Here’s my latest article for The Valley Advocate, about 1%er Jessie Spector, the Program Director at Resource Generation, who was arrested participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests, against her financial interest.

RAISE HER TAXES

Earlier this month, an estimated 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested while attempting to cross New York’s famed Brooklyn Bridge. It was one of the largest demonstrations to date by the amorphous “Other 99 percent” representing the majority of people who don’t benefit from the socioeconomic privileges enjoyed by the upper 1 percent of wealth holders in the country.

But among the protesters arrested was Northampton native Jessie Spector, who marched that day holding a most unusual sign: “I was born into the 1%, I want redistribution, we’ll all be better for it & Tax me!”

Why would Spector do this?

“I wanted to mix up the message,” she explains. “It’s important to show there are rich people in solidarity.”

Read on … 

SCHOOLING THE SYSTEM OF PRIVILEGE

This “back to school” season got me to thinking about my own formal education, and the teachers and professors I’ve known who have or have not used their positions of academic influence to challenge the status quo, especially the economic status quo.

The current issue of Boston Review features Noam Chomsky’s essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux,” which is updated from his original 1967 treatise. “As the Vietnam War escalated,” notes Boston Review, “Noam Chomsky penned … a stunning rebuke to scientists and scholars for the subservience to political power. Today we face a similar array of crises, from wars to escalating debt. What are the obligations of intellectuals in this day and age?” Which is a mighty fine question.

Read more … 

As they note at the end of the video above, without effective media coverage, “this type of critical analysis would not be possible.”

And the analysis, theirs and others, of economic inequality is needed more than ever these days.

GIVING GAY RIGHTS A SPORTING CHANCE

Before New York’s momentous legalization of marriage equality this summer, former New York Giants player David Tyree made a video with the National Organization for Marriage. “It’s a strong word,” said the wide receiver, but gay marriage is the beginning of America’s slide toward “anarchy.”

But his ominous warning may be becoming more of an exception than the rule in American locker rooms. Consider the emerging critical mass of athletes publicly supporting marriage equality and challenging homophobia: Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendan Ayanbadejo and New York Rangers forward Sean Avery have made advocacy videos in Maryland and New York, respectively. Grant Hill teamed up with fellow Phoenix Suns basketball player Jared Dudley to film a “Think B4 You Speak” anti-homophobic language video in April. And several Major League Baseball teams, including the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs and World Series champion San Francisco Giants, have shot videos for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” anti-bullying campaign.

Taken together, it’s a stunning amount of support from a sports culture that has historically been mired in homophobia.

Read on … 

Hopefully, this is the beginning of more to come. (Media coverage of economic inequality. As opposed to instances of tax abuse. Of course.)

While I had been meaning to watch Inside Job for a while, something always delayed me from doing so. Now that I’ve watched it, I realize what it is: the disturbing reality of our embedded “financial-industrial complex,” which, unfortunately, has not changed at all under the Obama Administration.

As the film’s writer, director and producer Craig Ferguson notes, 

“When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he had a truly unique opportunity to change the history of the United States. With his mandate and a heavily Democratic Congress, he could have restored financial sanity and economic fairness to America. It is a huge tragedy that he failed to seize this opportunity.”

The recession, like the economy itself, is a(n unnecessarily?) complicated construction, which leaves most of us yawning at mysterious words like “derivatives,” and usually keeps our inadequate understanding mired in an alphabet slew of CDOs and CDCs and MBSs and so forth, that read like so much gobblygook.

What can be done about an economy that still relies too heavily on financial companies that are still “too big to fail” when our regulating agencies are still run by politicians who are still too connected to Wall Street? Not enough not quick enough, unfortunately. But, as with most issues of social change, a little understanding usually goes a long way. Watching Inside Job is a very effective two-hour crash course in the corrupt relationship between our political and economic systems. And as G.I. Joe famously noted, “Knowing is half the battle.”

In the meantime, check out the film’s website, which has extensive information on the history leading up to the crisis, tons of detail on the crimes and corresponding fines that have chronically littered Wall Street throughout the years, and a very useful glossary for busting through the litany of financial-speak jargon.

If Ronald Reagan can do it, then why not Matt Damon?

Recently, Damon put the liberal back in Liberal Hollywood with his commentary on our current tax structure, and the correlative economic inequality our society is mired in:

“It’s criminal that so little is asked of people who are getting so much. I don’t mind paying more. I really don’t mind paying more taxes. I’d rather pay for taxes than cut Reading Is Fundamental, of Head Start, or some of these programs that are really helping kids. This is the greatest country in the world. Is it that much worse if you’re paying 6% more in taxes? Give me a break. Look at what you get for it. You get to be American.”

