Profit Creators

                

Power resides in words. What we argue about is more important than how we argue. The vocabulary of our discourse is what often determines the outcome. In a rape case, when you say a woman was asking for it because of the cleavage she was showing, you turn the conversation into a discussion on how much cleavage constitutes a provocation rather than determining if the accused raped her or not. What she was wearing is irrelevant. No one has the right to have sex with another against their will; even if, theoretically, the victim was walking the streets nude.

This is where the “job creator” defense is so brilliant when used by plutocrats. They cannot be taxed, they cannot be criticized, they cannot be expected to contribute more to society beyond the virtue of creating jobs. Should it become too difficult to create jobs, they will simply be forced to move somewhere more accommodating to job creating.

We then fall into the trap of arguing the relative worth of those jobs, if the tax breaks accorded big business is resulting in the creation of enough jobs, who deserves these jobs and who these jobs would go to if they were created elsewhere. All the while, the powers that be, look on, smile and apply for another subsidy for all the job creating they are doing.

Jobs are in fact created by consumer demand. It is not in fact the entrepreneur that is creating the greatest value, he has ,at most, a brilliant idea, identified consumer demand and  has some money he would like to multiply. On his own he cannot multiply it. He needs workers to make products and services which he can then sell at a profit. It is the workers that have invested value into his capital. It is the employees that are profit creators.

If workers, profit creators, are expected to contribute to their own well being and protection by way of the taxes they pay and the public services they perform. If these same workers are also the job creators by way of the consumer demand they represent and are expected to contribute further by way of the VAT and other sales taxes they pay. Then show me the logic that explains why entrepreneurs, investors and corporations, using the resources that are the public goods of all of society, should not equally  contribute to the well being and protection of the profit & consumer demand creators.

When we argue about social justice and get hit with the job creator defense, retort by saying that without social justice we will be punishing the profit creators. Let them argue about why they are against social justice.

Populist Falacies

Part of what OWS and her sister movements are suggesting is that we rethink the superficiality with which we approach our world. An opportunity to re-imagine how our world should ideally work is not something that comes along every day and should be embraced with hunger, curiosity and maybe a little trepidation. Now that Yair Lapid has pulled the veil off of his political beliefs it becomes evident that these are both superficial and unimaginative. What is most disappointing is not that he entertains these ideas, what can you expect from someone that works so hard at giving offense to so few, but rather that the ideas he espouses are so popular.

Here, like elsewhere we find little more than an ill conceived collection of neo-liberal baubels and populist trinkets. At best there is a sentimental distortion of a past that never existed which all too often resembles just plain old chauvinism.

So, what are these populist fallacies then?

The market can solve problems that the state can not.

There is a tendency to look at how messy politics is, how imperfect the way that decisions are made is, how mediocre the results often are and look with envy at how “successful” businesses are at attaining results. This is, of course, a fallacy. Politics take place in a democracy and is conducted in the public arena when compared to businesses which conduct their affairs behind closed doors and are run by hierarchical organizations. Politics and government exists to serve the wants and needs of citizens, business exists to make a profit.

If there is something wrong with the way the Trains are run, why is the logical answer to privatize it? If we need to change the way this service is managed, let’s change it. The reason for it’s existence doesn’t need to and shouldn’t change. It exists to provide a service to the public, not to make money. Add to that there is no example that I am aware of where public transportation was privatized and this led to better service, less problems and ultimately less cost.

Not so, says Lapid, trains should be privatized. Let the market take care of it.

You are all middle class.

I keep on thinking about Monty Python’s the Life of Brian when I hear Lapid talk about the middle class. “You are all individuals”, Brian shouts at the masses proclaiming him the messiah, “we’re all individuals”, they answer. You are all middle class, Lapid seems to say, except for them. Them are the Arabs, the ultra-orthodox and the Plutocrats, leeches the lot of them, living off the sweat and toil of the productive middle class.

What is this all encompassing middle class? My very unscientific definition of the middle class would be those people that can afford to buy an apartment, raise their kids and retire without feeling uncertain that they can pay for all of it. Someone who struggles to do the same is part of the working class. Someone who is unsure if he can feed and clothe his family is poor. Someone who can spend his money frivolously is rich. I am most certainly working class by this definition. Lapid is banking on our tendency to identify up and despise down.

