David Cay Johnston on Occupy Wall Street

Pay close attention to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York and around the United States, especially if the protests endure through the cold months into the election year spring or if the New York police are ordered to violently end the demonstrations, which would ensure they spread.

The protests show signs of sparking a major change in U.S. politics by creating common ground among people with wildly divergent views. The key to their significance will be whether they foster a wholesale change in political leadership in 2013 or whether Americans return a vast majority of incumbents in both parties at all levels of government.

Occupy Wall Street differs fundamentally from the many demonstrations I have covered over more than four decades. Instead of people with similar specific interests -- anti-war, anti-rape, Tea Partiers -- these demonstrators come with widely varying views, experiences and backgrounds, yet unite around a common theme: bankers are ripping off America.

Two secondary themes also emerge in talking to some of the hundreds of people occupying Zuccotti Park. One is that the super rich own the politicians. The other is that the news media, almost across the board, view events through the eyes of the rich....

Read the rest at David Cay Johnston at Reuters via AlterNet, Occupy Wall Street

David Cay Johnston is an investigative reporter and author writing on economic, legal, and tax issues. He is acquainted with MMT but doesn't always write in paradigm.

Johnston thinks, "The key to their significance will be whether they foster a wholesale change in political leadership in 2013 or whether Americans return a vast majority of incumbents in both parties at all levels of government." I don't think so. I think that it is unlikely there will be major political change in the US as a result of the 2012 general election, since both parties are essentially corrupt.

I think that this kerfuffle going to persist for quite some time and expect it to extend perhaps across the entire decade of the twenty teens. I also expect it to be a global phenomenon that will result in systemic global change of some sort yet to be determined.

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