TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

For those befuddled about the “Global War on Terror” and the attacks on US embassies/consulates in Libya and Egypt, perhaps this bit of fun from The Onion in 1998 might help:

State Department To Hold Enemy Tryouts Next Week (excerpts below; go to link for full piece)

Taking steps to fill the void that has plagued the American military-industrial complex since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced Tuesday that the U.S. will hold enemy tryouts next week. …

The decision to hold enemy auditions was made during an Oct. 16 meeting at the Pentagon attended by a number of top military-industrial-complex officials, including Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and Lockheed Martin CEO Thomas Reuthven.

“Everyone was of the opinion that an enemy was needed–and fast,” said Reuthven, whose company has laid off 14,000 employees since the end of the Cold War. “Nobody wins when there’s peace.”

General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who was also at the meeting, agreed. “Our profits are down 43 percent from 10 years ago. We sold more tritium hydrogen-bomb ICBM/MIRV triggers in 1988 than in the last six years combined,” he said. “Something had to be done.” …

Speaking to reporters, McDonnell Douglas CEO Richard Klingbell said the State Department should have foreseen the possibility of peace and taken steps to avoid it years ago.

“For decades, we took Soviet aggression and the arms race for granted,” Klingbell said. “We failed to realize that one day it might all come to an end. We failed to sow the seeds of future foreign discord, for our children’s sake. Thankfully, though, we’re finally setting things straight. We’re finally remembering that to make it in this world, you’ve got to have enemies.”

[Earlier posts by me on “defense” issues here:  http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2008/05/27/ironic-success-neocon-venture-influence-wanes-progress-middle-east/ and here: http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/2007/11/22/war-profiteering-quot-parasitic-imperialism-quot/.]

I refer to the very recently-launched “Anti-Corruption Pledge” here, which is the latest project by prolific Larry Lessig, now a Harvard Law prof and head of a corporate reform center there (and whom I have introduced and discussed in a number of preceding posts).

Larry further describes the purpose and motivation of the Pledge at his blog. (I note that I’m strongly in favor of pledges, as I noted in this blog post discussing the Kochs.)

I left the following comment on the discussion page of the wiki that Lessig created for The Anti-Corruption Pledge:

Larry, you aren’t really attacking the chief problem, which the role that STATE-Created limited liability corporations play in centralization and aggrandizement of power in Washington, which then further attracts rent-seeking by increasingly anonymous (who owns and runs these corporations, anyway?) organizations that wish to use a bloated government to receive favorable inside deals and to raise barriers to entry in their respective markets.

Corporations drive the growth of government because their LIMITED LIABILITY aspect means government protects shareholders from liability in the event of tort damage to workers/others/society. Citizens tired of holding the bag then must continually push legislatures and courts for “reform” that perversely helps to entrench the largest firms against newcomers.

Corporations are not simply the “Health of the State”, but they’re created in STATES, which accordingly MUST be a main venue to seek to rein them in. States can stop creating limited liability companies, can deregulate for non-limited liability firms (where owners retain a large tail of risk), etc.

http://tokyotom.freecapitalists.org/?s=limited+liability

Anonymity is not per se bad – the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers were written anonymously – it’s the anonymity afford to those whom have already received important government privileges (viz., limited liability) that renders them and their agents unaccountable that is the problem.

Thus I don’t see that public funding or limiting and requiring transparency of your broadly worded “political expenditures” (contributions? campaign ads?) really address the root problem.

Fortunately, there are 50 states in which to start campaigning for responsibility owned businesses whose owners are NOT protected by governments from the communities in which they operate.

Large, entrenched public companies are already seeing across-the-board declines in profitability and market capitalization (ask Robert Monks); they can be brought down by Schumpeter’s process of “Creative Destruction”.

Christmas fun at YouTube, from Reason.tv!

Remy: Grandma Got Indefinitely Detained (A Very TSA Christmas)

In seasons past, Grandma only had to worry about getting run over by a reindeer. With “Grandma Got Run Over by TSA,” web sensation Remy gets us in the holiday mood with a song about Christmas, Homeland Security, and the joys of civil rights abuses.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1uqrwLmQk:550:0]

On August 29, Tom Woods posted at YouTube a 9-minute video response to an AlterNet.org article “5 Reasons Progressives Should Treat Ron Paul with Extreme Caution.”

Woods’ video, entitled War Is Better Than Ron Paul, Say (Many) Progressives, is below.