Talking in us and them always makes me uncomfortable. Lapid is suggesting pursuing the divisive, niche politics of them and us while at the same time decrying the divisive, niche politics of others. When talking about Shas and Yahadut HaTorah he calls them both free-loaders and also holds them up as role models for how small political parties can exercise disproportionate power. Talking in us and them disenfranchises the them. Does a society belong less to its poor than it does to its working and middle classes? Is Lapid suggesting a democratic society modeled on Athens, with few citizens serviced by many residents?

This place was once decent (when we were running the show)

The most disturbing sentiment is one which is not specific to Lapid but rather seems to be part of a general malaise. There is a longing for a mythical past when things where more clear cut, people knew their place, when “we” were in power and “they” were not. This is what he alludes to when he says that he wants to change the political system so that small parties can no longer exert power over the coalition. He acts as if there is a form of democratic government where these pressures don’t exist.  The whole point of democratic government in general and parliamentary government in particular is that it forces compromise. It does not allow any single political group to impose their will on the rest. This is a good thing.

Things were not better in Israel when it was being run by a single party. Corruption existed, cronyism was everywhere and whole parts of the population had decisions made for them without being consulted. We don’t live in the past, so why are we seeking out solutions that only partially worked then to solve different problems now? The sixties, which so many of us progressives like to hark back to, was not an era of liberty and social justice but rather an era of great strife as a result of tremendous injustice. Perhaps it is better to look to the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes rather than as a model for our future.

There is this Bertrand Russell quote that I saw on someone’s facebook wall the other day:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, wiser people so full of doubts.”

A lot of people liked this and seemed to identify with the sentiment, many of whom are professed liberals, lefties and progressives. It triggered a long conversation about how easy it is to trigger that inner fascist we all have that longs for order and certainty and disdains the messiness of groping towards an uncertain truth. I surprised myself with how, when I thought about it, this seemed like such a chauvinistic sentiment. Whether he knows it or not, Lapid is flogging very similar wares and banking on people voting for sentimental reasons.

Relatively Speaking

Cultural relativism is just another form of not having to smell the poor. Human rights are universal and should be extended to everyone, not just your allies. The fact that they are universal is what should make our transgressions, occupations, invasions and killing a source of trouble to us. If what your society does wrong, and all of our societies do wrong, does not keep you up at night then you are little more than ignorant, cowardly, fascist or all of the above.

Shorter Showers

One of the many pamphlets I picked up in Zuccotti park was an anarchist essay by Derrick Jensen “Forget Shorter Showers – Why Personal Change Does Not equal Political Change”. I didn’t take to it’s argument then, that change in the personal sphere has negligible effect on the public sphere, but it took what Chris Hedges had to say on liberals talking about the needs and interests of the poor without ever being in danger of meeting the poor for me to understand why not.

Personal change is essential for political change. Political change requires passion, authenticity and an ability to empathize.  As banal as it might seem, it is exactly learning to buy less that awakens us to the unsustainable nature of our consumer society. It is learning to eat better, to make our own food, to know what we are putting in our mouths, that allows us to realize the importance of promoting equal rights to good nutrition. It is precisely through caring for others that we come to understand our short comings as a society in caring for the needy.

If all we do is concentrate on grand ideas, theories and mass political movements in order to affect change, we are not likely to get very far. We need to marry these ideas to practical change on the ground. It is only when enough people stop believing that change is impossible that it starts to take place. It is only when people feel that change will affect them on a personal level that they will invest the emotional capital needed. How can we convince others to affect change if we haven’t made it ourselves? Who will believe is when we speak of hollow theory?

Even though the Arab spring is more about civil liberties and self determination while protests elsewhere are more about the consequences of economic oppression, what sparked and allowed these protests to grow is personal change, personal example which allowed masses of people to realize that they were in the same predicament. One of the reasons why the protest movement has not yet turned into a mass movement in the States is because the majority of people who are struggling are still embarrassed to admit it, still believe that somehow, magically they’ll realize the American dream.

