Liberals on the Precipice: Knowing that Neoliberalism has Failed while Pretending that Politics can Fix It

Eduardo Porter has a column every Wednesday on the business page of The New York Times. It is interesting because it records how a liberal is comings to grips with a bankrupt neoliberal economic paradigm. Lately Porter has been jousting with proponents of a universal basic income (UBI).

Today, "For Hillary Clinton, a Risk of Excess Caution in Economic Policy," Porter implores Hillary to go big in addressing the problems of today's economy, which he correctly identifies as the shrinking of the working class:

A big part of the problem is the erosion of America’s working class. It has been hollowed out as trade and technology have done away with most of the well-paid jobs once available to Americans without a college degree, tipping many of them into a service economy of low wages, uncertain hours and little job security.

He likes Clinton's emphasis on rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, but he thinks her proposal to do so is too stingy:

For instance, she is proposing $275 billion in federal infrastructure investment over five years. That is less than 10 percent of what the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates will be needed. 

Mrs. Clinton’s entire tax plan would raise only $1.1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Tax Policy Center, half a percentage point of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Porter then goes on to list some helpful liberal ideas on how to create a more equitable economy:

What about dismissing the deficit scolds who shape the outdated Washington Beltway consensus and borrowing $1 trillion or so to sharply increase the spending on infrastructure, letting states and municipalities select the investments and manage the job?

How about taking advantage of the cheapest oil prices in a very long time to propose a carbon tax? Or how about imposing a progressive wealth tax to tap into the good fortune of 160,000 American families at the very tip of the wealth pyramid, who are on their way to pass $12 trillion to the next generation, much of it untaxed.

The money could be spent on high quality and universal early education, providing the next generation a better shot at a level playing field. It could be spent on training, to provide workers with needed skills, or job search services to help match workers and jobs. These strategies have been successfully employed by other advanced nations but remain a rarity in the United States.

Mrs. Clinton, of course, is not the only candidate indulging in nostalgia. Witness Donald Trump’s bombastic appeal to white working class men uncomfortable in an America where one must dial “1” for English.

Still, she has a rare opportunity. If she wins, she may well come into office with the political wind at her back: a Senate returned to Democratic control and a divided Republican Party with only a tenuous hold on the House. [Some robust magical thinking here.]

Americans have just lived through perhaps the most progressive presidency [!] since the 1960s. President Obama raised tax rates on the rich and expanded health insurance for millions of Americans. Facing stubborn resistance in Congress, he leaned on his executive powers to improve working conditions.

Yet the nation’s enormous inequities just got bigger. The income of the richest 1 percent grew 27 percent from 2009 to 2014. The average gain for everybody else barely exceeded 4 percent. A future projected along these lines does not look promising.

Bernie Sanders talks about a revolution. Mrs. Clinton might want to try to deliver one.

Most liberals (they don't call themselves liberals anymore; if pushed, they call themselves progressives) are where Porter is at. They realize the economic paradigm is malfunctioning for the vast majority of people, but they are still attached to the delusion that the political system can address and solve the problem. It can't.

The idea that Clinton is going to have long coattails in November and sweep the GOP from control of the Senate, or even substantially reduce the Republican majority in the House, is fanciful. No fix is in store. And what will be interesting is the level of allegiance Hillary will enjoy from liberals who remained loyal to Obama even after it became apparent post-2012 election that he was not "the one we were waiting for." I suspect liberal loyalty will be at a minimum.

At least liberals like Porter are able to frame the question, as he did in last week's column on technology-induced unemployment, "Jobs Threatened by Machines: A Once ‘Stupid’ Concern Gains Respect":

Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University has been working with a series of colleagues on an economic model of a world in which robotization both raises economic output and immiserates workers, pushing them out of their jobs. It is not a theoretical impossibility.

“The point for me is that these two scenarios — robots lead to nirvana and hell — can happen side by side,” Professor Sachs told me. “Generally capital wins and all labor can lose. It shows up as a fall in the labor share of national income.”

In that event, preventing a dynastic society of relentlessly growing inequality would require large-scale redistribution. It could even take the form of a universal income paid for with a hefty estate tax — using some of the vast profits accruing to the owners of robots to finance a living for everybody else.

Since most paid human labor would be pointless, the disincentive to work produced by a monthly check would be unimportant. People could devote themselves to unpaid creative affairs.

“Don’t destroy the robots,” Professor Sachs said. But recognize that “not everybody would be better off as a result of market forces. With redistribution everybody could be made better off.”

