It is obvious to a lot of us that security, stability and prosperity have not been improving for decades. They have been visibly declining, along with real estate values, employment and real income, for the last five years or so. There is no end in sight for this trend, just more instability ahead.
In the Detroit area, we are very aware of the state of the auto industry. Production of 16 million units annually used to be normal. Now 12 million is considered a pretty good year - and there is no guarantee that next year will be good. Layoffs and wage concessions are what we have come to expect.
Local governments that depend on real estate taxes and state government that depends on income and sales taxes are all seeing declining revenues leading to cuts in services and employment. Teachers, police, fire, road and construction workers generally, if they still have a job, can't count on having one next year.
Pensions, health insurance and home ownership are becoming unattainable for more and more people, including some who believed they were secure in all of these. Student loans, instead of being a bridge to a better future, have become a crushing burden for recent graduates who can't find jobs.
The only group of people who have benefited economically from the developments of recent years is the top 1% in terms of wealth and annual income. The recent report from the congressional Budget Office is just one in a string of studies and statistics confirming this fact.
For the rest of us, (the other 99%) the society, the economy and the political system is failing. that's the basic fact driving #occupy Wall Street, as it was the basic fact driving the Tea Party when they were protesting. It's the basic fact upsetting political organizations across the entire spectrum.
The Democratic and Republican parties are stuck with trying to defend the system they have jointly created. they are each trying to sell some version of the idea some marginal adjustment in taxes and government spending will fix things. This narrative is not convincing, and becomes less convincing with every new development in the continuing crisis of our economy.
More and more people are figuring out for themselves that something is fundamentally wrong with our economic and political trajectory, and that no marginal adjustment is going to fix things.
The genius of the #Occupy movement is that it has emerged from a process, repeated in city after city, of rejecting politics as usual in favor of encampment and general assembly conducted by consensus. The commercial press mostly identifies #occupiers as "demonstrators." This is not altogether off the mark, because #occupiers do sometimes demonstrate, and many traditional demonstrators have allied themselves with #occupiers.
Typically, political activity outside the electoral arena has been some type of single-issue activity. Many organizations exist to promote their version of a single issue through lobbying, publications, public meetings and demonstrations. The Sierra Club is concerned with protecting the environment. Unions try to hold the line on jobs, wages and working conditions. The civil rights movement focused on eliminating racial discrimination; the woman's rights movement, on eliminating gender bias. The peace movement opposes wars. Physicians for a National Health Plan is for a single-payer system sometimes called Medicare for All. The National Rifle Association promotes every citizen exercising a right to own a gun. Right-to-life groups want to make abortions illegal. The list could go on and on.
All these single-issue organizations often pick Democratic or Republican candidates to support, with donations and campaign volunteers. They lobby legislators about their particular issues. They organize demonstrations about their issues. They officially stay neutral on all the issues outside the range of issues with which they are concerned.
As a well-publicized #OWS sign says, "It's Not One Thing - It's Everything!" All the important issues - jobs, environment, war, human rights, health care, democracy, prosperity - are not just related but are inseparable. The time for single-issue campaigns is over. The job of the general assemblies, and of #OWS in general, is to figure out how to make progress on all the issues.
It's not clear that the general assemblies will be successful. The encampments that support the general assemblies are being worn down by weather, police pressure and the exhaustion of most committed long-term campers. However, the general assemblies have already been successful in setting the goal for all of us, just by defining the scope of the problem.
We need to support our local encampments and to work out how to carry on by other means as the encampments are worn down. Our failing global economy, declining military empire, degrading environment and stupid sound-bite commercial barrage that passes for political discussion in the two-party system will not let us do otherwise.
I'm not proposing we set up an encampment in a park in Royal Oak. I'm too old to be sleeping on an air mattress in the cold in any case. I'm not proposing a general strike, though it will be interesting to see how Oakland, California's general strike goes. I'm thinking more of how we can survey our neighborhoods to get a sense of what kinds of actions our neighbors would support, and how to start that action in the spring. The movement is started. The question is how to continue from here.
Art Myatt
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