Like others I believe that the watershed in Tunis, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Athens, Madrid and Lisbon came when people no longer felt that they were the only ones that were struggling with the system. This loss of shame at not being able to keep up the farce that everything was ok; that although the economy is tough, you’re keeping your head above water; that although you need to bribe to get ahead, you are managing; that although your neighbor got dragged away by the secret police in the middle of the night, they won’t come for you. This is what is fueling the revolutionary change in governments, in the way so many of us are thinking about the way our world should look. It’s the understanding at a personal level that the status quo simply can no longer be maintained. It is seeing your friends and neighbors struggling, seeing them protesting, defying power, that will move you to join the attempt to reshape our world.

Policies not Personalities

We really should stop looking for a messiah. Part of the reason why our societies look the way they do is because we keep on voting for personalities and not policies. We want to believe that we are voting for a transformative figure and are always disappointed when confronted by their humanity. Despite this, we will continue to project our hopes and desires on political figures.

I think of this as the other week journalist, author, actor, news presenter and all around celebrity, Yair Lapid decided to launch his political career, soon to start his own political party. This was followed by the announcement that Noam Shalit, father of freed IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, will be running in primaries for a seat in the Knesset with the labor party. Special men both, come to solve the special problems of Israel, to save Israeli democracy with their special insights. I don’t know whether to scream or barf at the idea of wasting another entire election cycle on the cult of personality. I just get angry at thought of these guys proving Shalom Hanoch right when he sang, “the public is dumb therefore the public will pay”.

The reason for my opposition to all these new celebrity players in the political game is because they don’t bring anything of value. I do not understand the popularity of either Lapid or Shalit when we know nothing of their political ideas. We have no indication as to their ability to garner political power or their ability to use it to achieve results.

I am not opposed to charisma in politics as long as it is married to a clear, definable ideology. Power for the sake of power is tyranny. A beautiful ideology divorced from the ability to deal with the day to day mud wrestling that is politics is a kind of masturbation. It will never lead to the birth of anything new. To believe things will be improved by having a specific individual in power is to buy into the cult of personality. It cheapens our part in a democracy, as Howard Zinn so aptly described:

All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.

The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture, beyond politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability, obliterating our own selves. But from time to time, Americans reject that idea and rebel.

And still we pine for our Ben-Gurions, Churchills, Kennedys, Begins, Reagans and Rabins; hoping that these new personalities will return us to these false memories of certainty and purpose. When will we reject and rebel and snatch the reins of power out of the hands of those that have been abusing it?

Michael Kordova, Social Media Manager and Online Spokesman for the Israeli Green Movement asks on facebook: “Will the Green Movement wise up and become part of the protest movement? I ask and who answers? Do we posses only ready made solutions or also the leadership that will take these ideas to the people?”  

Ideological parties in Israel, especially when they are socially left leaning, tend to shy away from political ambition in preference for beautiful, untainted ideas. It is not enough to know what needs to be done. In order to get elected you have to convince enough people that you have a burning ambition to see those ideas implemented. Voters understand that the political process crushes most initiatives and ideas; that if there is not a driving passion behind them, working to sell them, ensure their implementation, then they will go the way of the Dodo.

When we shy away from enthusiastically promoting our agenda because it reminds us of other ideological movements that we abhor, then we abandon the political field to them. I prefer parties to be strongly ideological, even if I am strongly opposed to them, as at least it makes the political discourse clear. It actually provides a choice between opposing ideas and not opposing personalities. Most of the parties in the very wide middle are nothing more than a collection of opportunists, celebrities and whores, each seeking to promote their private political ambitions, using whatever ideas are in vogue to get to the top. They are nothing but seat warmers in parliament, to be used by the ruling elite to perpetuate the status quo.

I prefer trying to answer Michael’s question rather than pondering if Lapid or Shalit are the newest messiah.

Practical Occupation

Last month protesters from OWS along with community organizers broke into a home in East New York that had stood empty since being foreclosed in 2008 and turned it over to a woman and her family who had been homeless for the last 10 years. In similar actions in Columbus, Atlanta, San Francisco and Southgate, foreclosed, empty houses are being occupied by Occupy and turned over to those without homes. Evictions, sometimes as soon as 2 months after failing to make a mortgage payment, are being resisted by large crowds making it impossible for police to force people out of their homes. Through this action, OWS is putting its money where its mouth is by highlighting poor communities and how they have been affected by our economic system. It is also exposing some of the central questions we should be considering if we want to rethink how we run our societies.

