Does anyone besides me feel that Elizabeth Bonner has it backwards in one way, and wrong in two others, in viewing the Occupy movement as echoing the "louder voice" of President Obama, who she characterizes as "going against" "the rich" and "capitalism", which she, at one point, seems to equate to "social and economic inequality"?
Do you really believe that President Obama is anti-capitalist? He seems to me to be a garden variety neoliberal, like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair--which means that he worships at the altar of the Free Market and the Holiness of the Private Sector just as conservatives do, but isn't as rigid in his application of the creed as they are.
You might suppose that TARP II and the bailout of GM and Chrysler are sure signs that Obama is a dad-blasted commie, but notice that the bailout of the banks was notably devoid of conditions limiting the banks' activities then or in the future, and that the administration has been anxious to withdraw its financial interest both from the banks and the automobile companies, I presume to restore them to the blessed state of privatude that Nature intends.
What's more, reports from within the Obama administration are that two mildly radical interventions that he favored, the establishment of an Infrastructure Bank to channel government-secured investments from the private sector into public works normally funded directly by
governments, and the imposition of a .01% tax on Wall Street-type transactions, were quashed, or perhaps (I hope) temporarily shelved, on the advice of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner.
These guys are devotees of straight-up caudillismic, oligarchy of the rich, priesthood-of-the-financial-wizards capitalism.
If the Occupy people are protesting capitalism, that's the kind of capitalism they are protesting.
So (in my view), they are not echoing Obama, they're yelling at him:"Hey! Obama! Snap out of it!" They aren't, generally, against capitalism, but they are all against the kind of capitalism we find ourselves afflicted with now, the monster
descendant of 19th century laissez faire capitalism, with, much worse than then, a swollen, diseased, banking-investment-financial organ driving the whole system to ruin.
Maybe I'm misreading, but I think the Occupy movement is asking: why can't we go back to the capitalism that we had for roughly 50 years, 1935-1985?
Pete Johnson
professor of mathematics and statistics
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