Many experts are not convinced. For every analysis like this one — forecasting that half of all jobs in the United States will be replaced by new technology — others point out that there is no evidence of humanity’s impending redundancy.

A research paper published last month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development argued that even the occupations most at risk of being replaced by machines contained lots of tasks that were hard to automate, like face-to-face interaction with customers.

My sense is that given a choice between interacting with another human or a computerized machine, consumers will overwhelming opt for the machine. Look at the fate of the corner video store. Streaming home video had a lot to do with the demise of the mom-&-pop neighborhood video rental store, but not so much as the appearance of the Redbox movie kiosks in grocery stores and in front of 7/11s.

We have to give more weight to predictions of 50% job loss due to automation than a pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by faith that robotic efficiencies in the job market will trickle down and create other types of employment.

To this end, Porter concluded his column last week with a Larry Summers anecdote. And who doesn't love a story about the pompous economics guru ex-Harvard president?

Last November, Lawrence H. Summers — a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, a top economic adviser in President Obama’s first term and one of the youngest people to earn tenure on the Harvard faculty — strode up to the podium at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington and made an unlikely admission: Perhaps economists were not always the smartest people in the room.

He reminisced about his undergraduate days at M.I.T. in the 1970s, when the debate over the idea of technological unemployment pitted “smart people,” exemplified by the great economist Robert Solow, and “stupid people,” “exemplified by a bunch of sociologists.”

It was stupid to think technological progress would reduce employment. If technology increased productivity — allowing companies and their workers to make more stuff in less time — people would have more money to spend on more things that would have to be made, creating jobs for other people.

But at some point Mr. Summers experienced an epiphany. “It sort of occurred to me,” he said. “Suppose the stupid people were right. What would it look like?” And what it looked like fits pretty well with what the world looks like today.

For large categories of workers, wages are inadequate. Many are withdrawing from the labor force altogether. In the 1960s, one in 20 men between 25 and 54 were not working. Today it’s three in 20. The population is generally healthier than it was in the 1960s; work is almost uniformly less demanding. Still, more workers are on disability.

“Maybe the stupid people weren’t quite as stupid as I thought they were,” Mr. Summers conceded. “This was at least a serious concern that had to be thought about.”

In a world in which many Americans do not work during large chunks of their lives, we might have to conceive of Social Security and disability much more broadly than we do today.

That, Mr. Summers said, “could start to look like a universal income.”

So this is where smart-set type liberals are now. They are the on the precipice. The economic system is clearly not working for the masses, and it promises to only get worse. Talk about solutions is headed in the right direction, but there is very little acknowledgement that the political system will address the problem in any significant way.

A political revolution is called for, but in the United States a political revolution is not on the horizon. So things are going to continue to get worse.

UBI Referendum in Switzerland + Hollywood Looking Shaky

Switzerland will vote Sunday, June 5 in a referendum on a modest -- $2,500 a month for adults, $625 for minors -- universal basic income (UBI). The UBI is gaining a toehold in public debate now that it is becoming apparent that remunerative, meaningful work for the masses is a thing of the past.

A pro-UBI statement by Daniel Raventos and Julie Wark can can be found in "Basic Income Gathers Steam Across Europe"; a con-UBI pronouncement is available this morning by The Times' Eduardo Porter in "Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty."

Porter, believe it or not, makes some cogent points, foremost is one borrowed from Marxist ontology, that work is how we communicate our being. People need work in order to live meaningful lives. Warehousing people in favelas with access to high-speed Internet sounds more like The Matrix than a post-scarcity Utopia.

Then there is Porter's assessment of the cost:

Its first hurdle is arithmetic. As Robert Greenstein of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it , a check of $10,000 to each of 300 million Americans would cost more than $3 trillion a year.

Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of burden to their current taxes. Cut it by half to $5,000? That wouldn’t even clear the poverty line. And it would still cost as much as the entire federal budget except for Social Security, Medicare, defense and interest payments.

Thinkers on the right solve the how-to-pay-for-it problem simply by defunding everything else the government provides from food stamps to Social Security. That, Mr. Greenstein observes, would actually increase poverty. It would redistribute wealth upward, taking money targeted to the poor and sharing it with everybody, including you and me.

As Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and one-time top economic adviser to President Obama, told me, paying a $5,000 universal basic income to the 250 million nonpoor Americans would cost about $1.3 trillion a year. “It would be hard to finance that in a way that wouldn’t burden the programs that help the poor,” he said.