In order for the movement to grow the coming year it is essential that it proves its relevance in helping to solve problems. The true relevance of OWS in starting a new conversation on how we want to see the future of our societies can only be maintained by not restricting ourselves to pointing out what is wrong but by proposing alternatives and implementing them where possible. Only by testing our ideas can we ascertain if they work. We have nothing to fear from the messy process of trial and error.

The focus on repossessed homes exposes one of the central differences between capitalism and socialism, between private property and community property, between the right of the individual and the right of the community. The question is what is of greater value, the right of an individual to buy an apartment building and leave it empty, for whatever reason, or the right of 20 families to housing at the expense of the individual?

A city belongs to all its inhabitants. When you buy a plot of land in a city that has been zoned for dwellings, do you have the right to not develop that land? The permits and deeds give you the right to make a profit from developing an apartment building that will serve a number of families, it does not give you a right to not build that building.

Finding the correct balance between the rights of individuals as opposed to the rights of a collectives is tough. Within reason, there is much to be said for the concept of private property. It is not difficult to find examples where the tyranny of the masses, or those claiming to speak for the masses, has trampled the rights of individuals. That this can and does happen in collectivist societies should not be used as an excuse to prevent criticism of the opposite extreme.

We are witnessing a tyranny by individuals who have amassed enough wealth and political power to trample the rights and interest of the many in order to serve the privileged few. Besides highlighting these perversions, we need to make sure we spend enough time thinking about how we break these power structures without merely replacing them with equally unbalanced and perverse structures and then to act. The housing crisis, at the heart of the current economic meltdown, is the perfect testing ground to try and rethink the balance between these rights in very practical terms.

Maintaining Indignation

Having spent the last couple of weeks with family visiting for the holidays and entertaining my kids on their winter break, I have felt markedly less angry at the outrages of our plutocracy. This is a good thing, to be reminded how easy it is to go through life oblivious of how the very few are running us into the ground. I was reminded of what Jamie Kilstein from Citizen Radio said, about living in a progressive bubble when you are mainly tuned in to other progressives and their independent media.

I’m still amazed and often at a loss for words when I have to explain what OWS is all about. What they want. Why they are so upset. Why they don’t just get a job. When you think about it, with the reality tv, unbridled consumerism, the cheap, processed crap we keep on stuffing our faces with on top of the usual day to day struggles, it’s no surprise that relatively few that manage to maintain their indignation.

And maintain our indignation we must! They told us we were a spoiled bunch of bored rich kids in New York, while they continued to repossess people’s homes without even holding the deed to the properties. They told us we were a bunch of sushi eating liberals in Tel Aviv while privatizing public lands. They called us lazy, welfare addicts in Athens while pushing austerity on the poor and debt relief on the rich. They call us terrorists in Damascus, when they have already killed more than 5,000 of us.

This will be our challenge in the coming year, to remind everyone why it is unacceptable to cause economic collapse and not be held accountable; why it is unacceptable to make housing, education and a decent wage inaccessible to many while the few take an ever growing share of the GDP; that to continue to expect the current system to supply different results is the definition of insanity.

And if that didn't piss you off, watch some of this, it worked for me...

Some Facts Are More Equal Than Others

The problem is not Fox news which is obviously identified with the GOP establishment but rather the rest of the mainstream media which continues to pretend to be neutral.  It is nothing short of childish to claim that all arguments are equal. To equate faux evenhandedness with good reporting is disingenuous. For make no mistake, Fox news may not be guilty of pretending to be neutral but it also wouldn’t know good reporting if it spat in its face. Good reporting should be about revealing a truth. By denying our biases we are obscuring part of the truth, much in the same way that we obscure the truth when we refuse to hear arguments we think are counter to the narrative we want to believe in.

The other week  I witnessed an interesting twitter exchange between a couple of journalist. One, Joshua Holland, was calling out Naomi Wolf on an unsubstantiated piece she had written claiming a conspiracy by police departments across the US to coordinate violent crackdowns on occupations nationwide.  Two other journalists, Allison Kilkenny and Mike Elk, although initially more or less supportive of Wolf, upon rereading her piece and taking some of Holland’s points into consideration agreed that the piece was off. Holland eventually published a piece dissecting Wolf’s claims and showing them to be not much more than hearsay. As conducive as a nationwide police conspiracy against OWS might be  to the worldviews of Holland, Kilkenny and Elk, for neither of these three hide behind “fair and balanced” reporting to camouflage their biases, none of them seem to want to base such claims on flimsy conspiracy theories.