Woods has also posted a few “resource pages” with videos and extensive links that respond to various other attacks on Ron Paul’s purported positions:

http://www.tomwoods.com/democrats/

http://www.tomwoods.com/motherjones/

http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/where-to-send-ron-paul-newbies/

For more videos, subscribe to Woods’ YouTube channel, and keep up with hiswriting and other activities via Facebook and Twitter.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH75aZcoMJQ:550:0]

HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig delivered his “Keynote from the Left” at the Conference on the Constitutional Convention on Sept. 24-26, 2011. The conference was co-sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots.

Lessig presented his speech again at Google on November 16, 2011; this is the speech/presentation posted below.

Lessig is the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He co-founded RootStrikers (originally Change Congress (2008) and Fix Congress First!), which aims to reduce the influence of private money in American politics. Lessig is very well known for his work on maintaining an open Internet, but since joining Harvard several years ago has focussed on corruption and politics.

Lessig has joined with a new organization that just launched called United Republic. It is another coalition of people from the right, center, and left tackling the problems of money in politics. 

Lessig is the author of a new book, REPUBLIC, LOST;  How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It. The NYT reiew of his book is here; here is another review at Bloomberg

Lessig’s collection of his speeches is here. His blog is here.

More on the movement to call for an Article V Convention to amend the Constitution is here.

For more, see “How to sober up Washington”—an essay by Lessig and Mark McKinnon on corruption in Washington, voters’ disillusionment, and the need for an Article V convention.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc:550:0]

It might be unfair to judge just from the short clip below (put together by Reason.tv) that’s making the rounds, but it appears to be the case that no one at Cato’s Novermber 15 conference (“Ending the Global War on Drugs“) – law enforcement, politicians, journalists, liberals, conservatives, libertarians and foreign officials, all presenting a litany of damning evidence about the tremendous costs of the “War on Drugs” –  little attention was paid to what should be a sad but very evident fact:

the War on Drugs has been a smash hit for our Federal government, in its 230+ year battle to wrest power from the states, fo the politicians who campaign and parade around on “Law and Order” issues, for a host of government agencies (not the least our CIA and Defense and State Departments) and for, of course, a deep pool of contractors.

How can anyone with any understanding of regulatory capture, moral hazard and “public choice” understandings of the workings of indivuduals’ incentives and institutional dynamics fail to see that, for those benefitting from the steady expansion of the War on Drugs that the need to ramp-up in response to its disastrous consequences are not failures or “bugs”, but “features”?

The erosion of civil liberties after 9/11 that has been justified as necessary to keep us safe during a long “War on Terror” were all already well-underway as a result of our War on Drugs.

But a Police State is not a simple necessity, but something that benefits certain groups of people, at the cost of others.

If we ever hope to rein in policies that are destructive to most of us, we need to focus on naming, blaming, shaming and otherwise standing up to and imposing costs on those who benefit from them.

We used to think that we needed a Constitutional Amendment in order to federally prohibit the use of and trade in alcohol – note that tobacco, pot, cocaine and heroin were all untouched at that time. That the Constitution now provides essentially NO check on the Federal government is a good indication of how far we’ve come from those days,  and leave one wondering — do we now need a Constitutional Amendment not only to overturn the ridiculous and radical Citizens United (states can create “corporations” but not limit their ability to finance elections) decision (Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced such an amendment; Larry Lessig thinks a state-convened amending process is needed), but also to prevent the Federal government from regulating certain parts of the economy?

Clearly the Federal Government and those benefitting from it have no intention to relinquish policies that enhance its power.

Here’s the clip:

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1dG-80D-2E&feature=player_embedded:550:0]

Trust is an essential piece of social capital; difficult to build, easier to lose, but essential to solving collective action problems.

Increasingly, in Japan and elsewhere, people are starting to see that their trust in ‘government’, politiicians, bureaucrats and big business has been misplaced, that these institutions and people have instead been DAMAGING social capital, and that citizens need to hold government more accountable and to take more power back into their own hands. 

I just ran across this interesting essay by Michael Cucek in Al-Jazeera  (December 9, 2011) . Cucek is author of the Shisaku blog on Japanese politics and society. and a Tokyo-based Research Associate of the MIT Center for International Studies.

Excerpts below; emphasis added:

Is Japan cracking up?

Tokyo, Japan – “Is Japan cracking up?” The question seems ludicrous, regarding one of the planet’s most homogenous, stable and violence-free nations. However, in the aftermath of the late-November victories of a regional party in the gubernatorial and mayoral races in Osaka, Japan’s second city, the next steps in Japan’s political evolution may be along regional, not national lines.

