Oh, yeah. The issue was that there were some politics. There was a bit of conversion trying to happen. “Fermented foods–such as beer, wine, and bread–are made with polyploid strains of yeast, which means they contain multiple copies of genes in the genome,” explained lead researcher Yong-Su Jin of the Energy Biosciences Institute in an interview with Phys.org. “Until now, it’s been very difficult to do genetic engineering in polyploid strains because if you altered a gene in one copy of the genome, an unaltered copy would correct the one that had been changed.”
With a tool that acts as a sort of “genome knife,” the researchers are now capable of reducing the elements in wine that causes a hangover (according to Jin, “improper malolactic fermentation”), or to up the amount of resveratrol, a healthy component already present in the drink. In September of 2011 Occupy Wall Street lit a match to a movement. Today that movement is known for what it did and didn’t do. Occupy connected income inequality to political corruption and put both issues at the center of our political debate. What it didn’t do, by design, was provide a blueprint for economic reform or build a more institutional movement to secure it.
There’s little our political system can’t co-opt and Occupy’s choices made its issues easy targets for acquisition. Three and a half years later politicians still speak of income inequality, but not of corruption, and there’s still no blueprint for reform. In 2014 Democrats promised a more populist ‘message’ but then forgot to deliver it. President Obama has some new populist-hued ideas, but they won’t be enacted or even debated while he’s around to partake in the discussion.
Meanwhile the gap between the superrich and the rest of us grows wider. Big banks are even bigger and able again to fob their biggest losses off on us. History’s most extreme Republicans now control all of Congress, where they boldly seek to shred the social contract that gives life support to the poor and the middle class. And while it’s hard to believe politics could get more corrupt, it has, and by a lot.
America now chooses between two radically opposed paths. One leads to a final consolidation of wealth and power by the oligarchs of global capital; the other to a just distribution of prosperity and opportunity. One leads to the ultimate corruption of our democracy; the other to civic revitalization. One direction heads toward the absolute depletion of natural resources, ceaseless global conflicts and a likely environmental catastrophe; the other to economic and environmental sustainability and the possibility of peace.
What is extraordinary about this choice is its starkness, of course, but also that in a democratic society we are making it without benefit of an informed, full-throated debate. This is a debate Occupy was unwilling — and perhaps unable — to bring and that Democrats seem unable to grasp, at least not fully. The choice it frames is not as simple as that between Democrats and Republicans, or even progressives and reactionaries. It’s a choice between a status quo we know all too well and a future we’ve only begun to imagine; between an all devouring yet lifeless leviathan bent on a single goal and its opposite; a political economy that prizes pluralism and human scaled enterprise; that upholds a higher ethics and seeks our moral as well as material wellbeing.
Progressives must do what Occupy and the Democrats did not: conceive a new political agenda for a new political economy. I won’t pretend to describe it all but we can all see a few shards of the vase. Let me first say what it isn’t. I don’t mean the Republicans’ lethal nonsense but the more enlightened policies now on offer from Democrats, mainly President Obama.
In 2008 Obama often said “I’m a market kind of guy.” It’s an assurance all Democrats make — but he really meant it. Obama’s faith in the system led him to three huge errors. One was to apply free market metaphors to things they don’t fit, like health care, public education and environmental regulation. Another was to draw his top economic advisors from Wall Street. The third mistake was to take their advice.
Obama brought to the financial crisis a faith in Wall Street elites and experts in general. Like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, he sees technology and globalization as irresistible forces–Friedman calls globalization a golden straitjacket– to which we can only adapt. He saw the crisis in the abstract, mathematical terms of macroeconomics. Macroeconomic tools are big and blunt; money supply, fiscal policy. An abstract thinker who likes the system isn’t apt to poke around looking for stuff to fix.
Obama thought the crisis arose not from any fundamental market flaw but from speculation and the ebb and flow of the business cycle. He saw but two remedies. One was to curb the excesses and contain the fallout, which is what Dodd/Frank did. The other was to use fiscal and monetary policy to pour mass amounts of free money into the system, which is what he and Fed chief Ben Bernanke did.
It worked as well as it could — and way better than the austerity regimes Republicans are always hawking. It gave us what we now have, an economy that outperforms nearly all other developed nations and a middle class that underperforms the one in Canada. Some people are better off. Unemployment is down. CEO pay rose 37 percent while workers’ wages shrank by 0.6 percent. Never before have average wages fallen as the economy grew. The number of people living in poverty also rose, another first for an economic expansion.
We’ve fixed little even of what we acknowledged was broken in 2009. Banks we called too big to fail are bigger now; the 10 biggest now control over 50 percent of all our financial assets. JPMorgan Chase deposits have grown 29 percent. Small banks, on the other hand, are an endangered species. In 1995 we had over 12, 000 banks. Today there are fewer than 7,000, the fewest since the Great Depression. In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” The findings of three studies, published over the last several years inPerspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become.
In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What percentage of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans? How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have?
The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.
This all might ring a bell. An infographic video of the study went viral and has been watched more than 16 million times.