By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Warning to America’s Super Rich: Think Occupy Wall Street disappeared in winter’s cold? Wrong: The 99% just declared a new aggressive, covert special-ops war strategy to take back our democracy in 2012.
No more peaceful tent encampments in parks. No more Mahatma Gandhi nice-guy stuff. Not enough. Escalation time. Wall Street, the Super Rich and their Washington lobbyists are tone deaf, blinded by greed, trapped in their post-2008 business-as-usual bubble.
Christopher Hinton/MarketWatch Warning, OWS tells us America’s going to be shocked by not one but hundreds of wake-up calls in 2012.
How? In a recent Washington Post op-ed column, OWS leaders are clearly accelerating their battle strategy in 2012. In what amounts to a new declaration of war that promises to electrify the 2012 elections, OWS will be using new asymmetrical warfare strategies, write the two men who’ve been the driving force behind the movement since early this year, Kalle Lasn editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine and senior editor Micah White.
Listen to some of the specific guerilla tactics they warn will be used in their coming 2012 “American Spring” assault: A “marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions, rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, ‘occupy squads’ and edgy theatrics.” And in a New Yorker magazine interview shortly after New York Mayor Bloomberg’s “military-style operation,” Lasn warned: “this means escalation, pushing us one step closer to a revolution.”
So get ready: 2012 promises to be a relentless succession of hit-and-run attacks during what already promises to be a hotly-contested presidential campaign. So forget Zuccotti Park. No long camp-outs and sit-ins. That’s so ‘60s. So last fall. Instead, be prepared for endless surprise attacks, albeit non-violent amateur versions of Seal Team Six, in-and-out fast.
‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ … a thousand times!
Kalle and White also noted in the Post that their 1,000 plus global allies are governed as separate democracies: Each picks their own targets, tactics, the timing and goals. So there may not be a coordinated D-Day re-launch attack date, like there was last Sept. 17. But lots of surprise attacks making the local and regional as well as national news throughout 2012.
As Kalle and White warned: “In this visceral, canny, militantly nonviolent phase of our march to real democracy, we will ‘float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.’ We will regroup, lick our wounds, brainstorm and network all winter. We will build momentum for a full-spectrum counterattack when the crocuses bloom next spring.”
One big target are events related to the proposed constitutional amendment to get money out of voting and reverse corporate personhood … presidential debates venues are high-profile … Supreme Court rulings on health care, immigration, voter redistricting … any events tied to “voting out incumbents” … supporting “Occupy Colleges” anger at oppressive student loans and no jobs … Federal Reserve System money and credit to Wall Street … special interest K-Street lobbyists … state recall campaigns … Keystone XL pipeline … Congressional hearings on jobs … taxes benefits for the rich … and the too-greedy-to-fail banks … corporations who pay less in taxes than CEO salaries … occupy state and local campaign headquarters … support young Millennials rejecting America’s failed two-party system … occupy lawns of elderly citizens being evicted … protesting states who repealed voting and union rights … and many more.
Revolutionary overhaul of American politics, no compromising
Taxing the Super Rich 1% is a given. Kalle and White’s counterattack also other specific, demands for game-changing reforms that would rival anything America saw back in the Great Depression years:
“Robin Hood tax on all financial transactions and currency trades; a ban on high-frequency ‘flash’ trading; the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act to again separate investment banking from commercial banking; a constitutional amendment to revoke corporate personhood and overrule Citizens United; a move toward a true cost market regime in which the price of every product reflects the ecological cost of its production, distribution and use;” and they are in favor of “the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.”
There are already several proposed amendments, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders 28th Amendment overturning Citizens United. That’s tough. But taxes on Wall Street trading? Remember, Goldman’s traders made over $100 million net profits a day for 23 days one month a couple years ago. They’ll spend billions to fight any such tax reform.
My prediction: Wall Street will never change, never, until they suffer another catastrophic meltdown, with no bank bailouts. We haven’t completed the natural economic cycle Paulson’s team aborted in 2008. Only then can we restore Glass-Steagall and reverse that totally irrational Citizens United ruling that corporations—whose sole allegiance is merely to their stockholders, not to all Americans—have the same rights as a living human. That ruling’s not only bad law, it is bad logic, bad morals, bad economics, and ultimately, it’s bad for capitalism.
War rises from a black hole in the souls of our enraged youth
Listen to Kalle and White describing the energy driving OWS movement. It comes from deep within the collective soul of a new generation of young Americans who have been disenfranchised by clueless politicians who are trapped deep inside a corrupt two-party political system no longer capable of changing. And our youth are enraged. Listen:
“This primal cry for democracy sprang from young people who could no longer ignore the angst in their gut — the premonition that their future does not compute, that their entire lives will be lived in the apocalyptic shadow of climate-change tipping points, species die-offs, a deadening commercialized culture, a political system perverted by money, precarious employment, a struggle to pay off crippling student loans, and no chance of ever owning a home or living in comfort like their parents. Glimpsing this black hole of ecological, political, financial and spiritual crisis, the youth and the millions of Americans who joined them instinctively knew that unless they stood up and fought nonviolently for a different kind of future, they would have no future at all.”
Yes, America’s youth are the voice of the 99%, Americans inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions. American youth are fueling “the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era.”
But never lose sight of the real war here. Yes, there’s a war between the richest 1% of Americans who have seen their income grow 265% the past generation while the incomes of the other 99% have stagnated or fallen. Yes, the wealth gap is bigger now than it was in 1929 just before the market crashed.
Super Rich vs. America’s future
But to truly understand how this class war is predicting what lies ahead, know that class war is not just between the Super Rich and the 99%. It is more a generational war between America’s youth and a wealthy entrenched establishment. The young helped elect the president. Expected “change we can believe in.” Unfortunately it got worse, and they’re mad as hell.
Investors especially better watch out: This pent-up energy in America’s youth is building to a critical mass (as happened in Europe and the Arab world, and now in China and Russia), and it will explode across the economic and political landscape in 2012.
In the final analysis, however, you sense that in spite of their accelerating rage against the establishment, America’s youth, our next great generation, also had a sudden epiphany and learned a crucial lesson. Oh yes. Because their enemies didn’t just give them a great gift, but also inadvertently trained them in using a more aggressive special-ops, guerilla, quick-strike strategy. Listen and you’ll see what they learned in one night raid against them:
“Why can’t the American power elite engage with the nation’s young? Instead, they stayed aloof, ignored us and wished us away,” then “attacked us in Zuccotti Park in the dead of the night. Bloomberg’s raid was carried out with military precision. The surprise attack began at 1 a.m. with a media blackout. The encampment was surrounded by riot police, credentialed mainstream journalists who tried to enter were pushed back or arrested, and the airspace was closed to news helicopters. What happened next was a blur of tear gas; a bulldozer; confiscation or destruction of everything in the park, including 5,000 books; upward of 150 arrests; and the deployment of a Long Range Acoustic Device, the infamous ‘sound cannon’ best known for its military use in Iraq. … This kind of military mind-set and violent response to nonviolent protesters makes no sense. It did not work in the Middle East, and it’s not going to work in America either. This is the bottom line: You cannot attack your young and get away with it.”
Repeat that “bottom line: You cannot attack your young and get away with it” And yet, that’s exactly what Wall Street, America’s Super Rich, their lobbyists, and all their bought politicians are doing: “Attacking our young.” Attacking our next generation. Attacking America’s future.
Our leaders are ideologically blind to the need to invest and invest big in jobs before this accelerating rage reaches a critical mass and ignites, triggering another American Revolution and the Second Great Depression.
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