The elections of Toru Hashimoto as mayor of Osaka City and Ichiro Matsui as governor of Osaka Prefecture on the Osaka Isshin no Kai (Association for the Renewal of Osaka) ticket were predictable, given the huge proven political drawing power of Hashimoto. A former television personality and a lawyer, Hashimoto had during his time as governor built up a huge following among the voters by taking on targets of public disdain: the prefectural assembly, prefectural civil servants, the governments of the prefecture’s smaller municipalities and the teachers’ unions and the Board of Education.

He hacked at public salaries and reduced municipal spending, racking up the first budget surpluses in years. In the municipal elections of 2010, Osaka Isshin no Kai – a party that Hashimoto assembled at the last minute – won a plurality of seats in the prefectural assembly, shocking the large national parties.

Control of Osaka, however, was not enough for Hashimoto, who has a grandiose plan to transform the prefecture into a metropolitan district such as Tokyo. The capital’s shining image is a huge psychological weight on Osakans, who are defensive about their national and international status. However, the mayors of the prefectures’ cities stood in Hashimoto’s way, the most prominent of which was the mayor of Osaka.

He argued that, in order for the Osaka prefecture to fulfill its destiny as a great world metropolis, the government of the city of Osaka would have to be destroyed. Hashimoto resigned as governor to run for mayor, placing himself in the position of leading the municipal government’s dismantlement from within. Meanwhile, this left the governor’s office open for Ichiro Matsui, the secretary-general of Hashimoto’s party.

On Sunday November 26, voters handed Hashimoto the keys to the mayor’s office, and elected Matsui as governor.

The battle of Osaka, however, was not just between Hashimoto and his main opponent Kunio Hiramatsu, the incumbent mayor of Osaka, a mild-mannered and avuncular former television announcer. The contest was also between Hashimoto and the national parties, particularly the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and the main opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP). The LDP and the New Komeito, the political party of Japan’s largest religious congregation, had supported Hashimoto when he ran for governor in 2008. But soon after his election, Hashimoto turned his back on his former political allies, attacking many of their sacred cows. As for the DPJ, it saw Hashimoto’s populism as a threat to the DPJ’s own reputation as a reformist party.

Decay in public’s trust

So it was that the main political parties worked together to halt the Hashimoto juggernaut. Even the Communist Party of Japan, which never sides with the other parties and always runs one of its own candidates in major elections, did not put up a candidate in Osaka City, in order to increase the chances of victory for the incumbent mayor.

….

The failure of the mainstream traditional parties to elect their candidates, even when cooperating to an unprecedented degree, opens a window onto the decay in the public’s trust in traditional politics. The DPJ and LDP, the two parties that can become parties of government, have seen their support sink to the level where they can each count upon receiving only 20 per cent of the vote. The New Komeito, drawing on the votes of the huge Soka Gakkai religious organisation, can count upon receiving between four and six per cent of the final vote. The other parties are really micro-parties, each with three per cent support or less.

Half the voting public does not consider itself affiliated with any party. It is this floating electorate that Hashimoto and those such as him are targeting.

The election of Hashimoto and Matsui to the main executive posts in Osaka puts Japan’s three main population centres under the control of renegades. The Tokyo Metropolitan District has Ishihara Shintaro, of The Japan that Can Say “No” fame, as its governor. A former member of the LDP, he quit the party and his Diet seat, saying that he was sick of the party’s policies. He struck out on his own, winning the governorship of Tokyo when he saw the traditional parties nominating grey and inoffensive candidates. He recently won his fourth election as governor, after promising he would quit after three terms, deciding to run again after he saw how bad the other candidates were.

In Aiichi Prefecture, the home of Toyota Motors and Japan’s third-largest urban area, the city of Nagoya and its suburbs, independents Hideaki Omura and Takashi Kawamura are governor of Aiichi and mayor of Nagoya, respectively. Kawamura, a former member of the DPJ and a flamboyant buffoon, was in perpetual warfare with his city’s assembly after his election in 2009, as the assembly resisted implementing Kawamura’s reforms, including deep tax cuts. A stalemate lingered until earlier this year, when Kawamura arranged for his own re-election, the election of his ally Omura and the recall of the assembly, all in one swoop

Omura and Kawamura see Hashimoto and his Isshin no Kai colleagues as soulmates. Omura, a former LDP Diet member, has indeed promised he will formally link his supporters to Hashimoto’s.