Conceding that a $250,000 annual salary takes the focus too close to the middle class, Damon suggests a tax reform of raising taxes on those making over $1 million/year, with a tax of 50% for those making over $5 million/year. “Why don’t you just tax the really rich?” Damon challenges. “Guys like me.”

Good question.

Democrats, are you listening?

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.”

Do we have to be so blatant about which economic section of our populace our government is “serving”?

While making a comment, Dallas Mavericks billionaire owner Mark Cuban accidentally knocked over the water of fellow panelist Christia Freeland. He apologized and continued with his thoughts. As he was speaking, someone off-camera put a towel on the table, so the water could be discreetly wiped up. As it turned out, it ended up being the third panelist, gay rights activist and sex columnist Dan Savage, who took care of the spilled water, pointedly saying as he did so, “Here’s the working class Irish guy, cleaning up after the billionaire.”

Upon first watching, I was immediately struck that the moment represented a central problem with the uber-wealthy: lack of awareness, and the expectation of others to deal with the mess you create. Cuban accidentally knocked over the water, nicely apologized, and then went on with things, paying no mind to the effects of his accident. And furthermore, it was tended to by Savage, reared in a working class household, who has been taught to do just the opposite.

But after a little reflection, it seems the class influences at work in this brief exchange between Savage and Cuban are a bit more complex.

Savage is an extremely successful columnist, radio host, published author, activist, and regularly-featured national commentator. He might not be a billionaire, but he’s more comfortable financially than most people. Of course, as he was brought up working class, maybe he still identifies with that reality, as is no doubt the case with many folks: being molded foremost by the class experiences of their childhood. But Cuban, too, was brought up working class. The grandson of Russian immigrants who were processed at Ellis Island, he sold garbage bags when he was twelve to pay for a pair of sneakers, and so forth.

So if Savage was still identifying as working class, then it seems a little unfair to negatively label Cuban as “the billionaire.”

Maybe this incident is not significant of any larger issues, class or otherwise? Maybe it was indeed an example of a class microaggression?

What to make of it?

“The accumulation of money,” Sanders writes, “gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us.

 “Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for things that do posses intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been the most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, non-profits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn’t directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the top.”

It’s easy to get lost, or dismayed, by statistics. This is especially true when trying to comprehend vast amounts of wealth. But by wondering “why … a billionaire [would] want more money” Sanders does a better job than most at illuminating the seemingly unrealistic reality of the insanely wealthy.

“Suppose you keep a billion dollars under your mattress,” Sanders explains, “where it will earn no income, and you set out to spend it; 

“in order to burn through it all within an adult lifetime of, say, fifty years, you would have to spend $1.7 million per month, or $55,000 per day. If you took your billion dollars out from under your mattress and invested it in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at current rates, you could spend $40 million per year, or $110,000 per day, without touching your capital. It so happens that $110,000 is a bit more than twice the median household income in the United States.”

So, how rich are the insanely rich? “If you do the math,” continues Sanders, “you will find that the twenty-five hedge fund managers who pulled in $26 billion last year claimed an income equivalent to roughly 500,000 households, or some 2 million people.”

Not bad for a bunch a working stiffs. Clearly, they must have been logging at least a thousand hours at the office on average each week.

But, if the uber-wealthy “are not worrying about sending their kids to college or paying their medical bills,” as Sanders points out, then what are the “billionaire advocates of unbridled capitalism after?”

Answer: “What the free-enterprise billionaires are greedy for is not money but power, and not merely the power to take care of themselves and their families, which would be reasonable, but the power to have anything they want and do anything they want without limit, which is decidedly unreasonable.”

What is the acquisition of vast sums of wealth, after all, without the unrelenting application of unlimited power?

As Sanders notes, this behavior is tantamount to the acting out of unrestrained desires by most two-year-olds, who are “incapable of sensing or caring for the needs of other people, indifferent to the harm they cause, [and react] aggressively toward anyone or anything that blocks their will.” As any loving parent of such a neanderthalic creature can, no doubt, easily relate to.

So, what can be done to remedy the situation? Change the rules of the game.

“Money derives its meaning from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it,” writes Sanders.

“It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently being played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator … and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.”

A realization which is all fine and good and all. But, skeptically, realistically, one that is much more easily articulated than effectively acted upon in today’s economically unrestrained political climate.

For, if our relationship with money is determined by rules set up by government, and our political system is unduly influenced by money, and (many of) those who operate with extreme wealth do so with the the awareness of a two-year-old, then what can be done to fix this essential problem?

I guess I’ll go ask my toddler.