Raventos and Wark come to the UBI from a completely different direction. They see it not as a replacement for work but as a guaranteed income, a buffer and bargaining aid for the increasingly pauperized average worker. It also helps solve the problem of demand in an economy that is increasingly one of automation.

If the Swiss pass their modest UBI on Sunday that will be a wonderful first step. I am skeptical it will pass. I think citizens of the West are just beginning to get a glimpse of the dystopia barreling their way and are not yet willing to put their shoulders to the paradigm shift wheel.

****

Though sales are up so far this year, the dream machine is beginning to sputter. Brooks Barnes reports in "‘X-Men’ and ‘Looking Glass’ Disappoint at Weekend Box Office" that:

Bombing was “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” which cost Walt Disney Studios $170 million to make. It took in $28.1 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. “We’re obviously frustrated and disappointed,” said Dave Hollis, Disney’s executive vice president for distribution. “Alice in Wonderland” arrived to $127 million in domestic ticket sales in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. 

But the misgivings in Hollywood extend beyond one disappointing weekend, even one as important as Memorial Day. A troubling box office trend started last summer and has only become more pronounced: The riches are not flowing evenly — four of the six major movie factories are struggling — and only expensive event films seem to be drawing crowds, with many general purpose, middle-tier movies being virtually ignored despite aggressive marketing. 

What seems to be succeeding are familiar and liked brands (Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War”), bold interpretations (“Deadpool,” “The Jungle Book”) or movies that are events for a particular audience (“Miracles From Heaven,” “The Angry Birds Movie”). Increasingly lost in the mix are films aimed at older audiences or designed as alternatives to effects-driven spectacles: “The Nice Guys,” “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” “Money Monster,” “Mother’s Day,” “The Finest Hours,” “The Boss,” “How to Be Single,” “Hail, Caesar!”

Studios have long fought through hits and misses. The worry is that audiences — unhappy with rising ticket and concession prices and increasingly bivouacked in their living rooms — seem to be saying that an entire section of studio output is no longer viable in theaters: Unless it’s a must-see movie, we’ll catch it on Netflix.

The superhero blockbuster is all we are now willing to gather together to celebrate. We have a great longing for justice and transcendence. But for the most part we prefer the solitude of our personal big screens.

Trump in Trouble

Given the unrelentingly negative media coverage -- such as this morning's "Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager, Is Charged With Battery" by Maggie Haberman and Michael Grynbaum; or, "Donald Trump, Revoking a Vow, Says He Won’t Support Another G.O.P. Nominee" -- I don't think Trump can survive as a viable general election candidate too much longer.

Basically The New York Times has given over its editorial page to an unending string of Trump attacks. Yesterday it was a David Brooks dissection of Trumpist misogyny, "The Sexual Politics of 2016," paired with a broadside by Roger Cohen, "Trump's New World Disorder," accusing Trump of calling for a nuclear arms race in East Asia.

The goal is to drive up Trump's negatives so high only the most fervent of supporters will back him. Trump will be left only with uneducated, working-class white men. He might win the GOP nomination, but he will not be electable in the general.

This appears to be the establishment strategy du jour. MoveOn is polling its members to see if they want to engage in an extended anti-Trump mobilization.

But good reporting has also been done on the Trump phenomenon. Nicholas Confessore's "How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump," which appeared Monday, is a must-read. The answer to the question of lost voters is lost jobs. Trump was able to get traction by attacking trade and immigration.

Corporate-managed trade policy, which has de-industrialized large swaths of the United States, is emerging as the premiere issue of the 2016 presidential race. The New York Times, always a stalwart on free trade, has attempted to obfuscate the issue with a series of think pieces -- Neil Irwin's "The Trade Deficit Isn’t a Scorecard, and Cutting It Won’t Make America Great Again" and Eduardo Porter's "Nafta May Have Saved Many Autoworkers’ Jobs" -- which acknowledge that jobs might have been lost because of U.S. trade policy but overall the country is stronger.

That might sound good in a corner office in Manhattan, but it makes no sense to most voters. People want jobs, affordable housing and health care, quality public education, efficient transit and well-maintained roads and decent food. Oh, and some green space. That's about it. They don't care about the dollar's hegemony and the rest of the Great Game bullshit.

