Get a political program and Occupy Main Street

Journalism seems to be as much in love with the Occupy Wall Street protesters as it has been in hate with the Tea Party protesters. But while both groups sense that the country is halfway down the toilet and picking up speed, at least the Tea Party people have recognized that the country still has a political process and that President Obama is in large part responsible for the country’s decline. That is, the Tea Party people have offered some policy prescriptions, right or wrong, and have helped to elect like-minded people to office.By contrast, the Occupy Wall Street people have a list of grievances of no particular coherence beyond their resentment of hard times. They’re against “greed” as if there will be a referendum on it. They seem determined to stay out of politics and to strike righteous poses, ­probably because they can’t bear to acknowledge the responsibility of the Democratic party and the president, a Democrat and nominally a leader of the political left.After all, it is the Obama administration that has given the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the federal regulatory agencies to Wall Street. It was Connecticut’s own Democratic senator, Chris Dodd, who did Wall Street’s bidding on the Senate Banking Committee while receiving millions of dollars in financial industry campaign contributions. Without Dodd, the financial industry’s highest goal, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking, never would have happened. Indeed, far more hostility to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve is being expressed by the Republicans.The people purporting to occupy Wall Street in Hartford are oblivious to the corporate welfare being distributed by Connecticut’s liberal Democratic governor, who recently gave the investment bank UBS $20 million just for promising to keep some of its 3,500 employees in Connecticut for another five years. The justification offered by the governor for the payment to UBS — that the financial industry’s obscenely paid and highly taxed jobs are too valuable to the state to mess with — is precisely the “trickle down” justification offered in defense of plutocracy elsewhere.A glaring failure of the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the political left generally is their forfeiting the tax simplification issue to the plutocracy, as demonstrated by Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain’s grotesque “9-9-9” tax proposal — a flat 9-percent federal tax on income, a reduction in the federal corporation tax to 9 percent, and the imposition of a 9 percent national sales tax. This would destroy progressivity in federal taxation, empowering the rich and oppressing the poor, even as the tax code could be simplified and made fairer by the repeal of exemptions and the taxing of capital gains income at ordinary rather than discounted rates. With the country sinking, it’s plain that the tax discount on capital gains income isn’t spurring investment any more than corporate welfare in Connecticut and elsewhere is. The tax discount is just enriching people with higher incomes, people who already have access to large amounts of investment capital. Taxing capital gains at ordinary income tax rates would simply establish that a dollar earned by a laborer deserves the same respect as a dollar earned through financial legerdemain.Tea Party-supported candidates are everywhere, including some running as challengers in Republican primaries, even as there are no Occupy Wall Street candidates anywhere. Apparently the president aims to become the protesters’ candidate even as he leaves Wall Street in charge of the government.If they would change things rather than just feel righteous, the Occupy Wall Street people should devise a political program and recruit or endorse candidates who plausibly can be said to support it. The campaigns for next year’s presidential and congressional elections are already under way. What needs to be occupied, with practical politics, is not Wall Street but Main Street. Until then politicians will remain comfortable on both sides of the street. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.