Rogue politicians

The successes of these rogue regionalist politicians have forced the main political parties to examine what they can learn from them in order to boost their own fortunes. But the traditional parties are finding out that they can’t borrow very much. The emerging regional parties (for example, there is a Hokkaido party, Shinto Daichi) are basically the vehicles of larger-than-life individuals, who combine their own personal fame with a call for re-emphasis on regional identity.

On the subject of governance, they have brought the national discussion on the role of bureaucrats down to the prefectural and municipal level, promising economic improvements from radical reductions in the pay and personnel of local government. Hashimoto, for example, claims there will be great cost savings from eliminating the redundant services currently provided by both Osaka’s municipal and prefectural governments.

Emulating the rogue politician’s slash-and-burn governance style would undermine the patronage and election networks that underpin the support of many of the traditional parties. For the ruling DPJ, which was elected on a platform of radical reform, the rogues are reminders of what the DPJ wishes it could do on the national scale – but the realities of macroeconomics and the lack of a singular, charismatic leader prevent the party from doing so.

…

Hashimoto’s political star has been rising and those of the traditional parties falling, in part because of Osaka’s declining economic importance and vitality. Some 60 per cent of those who supported Hashimoto in the mayoral election said that they did so because they expect him to improve the economic climate of the city – a desire that Hashimoto will be hard-pressed to satisfy.

Despite the difficulties faced by Hashimoto and those like him, the national parties should still be worried. The electorate is clearly shopping around for persons or parties able to deliver on promises, particularly in terms of the performance of the economy, the security of the pension and health systems, and the ending of government waste. In 2009, the majority of the public thought it had found the answer in the DPJ, tossing out the LDP after the party had run Japan for more than 50 years.

The voters have since become disillusioned with their choice, for reasons both fair and unfair. National elections do not have to be held until 2013, giving the major parties some time to align themselves more closely with voters or to find a champion. 

….

[Note: Kiyoshi Kurokawa, one of the co-aothors of the op-ed described below, headed up a recent and criticasl report regarding the Fukushima accident.]

Have the concatenation of the Fukushima meltdows on the heels of the Tohoku earthquaketsunami disaster FINALLY spurred ordinary Japanese to act after nearly three decades of disastrous bungling and irresponsible economic management by the Japanese government? The answer appears to be a modest yes.

The Japan Times ran an interesting article on December 1, by two policy wonks at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Hiromi Murakami, assistant professor and Kiyoshi Kurokawa, M.D., an academic fellow) (emphasis added):

Fukushima crisis fueling the third opening of Japan

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s announcement that Japan would join talks on a Pacific free trade agreement (FTA) triggered a nationwide debate over whether to open Japan’s market.

While this is certainly a useful discussion, the issue facing Japan is far larger. The Fukushima nuclear power plants crisis further exacerbated the problems Japan already had: an aging society, the hollowing out of manufacturing industries, a huge fiscal deficit, a widening income gap, and the sustainability of its governing system.

The fundamental question is thus not one of joining FTAs. Rather it is how we Japanese can carry forward a third “opening” and depart from our aging, dysfunctional system.

The Fukushima disaster has shaken the foundations of our system as it has proven all of its fundamental assumptions false. Fukushima turned Japanese citizens from believers into skeptics of the government.

Deep disappointment in the government has transformed people from apathetic bystanders to proactive citizens, creating innovative financial schemes without relying on the government and committing themselves to energy conservation and reduced dependence on nuclear energy by shifting their priorities and preferences.

Neither the shock of the Lehman bankruptcy, the asset and stock bubble collapses, nor 20 years of stalled economic growth, have had much of an impetus to change, but Fukushima ignited in Japan a great transformation at the grass-roots level. Just as the “Spring” movements have been demanding change in the systems of Arab countries, so civil society has finally started to blossom in Japan. Because Japan’s rather unhealthy one-party-dominated “democracy” has lasted over a half-century, the country is still inexperienced in translating fragmented individual voices into balanced public policies. Thanks to the spread of tools like Twitter and YouTube, and the catalyst of foreign nongovernment organizations, linking these voices may eventually lead to long-overdue domestic reform, altered voting patterns and changes in Japan’s outlook.

Since the Meiji Era, we have had complete confidence in our bureaucratic system and the strong policymaking institution of the “Iron triangle,” backed by strong economic growth. This iron triangle continued to survive until today partly because people continued to trust in bureaucracy and political/social institutions. This myth was completely broken after the Fukushima disaster, which revealed to everyone that there was no functioning system in place to deal with the crises. People watched as politicians produce lists of excuses for not cooperating and bureaucrats fought for jurisdiction while failing to make decisions, terrified of taking risks in such an unprecedented situation.