Don't Bet Against China: This is a Market Correction Not a Financial Crisis

On my way out of town when the global market slide commenced at the end of last week, I was not able to stay abreast of the news coverage. Old friends who I met asked what I thought. Were we heading into another financial crisis? My answer, for what it is worth, was no. People have been predicting a China meltdown for years, and it hasn't happened yet. The Communist Party has been able to centrally manage impressive growth year in and year out for decades; there is no reason to believe that they can't succeed in converting China to a mature, Western-style consumption-based economy.

That being said, something is definitely happening here. Chinese demand for raw materials is slackening, which has an effect on commodity prices worldwide. Then there is the issue of currency. The dollar has run up in value, which prompted a devaluation in the renminbi earlier this month; and prior to that, the yen. Draped on top of all this is the jingoistic Western press which wants to fix blame squarely with China for the stock selloff. (A good example of this today is Eduardo Porter's fabulistic "Political Risks May Foil Economic Reform in China," or Thomas Friedman's shrill "Bonfire of the Assets, With Trump Lighting Matches.")

I think Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang gets it right (see Neil Gough and Chris Buckley, "China Again Cuts Interest Rates as Concerns Mount Over Economy"):

“Currently, global economic trends are opaque and confusing, and market volatility is quite large, and this has had some impact on the Chinese economy,” Mr. Li said, according to a report on Chinese television news. “But fundamentally the overall stability of the Chinese economy has not changed, and positive factors sustaining a turn for the better in the real economy are accumulating.”

China, he added, would be able to fulfill its economic goals for the year. Mr. Li also noted that there would be no continued depreciation of China’s currency, the renminbi, after a sharp devaluation earlier this month. The currency “can maintain fundamental stability at a reasonable and balanced level,” he said.

This point of view -- that China, the world's second largest economy, is fundamentally sound -- is echoed from both poles of the political spectrum. On the one hand, you have Michael Hudson, in the Democracy Now! video at the top of the post, saying that the Chinese are successfully managing the conversion of their economy away from an export-dominated model, and that the stock drop in the U.S. is basically panic selling to get out of the market before the bubble bursts; while on the other hand, you have an op-ed, "False Alarm on a Crisis in China," by Nicholas Lardy, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, in fundamental agreement with contrarian firebrand Hudson -- China's economy is strong; what we are witnessing here is a market correction:

Washington — CHINA, many believe, is in a financial and economic meltdown causing anxiety and panic everywhere. China’s stock market dive first dragged down other emerging markets and has now spread to the United States, slicing trillions of dollars off the value of stocks traded here and in other global markets. Since China is the world’s second largest economy and has growing financial ties around the world, developments there clearly have enormous potential implications for both developed and emerging markets.

But the popular narrative is not well supported by the facts. There is little evidence that China’s economy is slowing significantly from the 7 percent pace reported by the government for the first part of the year. Wage growth is running at about 10 percent annually; the pace of creation of nonagricultural jobs is stronger than in any recent year; both real disposable income and consumption expenditures of Chinese households are growing strongly. It is not the picture of an economy heading for a hard landing. 

Services, not industry, are driving China’s growth, as has been the case for three full years. This is likely to continue since per capita incomes in China are reaching a level where a growing share of spending is on entertainment, travel and other services rather than on goods.

Naysayers question government economic data, continuing to focus on weakness in China’s industrial sector and the extremely slow growth of electric power output. But steel production, for example, is significantly more energy intensive than entertainment, so the demand for electricity has fallen sharply as the structure of the economy has evolved.

Assuming that electric power growth is a good proxy for China’s overall economic expansion is like trying to drive a car by looking in the rearview mirror.

Some economists watching from abroad believe that the country is in the midst of a financial crisis because of the excessive debt burden it incurred in recent years. But that view is even less well supported. After a very modest two-day depreciation earlier this month, the exchange rate of the renminbi has changed little against the dollar for eight consecutive trading days; capital outflows continue at a moderate, very sustainable pace; bank liquidity remains strong. This does not yet look remotely like a financial crisis.

Rather than a financial and economic meltdown, China is experiencing an overdue correction in its equity market. And the connection between China’s equity market and China’s real economy has always been tenuous.

Don't bet against China.

“Capitalists Will Always Be Capitalists" + Neoliberalism and the Incarceration Bonanza + Gregg Shotwell

There was an interesting story yesterday, "Plying Social Media, Chinese Workers Grow Bolder in Exerting Clout," about a partially successful strike in a Taiwanese factory, Yue Yuen, in the Chinese city of Dongguan. Partially successful because:

While Yue Yuen agreed to reimburse pension contributions and increase a monthly living subsidy by $37, the outcome is something of a Pyrrhic victory for its workers. In order to claim the past benefits, employees must pay matching funds, which for many amounts to years of savings they do not have.