What followed was troubling if not entirely surprising. Holland shared some of the feedback his readers had been giving to this latest piece. Suffice it to say that I now know what an asshat and a douchecanoe are. Holland got called every kind of traitor for pointing out inconsistencies in a narrative that a lot of his readers, few who seem opposed to the OWS movement, want to believe. This is very troubling.

How can we on the one hand rage at the obvious lies being peddled on Fox or wishy-washy excuses for journalism in much of the rest of the mainstream media and at the same time reject criticism of stories that are not backed up by facts, just because we want to believe those stories? If we become fundamentalist about the narrative of our protest movement; if we prefer to spend our time with the timidly likeminded; if we cry foul when we are confronted by our own misdeeds, then we are no better than those we are trying to displace.

All this reminds me of Animal Farm. All facts are equal but some facts are more equal than others. What these critics of Holland are saying is basically that although you can’t trust the right for twisting the truth to their own needs and desires, it is both acceptable and warranted when it is done in the service of a noble cause. What they don’t seem to realize is that the strength of our argument, the reason that our movement has struck such a chord, the source of what has got the ruling elite lashing out nervously, is based on the fact the we are expressing a truth that despite many and varied attempts is very hard to deny. Holland performs a service to that same cause by policing our use of the truth. Wolf and her supporters mistakenly believe that we can only defeat our opponents by lowering ourselves to their tactics. They are mistaken.

Class Warfare

We take our democracy for granted as much as those in power take their privileges for granted. One of the greatest achievements of the protest movement sweeping the world is that it is exposing the lies and half truths peddled by the power elites and our willingness to lap it all up. It reminds us that rights are never given, but taken. It reminds them that they rule by our assent, which will eventually be rescinded when that privilege is abused. It exposes the lengths that they will go to hold on to power and the means by which they hope to achieve this.

Mitt Romney describes Occupy Wall Street as class warfare. He is not wrong, just that it isn’t the recent protest that started the conflict. It started with Ronald Reagan’s 1981 campaign to destroy organized labor, with further shots being fired by partner Margaret Thatcher during the coal miners’ strike of 1984-85. All of this being just the start of a campaign by conservatives, neo-liberals, free-marketeers and corporate interests to bring back the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20’s.

This campaign has been going on for a very long time, with much success. While we have been busy shopping, expressing ourselves with Nikes, Diesel jeans, gold and platinum credit cards, the right usurped the left. It was on Bill Clinton’s watch that Glass-Steagall was repealed. It was Tony Blair, with his New Labour, who implemented privatization that Thatcher could only have dreamed of. Most of the rest of the developed world followed suit, with the IMF and WTO often encouraging similar moves to free market capitalism amongst those developing nations that came to seek relief.

With the cooption of the entire political machine now exposed, it becomes clear that our Democracy has devolved into little more than a farce. We snicker at despots that claim to receive 98.76% of the popular vote in what they call democratic elections. At the same time we freely choose between candidates that all essentially implement the same policy. Where is the Democracy in that?

Each time the establishment lashes out, whether in New York, California, Egypt or Tel Aviv  it assists in more clearly contrasting the choices we are faced with. It is this conflict that is exposing what is at stake. It is the disobedience of the governed and the establishment’s reaction that is making the scam so blatantly clear. Is it a coincidence that Mayor Bloomberg held a news conference to reveal a foiled terror plot that had been under control for two years, complete with a video of what the plot’s success would have looked like, only days after realizing that he was loosing the public relations battle? Was there no connection between the incessant chatter about the Iranian threat by the Israeli government over the last couple of weeks and the passing of new anti-libel laws, laws against financing of NGO’s, laws on giving politicians more control over the selection of Supreme court justices?

What emboldens those in power to continue using excessive force to deal with these annoying protests is the knowledge that the majority will look at these transgressions and believe that they will never be perpetrated against them. But they always are. What starts with Jews will end with anyone opposing the regime, by way of Homosexuals, Communists and Gypsies. What starts with Muslims will end with privileged white college kids speaking in opposition to the establishment by way of Arabs, Mexicans and the unemployed. As Matt Taibbi so aptly puts it, what is hardest is the transgressing against the first liberty, trampling the rest becomes increasingly easy.