Instead of relying on the government, people started to act independently through grassroots and civil movements in various parts of Japan. In other words, the third opening, or the great transformation in values and social norms, is finally occurring in Japan.

Led by the governing class of samurai, Japan experienced its first opening during the Meiji Restoration, triggered by the threat posed by Commodore Matthew Perry’s Black Ships. The second opening was led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, when the Allied occupation government initiated reforms and political purges after our disastrous defeat in World War II. While the past two openings were driven by external factors in a top-down fashion, the third opening has been triggered internally by the Fukushima disaster. It is a civil-sector-driven, bottom-up transformation.

While the authorities failed to deliver substantive action, individuals started to act. Many donated money for the first time and participated in voluntary activities; scientists gathered to offer credible information and explanations via Twitter; voluntary individuals in various regional areas monitored radioactivity levels and gathered data through the Internet that they made immediately made public; and parents organized and demanded that the authorities measure ground and food radioactivity levels in kindergartens and schools, which quickly became the norm. Japanese citizens now strongly demand transparency, so that they can judge how to protect themselves.

Energy shortages due to the Fukushima disaster have had a profound impact on individuals’ priorities and lifestyles. Households and corporations achieved 18 percent energy conservation last summer in Tokyo through various efforts. How to better preserve the environment for future generations has now become a part of our thinking. LED lights, expensive household fuel cells and wood-burning stoves are selling surprisingly well; and the demand for solar panels is exceeding supply.

Innovative trials are now taking place that will have even greater effects on a larger social and economic scale. The “2:46 Quakebook,” promptly published online worldwide, established new ways to donate money to Tohoku. Innovative microfinancing schemes have been operating to help small businesses that are desperately in need of cash at a time when traditional financial institutions are reluctant to take risks. The Tomodachi Initiative, a public-private partnership led by the governments of Japan and the United States, whose programs include the fostering of entrepreneurship, is also making an impact.

Fukushima gave us a great opportunity to transform our way of life and recognize that individuals can make difference in the society if they act together. Long-overdue reforms are possible today as established barriers weaken and room for innovation emerges. For its democratic system to truly function, Japan’s infant civil society still needs to learn from other societies by establishing horizontal links in various sectors, including NGOs, researchers and scientists. This is a chance to get globally connected and gather global expertise.

I recently ran across some interesting ancedotes and thoughts on the “Occupy” movement and the response to it from elites by investigative journalist-turned-new media consultant Kirk Cheyfitz. Cheyvitz is CEO and Chief Editorial Officer of Story Worldwide, a new media ad agency he founded in 1999. He is also author of the back-to-basics business leadeship book, Thinking Inside the Box: The 12 Timeless Rules for Managing a Successful Business (2003).

With permission from the author, here is his December 5 piece at Huffington Post (emphasis added):

How Much Does America Really Love Democracy?

As police began wholesale attacks on the Occupy Wall Street protests in early November, I attended a dinner party at “the scene of the crime,” as many Occupy protestors call it — the New York Stock Exchange. Hosted by NYSE and arranged by a group called wf360, the event was billed as a night of conversations around questions beginning with “What if…?”

My 200 fellow dinner guests were mostly senior executives, mostly from the financial industry, mostly (seemingly) Republicans. A lot of what was said, however, sounded little like the empty rhetoric out of Washington or cable news. There was widespread disgust with government paralysis and both political parties. More surprising, there was widespread sympathy for the problems of ordinary Americans and a broad appreciation of a central message of the Occupy movement — the message cable news can’t seem to get — that the US needs to get money out of politics and end corporate control of government.

Reflecting the spirit of the evening, one diner, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, rose to ask, “What if the Occupy Wall Street protestors are our Arab Spring?” He added, “What if they are moving the line between the governing and the governed?”

“Arab Spring” holds special meaning for Dempsey. He has spoken with palpable awe of the popular revolutions rearranging Middle East politics. He credits the downfall of Egypt’s Mubarak to “Facebook and social networking, a leaderless organization that rose up and we call the Arab Spring,” Agence France Presse reports. Speaking about these “viral” uprisings to world military leaders in London in June, he said, “I think our imaginations are just beginning to touch the edges of what it might mean….”

Continuing that theme back home, Dempsey stood in a private dining room of the New York Stock Exchange contemplating the rise of such a “leaderless organization” in America. In public and private conversation, he seemed to sway between his military duty to put down insurrections and his devotion to the idea that America stands for the unquestioned goodness of democracy.