“Worker wages are barely enough to feed their families now,” said Wang Kongxia, 38, who has worked at Yue Yuen for 19 years. “A lot of people feel quite helpless.” 

Despite those misgivings, workers say, Chinese authorities and Yue Yuen used subterfuge to force employees back to the assembly lines. According to Ms. Wang, factory management removed the time clocks for four days this week, requiring employees to sign in every two hours or be fired. Supervisors were also asked to photograph each employee. “We didn’t do it,” she said. 

Yue Yuen did not respond to repeated phone calls requesting comment. 

Zhen Fanfei, 35, has gone back to making Adidas midsoles, but he doubts the company will be more respectful of workers’ demands without a major change in the government’s attitude. 

“Capitalists will always be capitalists,” he said.

Eduardo Porter had another good Business Page column this past Wednesday, "In the U.S., Punishment Comes Before the Crimes." The dawn of neoliberal age in the middle 1970s was also the beginning of the incarceration bonanza  in the United States. Prior to this, the U.S. and other industrialized nations had similar rates of incarceration:

Scholars don’t have a great handle on why crime fighting in the United States veered so decidedly toward mass incarceration. But the pivotal moment seems to have occurred four decades ago. 

In 1974, the criminologist Robert Martinson published “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform.” Efforts at rehabilitation, it concluded, were a waste of time. 

“With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism,” he wrote. Standard rehabilitation strategies, he suggested, “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendency for offenders to continue in criminal behavior.” 

Crime was rising in the 1960s and 1970s, alarming the public and increasing the risk to politicians of appearing “soft” on crime. 

The decline in manufacturing employment, once the backbone of many urban economies, wasn’t helping. Later, in the 1980s and ’90s, crack cocaine became a scourge of the nation’s inner cities. 

But as Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael A. Stoll of the University of California, Los Angeles, note in their book “Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?,” what drove up imprisonment rates was not crime but policy. 

If rehabilitation was out of reach, the thinking went, all that was left was to remove criminals from society and, through harsh sentencing, deter future crime. From 1975 through 2002, all 50 states adopted mandatory sentencing laws, specifying minimum sentences. Many also adopted “three strikes” laws to punish recidivists. Judges lost the power to offer shorter sentences. 

And the prison population surged. Four decades ago, the correctional population in the United States was not that dissimilar from the rest of the developed world. Less than 0.2 percent of the American population was in a correctional institution. By 2012, however, the share of Americans behind bars of one sort or another had more than tripled to 0.7 percent. 

Bruce Western of Harvard suggests a specific American motivation, which sprang to some degree from the victories of the civil rights movement. 

“The crime debate was racialized to an important degree,” Professor Western told me. “The anxieties white voters felt were not just about crime but about fundamental social changes going on in American society.”

Today, a little under half the state and federal prison population is black. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that a black boy born in 2001 had a 32.2 percent chance of doing time behind bars. 

Growing inequality, too, appears to have played a role. As Devah Pager of Harvard told me: “There is something to the idea that the more distant the rich become to the poor, the easier it is to impose policies that are more punitive than others.” 

Professor Raphael is wary of linking incarceration with income dynamics. Still, he agrees the trends are suspiciously similar. “In the 1970s, something changes,” he told me. “The increasing concentration of income at the top follows the incarceration rate almost perfectly.”

And a final reference for your Sunday, be sure to check out Gregg Shotwell's absolutely essential "A Practical Solution to an Urgent Need," which appeared in last month's Monthly Review. American organized labor started buckling at the same time as the mass incarceration boom.

Chomsky has that line, "excess of democracy," from one of his books about a Trilateral Commission report on the social upheaval of the 1960s. The report's conclusion was that the world was suffering from an "excess of democracy."

We Need New Political Formations

Today's Economic Scene column by Eduardo Porter, "From Mexico, Some Lessons for Europe," looks at Europe's allegiance to austerity and compares it to Mexico's attempt to deal with its sovereign debt problems in the 1980s. Porter was a college student in Mexico City at the time. 

Tweak a few of the details and Mexico in the 1980s looks a lot like most Southern European countries today. In Mexico’s case, runaway government spending in the 1970s, fueled by high oil prices and greased by foreign debt, threatened to bankrupt the country after the Fed sharply raised interest rates to curb rampant inflation in the United States, increasing Mexico’s interest payments even as oil prices crashed to earth. 

