The Real Story Behind The European Mess

Image via WikipediaThe market is sending strong signals.

The Europeans did the economic union thing, and they did the single currency thing. But they thought they all could still be all these various sovereign nations.

And the market is saying no to that.

The economic union and the single currency needed to be followed with a political union. The Europeans needed to work on that years ago. Not attempting a political union was a mistake. And the Europeans are paying a price.

And if they are not going to go for the political union the economic union is going to unravel. The single currency could fall apart.

This storm is major.

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Somewhere To Start

Image by david_shankbone via Flickr(1) A second term for Barack Obama, with a super majority in the Senate and a majority in the House in exchange for total campaign finance reform within the first 100 days of his second term. If that is not delivered, launch a new third political party. This is me saying 2012 is about The Agenda, not Barack Obama.

(2) Wealth Equity Tax of 10% on all corporations with a valuation over a billion dollars.

(3) Nationalize Zuccotti Park.

Jeff Sachs: New York Times: The New Progressive Movement: Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington....... The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old. ...... The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park..... To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all....... Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. .... A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

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Occupy Zuccotti: The Eviction

Image by david_shankbone via Flickr(1) I am not alarmed.
(2) The operation was well done, well executed.
(3) It was the wrong thing to do.
(4) New York City should take pride in the fact that something that started in a small park in this city has spread across the world. Liverpool takes pride in The Beatles.
(5) There will be a regrouping.
(6) The eviction was top news on Google News for an entire day. It probably still is. The Occupy people could not have thought of a better way to spread their message around the country, around the world. An operationally well executed plan was a political defeat, if the purpose was to calm down the Occupy movement.
(7) The movement has to rethink, regroup, and do one better.

(8) It is not within this or any other mayor's power to address the concerns of the movement. The mayor does not have a political solution. The movement is above the mayor's pay scale. The movement is not asking the mayor for the solution. No city official can address.
(9) This movement is out of the box thinking. It is stepping out. It is saying the entire system is dysfunctional. Something fundamental is not working.
(10) The movement can sleep outdoors if it wants to. Why not? The right to peaceful assembly does not end when the sun sets.

(11) The movement has to go through some introspection.
(12) Public acts are important. 200 people in 200 basements hammering away on social media sites could not have had one millionth the impact. Of course Zuccotti Park mattered. That 24/7 character has to be brought back. (Occupy Wall Street Could Legitimately Go Indoors)
(13) Nonviolence is the only option.
(14) My favorite part of the movement so far has been individuals writing out on placards explaining what makes them part of the 99%. That has to be magnified.

(15) Mass actions like literally shutting down Wall Street and crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in ways that disrupt traffic might be great ways to get old media attention and magnify the message, but they go beyond my personal comfort level for now.
(16) But then financial bad behavior on Wall Street over the past decade was not exactly within your comfort level either.
(17) I wish the movement worked harder to achieve more sophisticated levels of organization.
(18) Isolated incidents of possible criminal behavior, or in one case suicide, would be a lame excuse to shut down the movement. There are murders taking place in New York City every day. Should the city be shut down?

(19) Message.
(20) Organization.
(21) The movement will take a few months to take both of those to the next level. The mayor wants debates. There will be debates.

The Occupy movement is not a mirror image of the Tea Party. To say it is to suggest Charlie Rangel is a modern day MLK. The Occupy movement competes with acts by MLK. It is a modern day movement, completely crowd sourced.

Occupy The World
Occupy Wall Street Could Legitimately Go Indoors
Occupy
The Conversation Is The Revolution
Tahrir Square In America

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