I’ve launched a new video series, called POLITICAL Public Service Announcements (#PPSA for short) to share what I think are vital clarifications on key issues of the day. In the first in the series, I address the myth that progressives and Occupy activists hate wealth. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Check it out and please help spread it around:
In my latest column for the American Prospect, I write:
In 2011, grassroots economic-justice organizations mobilized protests at six corporate shareholder meetings. This year, there have already been 20, including the stunning disruption of Bank of America’s shareholder meeting last week to protest foreclosure abuses and funding for mountaintop removal mining, and another 20 protests are scheduled in the coming weeks. That alone says something about the rising scale of public anger at the abuses of crony capitalism, but such anger—even when it takes to the streets—doesn’t always lead directly to concrete policy change.
Yet last month, Citigroup shareholders rejected a lavish $15 million exit pay package for the company’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit. Shareholder activism is nothing new, but this was the first time on record that shareholders at a major bank successfully blocked a CEO pay package. Taken as a whole, this suggests that protesters aren’t just lone wolfs tilting at windmills but, rather, represent the moral mainstream of America, agitating for and starting to achieve changes in an economic system that no longer works for working people.
Evolving toward what? Read the piece!
In my latest opinion piece for CNN, I praise the Occupy movement for putting needy families in needy homes — and helping our housing economy rebound.
Granted, helping homeowners stop eviction orders and helping homeless families occupy empty, bank-owned homes is a short-term strategy, but one that will hopefully draw public attention to the injustice of millions of foreclosed homes and millions of homeless families, an injustice that banks could easily have addressed if they cared about our nation and our economy a fraction as much as they care about their bottom lines.
Read the full piece here and tell me what you think.
The people united will never be defeated!
Amidst record levels of unemployment, the former mayor of New York takes a stab at Occupy protesters, telling them to get a job?! They are working hard, standing up for the American Dream to make a better economy and a better future for all of us. History will repay them.
Meanwhile, the random incidents of violence at Occupy encampments have been isolated and roundly condemned by the majority of other protesters. But enemies of the middle class are dredging up anything they can to try and undermine this popular, mass movement.
“This election marks the victory of a new politics in America, an emerging populism that is neither left nor right, Republican nor Democrat, but is fiercely pro-worker, pro-community, pro-opportunity and pro-American dream.
It all started when the disillusioned right and the disillusioned left came together. Tuesday night, they tied the knot.”
NEW YORK TIMES PROFILE
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