Conscience of a Liberal: Behind the Occupy Wall Street movement

It has been one month since the Occupy Wall Street movement began. It is now spreading and gaining national attention. Although the news on TV focuses on the mixed messages the movement seems to be sending out, the real story nobody is asking is where did the movement originated.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is born out of a certain form of dissatisfaction. Specifically, it is born of disenfranchisement. It is a feeling of being left out. It's the feeling you get when you think what should be yours is denied. Rightly or wrongly is not the question of disenfranchisement. It is perception as well as in actual fact. You can feel disenfranchised when you think a right that you think is yours is taken away from you. Like the right to text while driving. Or like the right to vote. Some feelings of disenfranchisement are justified while others are not.
I am going to expand the definition of what this blog is for. I did this in a way when I did the post on TWiT because in reality I listen to TWiT more than I watch it. This post is about something you can only listen to, an audiobook. This audio book is an unabridged version of the book The Conscience of a Liberal or The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. Read by Jason Culp, this book begins by explaining the history behind the recent, as in past 100 years, events in the economy, society and the political process as seen by the author. It is his narrative and his conclusions. The book lays out what it sees as the condition of the society at the time the book was written and draws up arguments to explain how it got to that point. It goes into great detail about it's arguments. It supports them with facts and figures that rarely require re-interpretation by the author. I don't agree with all of them but you have to respect an argument backed by facts and figures. If you can accept Freakanomics and it's conclusions from those statistics, this is a shorter leap and lot easier to understand.
This is not an academic text. There is a strong narrative, a story being told. The language is simple to understand and told in a fashion that draws you into their argument. Rather than offering a narrative that tries to invoke emotional responses from you to make you agree with the author, he offers logic and reasoning and a lot of history. It is not like the story won't invoke an emotional response.The picture he draws is of how the country has been hijacked, politically and economically by a small group of people with a very specific agenda. He talks about income inequality and the runaway rich. He describe the rise of a self-sustaining system to ensure that the rich become richer at the expense of everyone else while controlling the political process, the one force that is able to counter their influence effectively. It makes us think whether we want to or not. What is chilling is that if we look around, the book describes the world we live in right now.
The book is far ahead of it's time. It is relevant today and you can draw a line from where the books ends to the unregulated and ultimate near-collapse of Wall Street in 2008 to the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book clearly illustrates where the feeling of disenfranchisement comes from and comes about while emphasizing the reality of that source.

I never have read the book before and I am glad. Without the amazing and interesting reading by Jason Culp, I might not have made it to the end. If the voice sounds vaguely familiar, Jason Clup's father is Robert Culp of the Greatest American Hero fame and many outstanding roles on TV series and movies. His reading makes the book sound like an interesting extended lecture. A lecture given by someone who knows what is talking about, passionate about it and wishes to share the knowledge and passion with you.
Listening to this book enables you to understand why Paul Krugman sound like he does in his newspaper columns. It explains the history of the American society, mainly about the economy and politics in a way that no political TV commercial could capture. Politicians understand that we are so used to commercials for information. They assume that we find anything else hard to understand. However, some things just takes time to explain because it is just complex.
What is frightening is that the book depicts the society that this small group of people are working for, the return of the Long Gilded Age. And if no action is taken by the masses, this is where we will be headed. The books shows the origins of disenfranchisement but also shows how it can be created to motivate a group of people to act. It shows of how politicians take advantage of change to create a sense of disenfranchisement and channel that energy towards their own causes and continued election success. 
In a way, the polar opposite of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party is in fact a reformation of the anti-Obama groups with the christian conservatives. They hide behind a common show of hatred torwards the government. Guess what? They feel or being told they should feel disenfranchised. This feeling, fanned by political rhetoric, spurred people against the government. The book talks about how politician gained control over similar feelings of disenfranchisement in the past. It explains that it is not about ideology but specific actions suggested by politicians. The blind implementation of these actions regardless of consequence results in unintended outcomes. What the people don't realize is that the message they receive from these politicians has been carefully crafted to gain their support. But once in power, these ideas are discarded for the true agenda. Often the result is an increase in disenfranchisement towards minorities and the middle class. I wouldn't be too far to say that the their true goal may just be the eventual creation of a citizen class vs civilian class, those who can vote vs those who can just live here, those who have power and those who will always be without (or at least not without a cost or being co-opted with those in power). 
The Tea Party rode on the feelings of disenfranchisement to put themselves in power and then turned around and sought to create a wider gap between them and their the general public. The efforts to roll back Union and Voter rights and the effort to remove government regulations on business are the results. The books talks about the anti-union, anti-voter right and pro-business results in other efforts in the past, showing that while the Tea Party is new, their agenda is not. 
What is strange, once you have heard the book, is how it proves general prosperity is so closely tied to the prosperity of the middle class. If this is so, why the strong effort to hold the middle class down? The answer is right there: general prosperity is not the goal of the Tea Party and their partners. It is really about making people work and pay without giving them political power, a new form of taxation without representation. This time the taxing is being done by large corporations who pull the strings of politics in Washington. The last bastion is the election of the president. This is where the people have the most direct effect on the nation.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is driven also by this strong feeling of disenfranchisement. This time it is the feeling of losing the ability to contribute and participate in the democracy (at least enough to take effect). This impending voting restrictions makes it feel worse. Is is also driven by the feeling of losing the ability to participate in the country's economic prosperity. How is this so when everybody says the economy is in the toilet? Because they are still people making money and becoming and remaining rich. And where are those people? In Wall Street.
So the goal of the Occupy Wall Street should be the polar opposite of the Tea Party: achieve general prosperity. Efforts to do so will help dissipate the feelings of disenfranchisement and strangely enough, as the book points out of events in the past, will make people feel less inclined to both politicians.
This books makes you think. And that is a Good Thing.


