Author: Protests sign of times

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/article/20111013/NEWS01/710139868#author-protests-sign-of-times

Published Thursday October 13, 2011

By Christopher Burbach
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

The United States is in its second era of plutocracy, and Occupy Wall Street could be an early sign that people are going to demand a "redistribution of power" to individual Americans, said author Barry C. Lynn, the latest Holland Lecture Series speaker.

So could the Tea Party protests, although the two movements advocate different solutions, he said.

"It's great that people are standing up, that they're in the streets registering their anger. It's necessary," Lynn said Wednesday in an interview before his speech at the Holland Performing Arts Center in downtown Omaha. About 1,000 people had requested tickets to the free lecture.

Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., discussed ideas from his recent book, "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction." He also wrote "End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation."

Lynn criticized Occupy Wall Street protesters who simply target corporations and capital. Those are merely tools, he said. But he said international corporations have been allowed to grow too large and too powerful.

FULL story at link.

[lunatica]

1. Historians worth their salt see the cyclical nature of history as it unfolds

Thus the warning that to ignore it means you're doomed to repeat it. But I think there's more to it than that. I think it would be repeated again even if we didn't ignore it because the side that wants to go back to the Gilded Age are deliberately trying to repeat history and are forcing the rest of us to do so too.

The drive of the Right for the last 30 years has been well planned out.