When I think about the last few months in American politics, I think about the clashing themes Dempsey conjures. Our support for democracy, in the abstract, and for the growing democratic protests across the world is counterbalanced by our fear of democracy in action and our official tolerance of police violence in multiple US cities against peaceful protesters. In these and other ways, the Occupy movement confronts America with our contradictions.

Let’s look at a few of those contradictions: We live in an America where the bedrock promise of opportunity for all is contradicted by the widening gap between rich and poor; the promise of democracy is contradicted by the dominance of money and corporate interests in our politics; the promise to support freedom is contradicted by our historic support of repressive dictators like Mubarak and our ambivalence about majority rule in the Middle East; our promise of free speech and free assembly is contradicted by use of rubber bullets, pepper spray, beatings and arrests to put down protesters here at home. This list could go on, but that’s a start.

It is obtuse, I fear, not to interpret recent police violence in the US as a sign of intentional and coordinated opposition to the Occupy movement by official America, whether you call that group the 1%, the Establishment, the ruling class or any other name.

For those fond of obtuseness, please remember that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC she decided to evict her city’s protesters after discussing the matter with 18 mayors on a conference call. Many of these mayors executed similar evictions and mass arrests immediately after that call, all citing what they termed health and safety concerns. That same week, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes reported on a memo in which a large DC lobbying firm proposed that its client, the American Association of Bankers, pony up $850,000 to create “negative narratives” about Occupy and the politicians who support the protests.

Are the rights of the Occupy movement being violated by the American establishment or are police merely enforcing the law? Assuming that the protestors were, in fact, breaking the law, how should our democracy react to non-violent civil disobedience? Isn’t such lawbreaking enshrined in the founding of the nation and the modern American notion of free expression?

When considering these questions, it is important, first, to see the context. At the heart of what’s going on in our politics is something that left and right broadly agree about: We are in a long-standing crisis and our government isn’t doing anything about it.

In case you are in the tiny minority that disagrees with that statement, let’s remember that the middle class has been shrinking for 35 years as the gap between rich and poor has been widening. There are now 100 million Americans living either in poverty or just fractionally above the poverty line while the top 1% of American earners have seen their outsized share of total wages nearly triple and they now control 40% of the country’s total wealth.

Meanwhile, among the other 99%, misery spreads. Seriously delinquent mortgages started rising again in September, up to 4.9% of all mortgages, according to the New York Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. This is roughly half what the rate was at the end of 2009, happily, but still nearly three times the delinquency average for the three decades prior to the crash of 2008. Unemployment, of course, sits at 8.6%, a recent low, after a welcome half-point drop in early December. But for youth it’s double that, for Hispanics it’s more than double and for African-Americans it’s more than triple that. If you are a typical American, you see the majority of America in crisis while the rich keep getting richer and Congress does absolutely nothing to turn things around.

Times are so hard that most Americans now question the country’s longest-running mythical narratives about hope, hard work and social mobility — the bedrock social contract that we call the American dream. Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, in fact, finds that a majority of Americans (54%) now feel the government helps the rich “a great deal,” but only 6% say it helps “people like me.” In short, by a 9-to-1 margin, Americans see the game is rigged against them.

It is in this context that Occupy Wall Street sprang up in Manhattan two months ago with a central message about the essential unfairness of America — the growing disparity between rich and poor; the escalating clash between the rights of flesh-and-blood persons with the expanding rights accorded to money itself and to legal-fiction persons known as corporations. (Harold Myerson recently referred to the Citizens United decision as “one dollar, one vote.”)

My point is simple: the protests are actually about something (or a set of somethings) very seriously wrong with America. The protests are about things that many of us agree deserve our serious attention. The substance of the protestors’ complaints are so serious and widespread, in fact, that they have given rise to the kind of “leaderless organization” that is bringing down governments in other parts of the world; so serious that America’s highest-rankling military leader wonders out loud about the similarities among Cairo, Tripoli and Oakland.

I make this point because we should acknowledge that if the First Amendment was meant to protect any kind of speech at all, it certainly was meant to cover what the Occupy movement is doing: identifying inequities, agitating for redress and dramatizing the need for change. We need to acknowledge that the First Amendment is a safety valve that actually protects the 1% from revolution by allowing for political change.

So I am troubled, to say the least, by official America’s intolerance of free speech, particularly when the speech addresses subjects so central to our expressed national beliefs and so important to our political process. I think we should all be troubled.