The rest of this post is a rant and can be skipped. Seriously.
For what it's worth, I think that the Tea Party Movement organizers were riding on the repressed racist feelings for Obama. They smartly harnessed that energy by providing a legitimate channel for people to express that sentiment without being overtly racist. In fact, they harnessed it so well that they people were just happy to let off some racist steam in the form of activism for ideology that they don't even really support when asked individually. For example, there have been people going on TV demanding a stop to socialism while demanding that Medicare should not be touched. News flash: Medicare is Socialism. And voucher programs is going to introduce the concept of profit in to the equation. Which means either the government pays more or you get less for the same amount of money spent. Why? Someone has to pay the people to manage the vouchers. And who are the people with the most related experience in this? The insurance claims processing industry or the claims part of the insurance process. Or better known as the worse part of insurance.
What I think is the most important lesson the book teaches is the reality of who Conservatives are or really aren't. The name "Conservative" alludes to an effort to maintain something or return it to the way it was. In reality, that past in itself is a dreamed-up image, less historical, more Hollywood. If you think about it, "turning back the clock to the way it was" sounds nostalgic. However, even on the surface, turning back the clock sound like a bad idea for most things. The image that the Conservative wants you to accept that what the world is now is a mistake, something worth turning back the clock for. Ask yourself right now, up to which point do you want to turn back the clock? 5 years ago? 50 years ago? Compare that to how far the Conservatives want to turn back the clock. The book points out how far based on their own words and actions and you would be surprised how far.

Even if they let you know how far, the image they paint to their supporters is a dream, something that never existed in reality. That dream is a history that has all the bad stuff removed, so it has to be a dream and not real. They wish for a time when government let businesses do what they want, without the part where they dump toxins into the rivers as a standard practice. A time where the wealthy were taxed very little, without the part where the rest of people lived without indoor plumbing and basic roads.
So what the Conservatives want is a dream. This is a problem because a dream is an ideal world. Conservative wisdom says idealists, people who believe in ideals, are to be ridiculed and have no place in politics. But that is just what they are because they are fighting for and working for their dream. Which makes them no better than who they mean when they derisively say 'idealist', pointing to the Democrats, the Progressives and the Liberals. Guess who else are idealists? The Fathers of America. America was and still is an idea. When the Founding Fathers thought up of what is to be America, they were being idealists. There is no other way to explain this because what they proposed did not exist in the Western world up to that point. And they enshrined that idea into the Constitution of the United States. They believed in them to the point of defending them with their lives. Realists would have looked at the resources the British had available to them and given up. It makes you think, "What would a person with a conservative mindset circa 1776 be doing? Pining for the way things were with King George or looking forward to embrace the new ideals of a new nation?