Liberal Democrat

Liberal Democrat
Individual Freedom For Everyone

Saturday, November 19, 2011

RT America: The Alyona Show- Kevin Zeese: 'The 99 Percent's Deficit Plan'

Source:Russia Today- Kevin Zeese was one of Occupy Wall Street's founding members.
"RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian state-controlled[1] international television network funded by the federal tax budget of the Russian government.[15][16] It operates pay television channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and Russian.

RT is a brand of TV-Novosti, an "autonomous non-profit organization" founded by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti in April 2005.[10][17] During the economic crisis in December 2008, the Russian government, headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, included ANO "TV-Novosti" on its list of core organizations of strategic importance to Russia.[18][19][20] RT operates as a multilingual service with channels in five languages: the original English-language channel was launched in 2005, the Arabic-language channel in 2007, Spanish in 2009, German in 2014 and French in 2017. RT America (since 2010),[21] RT UK (since 2014) and other regional channels also produce local content. RT is the parent company of the Ruptly video agency,[5][6][7] which owns the Redfish video channel and the Maffick digital media company." 

From Wikipedia 

"Next Wednesday is the deadline for the Congressional Super Committee to finalize its deal on how to find 1.2 trillion dollars minimum in deficit savings. All things considered, including what members of the committee themselves are saying, it looks like it's going to fail. We'll take a look at something that one occupation in the country is offering up. Those camping out at Freedom Plaza have now created their own Deficit Proposal, the 99%'s deficit proposal. Kevin Zeese, an Occupy Washington, DC Oragnizer explains." 

From RT America

It looks like Occupy Wall Street finally has an agenda and it's pretty clear where they are coming from on the political spectrum. Their leadership (if you want to call it that) has put something on the table an agenda that I'm assuming they want to see passed.  

So the OWS deficit reduction plan is about putting the top tax rate back at 91% (which is where it was until 1964) and raising the capital gains tax. And of course cutting defense in half, without laying out where they would make those cuts. (Perhaps because no one in this movement actually understands the defense budget) They'll probably say their cuts will be in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's all borrowed money to begin with, so if we stopped doing that, we would just stop current borrowing, but not actually cutting the deficit. 

The OWS agenda (at least according to Kevin Zeese) is just more traditional social democratic proposals: more infrastructure investment, more co-ops in business, more employee owned businesses. I'm fine with that, just as long as businesses and employees get to make those decisions themselves, instead of Big Government forcing those businesses on to the people. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a left-wing political movement in America called the New-Left, which was made up of self-described Socialists and Communists. Not right-wingers who still lived in the 1950s calling these young political activists Socialists and Communists. And those young activists back then were talking about what left-wing Gen-X and Millennial political activists are talking about today. Nothing new here, but at least OWS finally has a political agenda.