Micah White on the Paradise Papers and then me on HOW TO FIX EVERYTHING.

Continuing on the Occupy themes of this blog that allow me to vet my constant pre-occupation with how are we going to fix everything.

Micah White has just sent an email about the Paradise Papers and I want to put the message out, even though I don't agree with his conclusion:

He starts well:

The fundamental lesson of the Panama and Paradise Papers is twofold. First, the people everywhere, regardless of whether they live in Russia or America, are being oppressed by the same minuscule social circle of wealthy elites who unduly control our governments, corporations, universities and culture.

We now know without a doubt – thanks to the incontrovertible evidence provided by the Panama and Paradise Papers – that there is a global plutocracy who employ the same handful of companies to hide their money and share more in common with each other than with the citizens of their countries. This sets the stage for a global social movement.

Second, and most importantly, these leaks indicate that our earth has bifurcated into two separate and unequal worlds: one inhabited by 200,000 ultra high-net-worth individuals and the other by the 7 billion left behind.

While street protest is losing its effectiveness, there is a force that could terrify these elites: the spectre of a ruthless and globally inescapable class justice.

Unlike in the 99%’s world where youth languish for months and years in jail for allegedly stealing a backpack or $5 worth of candy or a bottle of water, in the world occupied by the 1% getting caught stealing millions from the public through tax evasion might be embarrassing but is rarely prosecuted. That must change.

The ultra-rich live in a different world but they are still stuck on our planet and activists must ensure that there is nowhere to hide.

But here is where I break with him. He concludes:

From this point forward, protesters must frighten the uber-rich with a sophisticated movement to establish a new binding global legal regime dedicated to prosecuting financial crimes against humanity.

The impetus to reorient our protests away from the old model of getting angry in the streets in the hopes of toppling corrupt individuals and toward the new affirmative approach of founding a planetary legal regime, an international criminal court that ruthlessly prosecutes tax evasion as a crime against humanity, could be the greatest gift of the Paradise Papers. And only activists can make it happen.

End Micah.

OK, I disagree on this point.

To me a couple things are obvious. If we are going to transform this inequality of wealth and justice, we need to accept that we may not be able to do it in our lifetimes. Instead here in the darkness we must grow deep roots, deep roots of ideology, of faith, of tradition. At Occupy London I told the General Assembly that here began the work of decades.

We must review all our beliefs of right and wrong and God and community and virtue. At this point we can only take the logs out of our own eyes. We can only change the conversation. A social political consensus that is not imposed by landowners is something that is going to take a long time. We will never bridge the gap between the red and the blue in the United States by getting the other to see that they are wrong. We will get there by seeing what is wrong in ourselves.

I remember laughing on 15 October 2011 at St. Pauls when it became so clear to me that this is a moral revolution. Cue Aristotle because we have got to rethink what we know of what it means to be a good person and how humans can survive in peace. Now is the time to make a philosophy that will save our children. And this idea is starting to seep into the dialogues in the mainstream left. We have Bernie Sanders. We have the New York Times questioning the prevailing internal monologue of the rich: as long as I am a nice person, my wealth is unassailable. We have the Panama and Paradise Papers, in a puff of alliteration.

We have here in the UK a national suicide taking place - Brexit but also the utter and complete incompetence of a government in thrall only to wealth coupled with our despair and inability to change it. How did we let it get this bad? In our deepest despair lies the seed of our answer. I feel like this gives us the opportunity and impetus to look very hard at the cause of the national depression that led to the suicide. This is what I think it is: our institutions do not serve the humans they were created to serve. Governments do not, corporations do not, banks do not, religions do not, economic policy does not - those things serve wealth only. The epidemics of mental health issues do not arise from the inside - it's not some dumb chemical imbalance. The chemical imbalance is caused by inequality of justice. Cure yourself, cure the world.

So as much as I love Micah White- whose book End of Protest should be required reading for every human - rather than jump to transform the legal regime from the top down - something that will never work - why not continue the work we are already doing of looking hard at ourselves. We need to clean house from the roots to the trunk to the branches to the leaves to the blooms. I myself am a recovering misogynist. We start with ourselves. Our past and our future, what serves us and what we really believe in. In the past in both the US and the UK, injustice was addressed by the rule of law. It was specific and local.

I am not interested in scaring anyone with the threat of incarceration - not refugees and not the super rich. In fact the most interesting thing about the super rich is that none of them think they are the super rich. This is because the mentality required to acquire or maintain wealth has a direction - it only looks up. They look at the people who have more and feel that they are wanting. These poor bastards have the smallest Warhol! Or no place at Aspen, just the Vineyard, New York and Connecticut! Honestly. They think they don't have much. At Occupy, we figured out that globally, the 1% is everyone who earns more than £33,000/year. That number is skewed because of the superrich, but here's the thing. We all are surprisingly wealthy compared to the refugee children living in the woods around where the Jungle used to be.

I feel like this will never happen. If countries including the US can't agree on the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for war criminals, there isn't a