Armed with this knowledge, that we are next; that if we are not now unemployed to allow for greater profitability, we soon may be; that if we are not now being poisoned by yet more exploitation of our natural resources, we soon will be; that when we sympathize with others that have had their freedom curtailed, we know ours are soon to follow. How can we continue to sit at home and wait for someone else to bring change.? Get you down to Zuccotti Park, to Tahrir, to Rothchild boulevard and put your body on the line before they have your soul.

Democracy is for the Uncertain

More often than not, my best thoughts are not my own. This one came to me while reading Mark Martinez book on free market capitalism called “The Myth of the Free Market”. He titled one of the sections “Democracy is for those that are not sure they are right.” This resonated with my thoughts on the importance of pluralism. I had been thinking this though, just never quite so succinctly.

As a pluralist, I am deeply suspicious of fundamentalists of any stripe. I am thoroughly convinced that there are very few things in human experience that encompass only one correct truth. That is not to say that every idea and opinion is of equal validity, far from it. Rather, this means that, especially when you are passionately convinced of the validity of something you’re doing or believe in, it is important to entertain the possibility that you may be wrong. It is a certain skepticism that really gives out beliefs and values their worth. If you hold something to be true, test it, question it. If your belief is correct, it will hold up to scrutiny. If it proves to be false, you can disabuse yourself of the illusion, we all entertain illusions from time to time, and change your perspective.

Not questioning and not allowing questioning by others is the mark of an intellectual coward and someone who, deep down, is aware of the shakiness of their beliefs. Democracy, in my mind, is not meant to achieve a singular way of organizing ourselves as groups. 9 times out of 10, those offering “the way” will lead you to fascism, communist tyranny or some other fundamentalist, totalitarian dictatorship. Rather, it is a system that should force us to recognize our differences, accept that they will continue to exist and reach some kind of compromise that will leave the vast majority only somewhat disappointed.

Only through the recognition and acceptance of our diversity can we truly accept our responsibility towards one another. A society belongs to all of its members, not just to those in power. A healthy economy is the result of the efforts of all its participants and not just those making the most. A democracy does not just belong to those that are in the right but also those that are in the wrong.

Occupy Rothschild, Occupy Wall Street

As originally posted on the Israeli Green Movement blog

This summer I watched with envy as Israelis took back ownership over determining what society will look like. I had just moved to New York and spent countless hours watching streaming video from Israel, often tearful as I realized just how many people shared the ideas and values that I believe are so important. What impressed me most though was the change in the actual conversation being held. People where suddenly talking about how we live together rather than how I get ahead.

Two weeks ago a small group of people started a protest on wall street in New York City called Occupy Wall Street. What started as a few individuals has changed into a few thousands camped out in a park in Manhattan. Once again there are people discussing how they want our society to look, what they think needs to be changed, why we cannot continue going on the way we have up to now. Once again, it’s the act of the conversation that impresses me most. What they want to achieve is clear, an end to the free market economic policies and the corporate dictatorship of our politics.

How to achieve this, on the other hand, is very unclear and the subject of countless, passionate discussions and arguments. This is the beauty of recent protest movements because they signal a change in the way we perceive our problems. We have tried working through the regular channels in order to affect change only to realize that everyone that makes it to power is enamored to the Chicago School of Economics, whether he is Netanyahu, Bush, Livni or Obama. It seems that the time has come to try something else.

No one really knows what this something else is exactly. News media here, just like in Israel this summer, keeps on insisting on getting a clear list of demands and some kind of idea when the protest will end. There cannot be a clear list of demands as what is being asked for is a change in the way we conduct ourselves and not just a change in this policy or the other.

It took conservatives 40 years to break down the welfare state, deregulate the financial industry and establish the consumer society. These protests aren’t going to change that within the space of a couple of months. What they are doing is reminding us that it is us that decide on the character of our society. It is us who allowed the corporate greed, the wholesale privatization of public services and goods, the monetization of everything we do to take place. It is us that will decide to put an end to this. This is our responsibility.