Similarly, money poured into Spain and Greece when investors persuaded themselves that the bonds of all members of the euro zone should be as safe as Germany’s, the region’s most creditworthy country. In Greece, this allowed a government spending binge. In Spain it ignited a housing bubble. Both countries were left with an unbearable burden when the world economy hit a wall, creditors took flight and the money stopped.

In the five-plus years it took me to get a degree (Mexican degrees take longer) the Mexican economy contracted about 2 percent. By the time I got my graduate degree two years later, gross domestic product per person was 8 percent less than it was in 1982. Yet despite the enforced austerity, Mexico’s foreign debt in 1988 still amounted to 56.5 percent of Mexico’s economic output, more than it had six years before. 

This must sound familiar to Europe’s unemployed. If anything it’s far worse there. The Greek economy has shrunk more than a fifth over the last five years. Government debt amounts to about 170 percent of the economy; it was 100 percent when the crisis started. The economies of Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy are smaller, too, than they were five years ago. Their debt burden is heavier. And still, European leaders insist that more of the same must be the solution.

Porter says that Brady Bonds helped solve the Latin America debt crisis, but then he questions the applicability of a similar solution in Europe's case:

What can Europe learn from this experience? Proponents of austerity will probably note that the harsh years planted some of the seeds of Mexico’s recovery. Bankers will remark that Mexico’s absolute debt reduction package was small — much less than the 50 percent or so already granted to Greece. Economists will note that Mexico had a degree of freedom that no member of the euro area has: it could devalue its currency to gain export competitiveness. 

Nonetheless, the Brady plan was a crucial ingredient. It not only reduced Mexico’s interest costs, it also produced a jolt of confidence that pushed down domestic interest rates and buoyed the peso — reducing the burden of foreign debt. It prompted flight capital to return to the country and set off an investment boom.

The cold war, Porter argues, was a critical ingredient in getting the nations to agree to debt restructuring. Leaders in the West were afraid of Mexico tilting socialist.

The only hope of that we have today is for a genuine transformation in our politics. Occupy Wall Street for a month or two in the fall of 2011 fulfilled this hope. Political parties are captured by business-as-usual money; we need a clean sweep. Then, as a result of a police crackdown and the presidential election of 2012, Occupy evaporated seemingly overnight. Now, from what I can tell, our best hope for a political reboot is Italy's Five Star Movement.

Rachel Donadio has a story this morning, "Upstart Party in Italy ‘Occupies’ a Parliament That Is Already Paralyzed," about the continuing gridlock in Rome. The parties can't form a government and soon there will be an election to select a new president:

The pressure is rising because the seven-year term of Italy’s 87-year-old president, Giorgio Napolitano, ends in May, and his replacement must be elected with a two-thirds majority of the same divided Parliament.

Italy’s Constitution forbids a president to dissolve Parliament and call new elections in the final six months of his term. 

The presidency has traditionally been a largely symbolic office, but Mr. Napolitano has become a bulwark against political instability. Last month, he named a committee of 10 politicians, experts and technocrats and asked it to produce a list of issues on which the squabbling parties could find consensus. They are expected to issue their findings this week.

On Tuesday, some of the Five Star Movement lawmakers “occupied” the Senate, meaning they remained in their seats after the day’s session. The group said they would stay until midnight to protest a decision by the presidents of the Lower House and Senate not to form permanent committees until Parliament forms a government. 

They passed the time by reading aloud from a legal code. 

Mr. Grillo, who does not serve in Parliament but runs the Five Star Movement with what critics say is an autocratic hand, accused the two parliamentary leaders of having carried out “a coup” by blocking the creation of committees.

The last paragraph of Donadio's story is not encouraging:

Mr. Bersani [leader of the center-left Democratic Party] has so far failed in his efforts to try to persuade some of the Five Star lawmakers, all of them first-time politicians, to support a center-left coalition. But as time passes, the movement appears to be splintering and may not vote as a bloc.

New political formations are hard to hold together. Grillo is smart to keep the Five Star Movement in motion doing actions like its occupation of the Senate. My experience with the Green Party coming out of the 2000 presidential election is that we did not do enough actions to keep people focused and engaged. We spent our time in a tedious bylaws revision process which lasted months, created division and killed any flame. So far the Five Star Movement seems to be avoiding these mistakes. The best thing for the Five Star Movement would be new elections as soon as possible.