Washington Pre-Occupied

Robert Reich
blog
November 3, 2011

http://robertreich.org/post/12303771388

The biggest question in America these days is how to
revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall
Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back
against the nation's almost unprecedented concentration
of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1
percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and
wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class
no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the
economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend
otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as
ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is
prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as
the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the
economy can't be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation's capital right
now has nothing to do with any of this. It's whether
Congress's so-called "Supercommittee" - six Democrats
and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2
trillion in budget savings - will reach agreement in
time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its
proposal, which must then be approved by Congress
before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic
$1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-
the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already
signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social
Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The
deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who
won't raise taxes on the rich - not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying
to sell his "jobs bill" - which would, by the White
House's own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs.
Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10
million are working part-time who'd rather have full-
time jobs.

Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill
anyway.

The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the
nation hasn't been this wide since the late 1960s.

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who
are losing their jobs or their pay and can't pay their
bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington
insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans,
diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the
lobbyists' wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in
corporate suites haven't a clue or couldn't care less.

I can't tell you when the collision will occur but I'd
guess 2012.

Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar
collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger
forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and
Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers
insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel,
whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East,
whose "Arab spring" is becoming a complex Arab fall and
winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers
are demanding more - and whose surge toward inequality
in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its
surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that
shook the foundations of the world's political economy
- 1968 and 1989?

I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The
Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United
States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere,
people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game -
an economy that won't respond, a democracy that won't
listen, and a financial sector that holds all the
cards.

Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.

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