OWS is getting traction in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death and I began to ponder a connection between the two events. Was the end of the Steve Jobs/Apple "story", meaning its mystique, also the lifting of a veil of complacency and gullibility about what's going on in plain sight around us? What if the Apple story needed to be debunked, stood on its head in the same way that much of our politics and economic struggles need to be?

I want to turn the Apple upside down for a moment. Let's say that Apple is  part of what's wrong with America. Apple stock serves as exhibit #1 in the daily money grubbing of stock market hucksters who appear every day, for example, on CNBC. Apple has $70B in cash that is not being employed in the economy. Only 17% of costs of the iphone are attributed to direct expenditures to U.S. based suppliers and workers. Executive pay is outrageous. This company can be seen as nothing more than having basked in the low level of competition provided by Microsoft. If this company were other than Apple, it would be at the top of a pike along with the the heads of other offenders-- individual, political, and corporate.

The Apple revised story above is by way of illustrating the act of standing something highly sacrosanct to someone else on its head, which is what the posit of the "99%" as the "top" does. But 99% covers a lot ot territory. And the apple cart upside down illustrates how Mr. Blankfein, or any of us, might feel when our sacred cow is placed on the chopping block, not to mention our heads.

When the pyramid is turned upside down, the top 1% is no longer the "top". The same with Gulliver. Or Leif Ericson - mortally wounded in his long boat by hundreds of very angry Inuit in fleets of tiny canoes with miniature bows and arrows. The Norsemen must have thought, "Man, we didn't see that coming. Sure, we needlessly slaughtered some of their villages but what was the big deal?" The big deal was an affront, an outrage and a difference in the perception of power. 

It takes an event like OWS to demonstrate a change in perceptions and begin a process of awakening in much broader reaches across the populace. If OWS continues to awaken people, which I think it will, moral authority will be exerted. Along with moral authority,  physical and mental effort needs to be channeled. I'd like to list five areas which in my opinion need to be thrown upside down and in which perceptions need to be changed, and possibly can be.

Banks and Federal Reserve. The current economic crisis is at heart a banking crisis. The crisis occured because banks were too big to manage, too big to regulate, and too big to fail. The Fed has been complicit. A perception which needs to change is that there is value in "economies of scale" for large banks which outweighs the risks of "too big to fail". I think the implied value of being "large" is facetious. The banks need to be downsized into units small enough to undergo bankruptcy if necessary, and in a staggered manner to prevent systemic bank collapse.

The Fed is an antiquated old boys' club. It is not sophisticated and should not be held in anyone's construct as a sacrosanct institution. It's directors need to be independent of the banks it regulates. The Fed facilitated the bubble, was late in developing tools to limit systemic risk it helped create and even now has no tools to affect rapid economic recovery and job creation. The Fed is a blunt instrument in a world which has changed around it. The Fed can fill up regional distribution centers with gasoline but cannot get the gasoline to the gas stations and get it pumped into vehicles - to use a crude example.

Capital for small businesses and funding for WPA-like employment programs. An infrastructure bank is badly needed. Corporations are sitting on $2T in cash, including Apple's $70B. Corporations themselves need to create an Infrastructure bank. This is not rocket science. It is a matter of perception of how corporate responsibility and responsibility for capital are defined. Apple, as an example, could be the first investor in the infrastructure bank --which bank, in my opinion, is simply a necessary adjunct to a high tech, low employment world. Apple might use its prestige to promote the corollary need for broad employment in useful projects which make for workable communities outside its own.

Taxes, Deficits. There is constant talk about what the proper level of government spending as a %-age of GDP should be. So as long as we're talking about "shoulds", we need to ask what should be the maximum tax rate an individual should pay. My formula is even simpler than Cain's tax plan. I take the number 66%, which represents a kind of threshold people need to exceed when they really get pissed off. Then I subtract from it whatever a person's position is on what the %-age of the budget "should" be. The result is the proper tax rate at the high end. Example: 66% minus 22% (as the proper %-age of GDP) equals 44% as the top tax rate. This formula is self-correcting. The point of the formula is to change the perception that we "should" formulate proper spending without simultaneously formulating proper revenue and tax levels.

Housing. The GSEs do not need to be eliminated, their roles need to be revamped. The single perception change with the biggest possible impact right at the moment is that what the FHFA is doing in its lawsuit against the banks is in the interest of the populace.  That lawsuit is not in the interest of the people who are struggling with mortgage payments and are blocked from refinancing to historic low interest rates. The suit needs to be used as leverage to force reforms and simultaneously enroll banks (they can do this in a downsized mode) in a mammoth refinance effort.The lawsuit is a specific slice of the pie and does not prevent other laudable suits against the banks. So settle this slice in the interest of the people and get on with a revolution in mortgage refinance.

Money in Politics. Reversing Citizens United is a necessary and long term goal. But the thing that could most overturn the atrocities in campaign finance right at this moment in time is to up our own contributions. Obama has close to a million donors, including me. We need to change the perception that our small contributions don't matter. The best counter attack on Citizens United is for 5 million people to give $100 to Obama instead of buying that additonal Apple App. Then write a new law. I'm not holding my breath on a change in the Constitution. I would settle in the near term for total disclosure. I realize I'm drinking my own bath water here which puts me in the same tub with an overpaid executive from Apple or Goldman Sachs. But I simply ask you, what is the realistic alternative to Obama between now and 2016?

There are many things I have excluded in this exercise in which I set out to pick five points for a course correction in our exisitng system. I chose five areas where I think perceptions can and should be changed, enabling political action in the near and middle term.  Also implicit in my five points is at least the outside possibility of bi-partisan support. In the case of the FHFA, it has a degree of independence from the other two branches and might be the perfect target for moral persuasion. The 99% of the population that we now revere contains an awful lot of Republicans.I have obviously excluded from my list such things as immigration, gay marriage, national defense and a host of other grievances. 

I hope that OWS succeeds. It is a moral awakening. It has the possibility of changing perceptions which is the key to fundamental political change. And I hope I have turned a few things upside down.

Onward, the top 99%!