The Occupy Handbook

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e505033c-a02f-11e1-88e6-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1vRtr4bKc 

Review by John Gapper

Janet Byrne has assembled a rewarding collection of essays on the Occupy Wall Street movement

Do you remember Occupy Wall Street? Last week, it was hard to do so amid the round-the-clock coverage for Facebook’s initial public offering and the $20bn in paper wealth that Mark Zuckerberg gained. Or the decision by Eduardo Saverin – the allegedly hard-done-by hero of the film The Social Network, to renounce US citizenship to avoid taxes on his own Facebook billions.

It sounds as if he took the tongue-in-cheek advice to the “Upper Ones” from the author Michael Lewis: become more like the wealthy in Greece. “To the member of the Greek Lower 99, a Greek Upper One is as good as invisible. He pays no taxes, lives no place, and bears no relationship to his fellow citizens.”

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ON THIS STORY

• Faith that moved mountains
• The fate of the nation
• Continental drift
• A debate resurrected
• Feasts forward

JOHN GAPPER

• JPMorgan exposes the imperial CEO myth
• Dimon is a whale of a hedge fund manager
• Law firms have struck the limits of partnership
• Need for financial engineering

As Janet Byrne, the editor of this disparate yet rewarding collection of articles, writes, OWS “has the rare distinction of being a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.” The proto-anarchist meeting of like minds in Zuccotti Park aroused both fascination and sympathy.

“The basic message – that the American political order is absolutely and irredeemably corrupt, that both parties have been bought and sold by the wealthiest one per cent of the population, and that if we are to live in any sort of genuinely democratic society, we’re going to have to start from scratch – clearly struck a profound chord,” writes David Graeber, a founder of the movement.

Yet eight months since, OWS has melted away in the public consciousness in the US. By clearing Zuccotti Park in November, the New York authorities excised some of its heart. The medium of the anarchist-style General Assembly, an attempt to live by Athenian democracy in Manhattan, was the message.

The brilliance of OWS was to unite a range of social concerns – the power of corporate interests over politics, the stagnation in median incomes, the emergence of a global super-elite, the crash that ended what Raghuram Rajan calls the “let them eat debt” era, and Wall Street – into one slogan: We are the 99 per cent.

The question of what to do was deferred but was bound, eventually, to recur. This book makes a decent stab at answering it (although it is largely written by a group that is close to, if not in, the one per cent themselves). But nothing in it feels as convincing as the movement itself.

Although many of the social and economic trends against which OWS stood are universal, it focuses on the US and the problem of its sclerotic political system. Both Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, and the author Scott Turow, criticise the Supreme Court’s persistent striking down of any limits on campaign finance.

The court “has figuratively allowed the rich to speak through microphones while the poor can barely whisper,” writes Turow, “ . . . I have never understood how permitting the wealthy so much greater influence over the political process can be squared with the vision of equality on which the country was founded.”

Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose “Volcker rule” is at the heart of a battle between Wall Street and regulators, contributes a short blast against lobbying in Washington: “Can it really be true that our government is for sale? I hope not. But the threat makes it worth occupying K Street.”

To an outsider, it seems obvious that the dominance of money in US politics is pernicious. That problem is not unique to the US. Money and politics are even more intertwined in China, where the relatives of Communist party leaders make millions through connections. But it could in theory be tackled country-by-country.

Many of the trends identified by OWS cross borders, as do the super-wealthy with houses in London, New York and the Caribbean islands. Similarly, banks and corporations threatened with tougher regulations and higher taxes can – and do – threaten to move elsewhere.

As Martin Wolf argues in a wide-ranging essay: “Ours is not the world familiar to Adam Smith more than two centuries ago. Today, markets are global, not local. The dominant businesses are limited liability companies not personal proprietorships or partnerships. Debtors are made bankrupt, not thrown into prison.”

The tethers on the wealthy and successful, in other words, are much weaker than in the past. As hard as campaign finance reform in the US might be, creating the kind of global governance that could respond effectively to this are remote indeed. While some of the rich might agree in principle with OWS, pinning them down is another matter