Something's Got To Give?

Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters An Occupy Wall Street tape hangs across the door of an abandoned foreclosed upon property where demonstrators protested in the East New York section of Brooklyn in New York City, December 6, 2011.
(via Bag News Notes)

So it's back to work, and I'm back to distracting myself from clock-watching—by audio-listening.

Despite the long hours at the office, there's so much excellent stuff available that I can't keep up. But I try, so I'm still getting to year-end material, like the December 29 Majority Report.

This starts with a two hour review of the show's reporting on Occupy Wall Street: extensive, and beginning with the pre-September 17 planning, because Sam Seder saw the significance from the start.

An interview with Fran Lebowitz starts after the 2:00 mark. Regarding OWS, Lebowitz points to the original site itself being "about real estate: no New Yorker ever heard of Zucotti Park." Only because the developer had made a deal with the city years before, a small green space was open to the public when protest got underway in September.

The interview ranges over a lot of thought-provoking material, particularly about the three-decade or so ascendancy of money over all other values. There are no longer sane points of reference, says Lebowitz: "I hear 'earn' before the word 'billion'; you don't 'earn' a billion, you steal it!"

She notes that when Obama ran for president, she knew he was to her right on economic issues, simply because he's ten years younger. It makes him

from the generation of people who believe there is such a thing as clean money... like "clean coal"... "public-private partnerships"
... Words that starting being used about 20 yrs ago: "vision" ... business has only one goal, to make profit, which is fine, but when you mix things..."

you wind up with horrors like Liebowitz's example of private prisons.

Her comments about spurious consumer choice—and the landmark reached "when people started to not mind being called 'consumers' instead of 'citizens'"—harken back to Thomas Frank's take on "market populism" in One Market Under God. There, Frank chronicles the foisting of the post-80s narrative: CEOs are heroic, unions are run by "bosses," and "consumer choice" is the highest form of human freedom.

So much of our sinking ship condition comes from decades of a management consensus used to destroy institutions in the name of remaking them. On the macro level, is the political/corporate agenda behind, say, destroying the Post Office.

On the local level (or in the workplace), it can be painfully easy to see what is sacrificed to bolster individual resumes. This is at work in the case of libraries being stripped of books in pursuit of the next big thing. And, since overseeing a major capital project looks trememendous on a director's resume, functioning buildings are torn down and replaced by empty media spaces.

Lebowitz notes that the "middle-class" was mainly a myth, because people buy on time. And the people who actually were middle-class didn't care when the lower-class jobs began being shipped overseas, since it didn't affect them. Without working-class identification, Americans have been unorganized and have "identified up," with the moneyed class.

With the "Work" part disappearing from the Work-Buy-Consume-Die American way of life, it seems a constructive cultural shift would be the best we can hope for.

Whether of not they come out of Occupy Wall Street, Lebowitz says we will have to find values to compete with the power of money, because "there's no money left: they stole it all!"

Eclipse of the Sun, George Grosz, 1926