matt Taibbi points out in an elegant article in the Rolling Stones, “This reveals the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.”
It is true that the OWS needs to have a clear and cogent message, one that resonates with the people. Some suggestions for these few messages:
1. Make Wall Street pay for its own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay for the bailouts. (As an added benefit, it would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.)
2. Provide incentives to billionaires and Banks to invest in infrastructure. The millionaire surtax of 5 % should be temporary and could be removed as the economy recovers. With every 1% increase in GDP growth, the surtax could be reduced from 5% to an equivalent amount.
3. If Corporations are people, they should be taxed accordingly. Remove the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires.
4. Break up the monopolies. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled by mandating the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.
5. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him.
6. No upfront bonuses or exorbitant parachutes for Wall Street titans. These should be directly tied to the performance of the company in creating jobs and shareholder value over the long term.
Hurrah! See also Naomi Wolf's Project Syndicate comment that America's politicians seem to have had their fill of democracy, and are bet on breaking up protest, sometimes with shocking and gratuitous violence.
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