This is the traditional week for columnists to reflect on the year past and make predictions about 2012. I’m not very good at that sort of column.

 What does strike me as significant is how certain events can make us re-evaluate what we thought we knew, what everyone has been saying is true but which no longer seems that way.

 One of those moments came while reporting stories on the Occupy movement in Maine. I talked to numerous people at the Augusta and Portland camps, and realized they didn’t see the world the way most of us do.

 The Occupy message is simple. What unites these citizens of highly diverse backgrounds is that, for far too long, we’ve accepted the idea that large corporations will improve life for all of us, and all we need to do is be good consumers and the rest will take care of itself.

What has happened is that the most prosperous nation on Earth now feels poor, at least when considering its public sector, while the middle class works for diminishing real wages and a new class of super-rich corporate executives garners an astonishing share of the national wealth.

 The facts are by now so obvious that it’s silly to try to deny them. A recent Congressional Budget Office report is one of the clearest statements that we have seriously diverged from the notion that our national good fortune should create shared prosperity, and that Congress’ key role under the Constitution is to “promote the general welfare.”

 I now look at things a little differently. Back in the 1980s, a bitter strike at the International Paper mill in Jay resulted in the firings of hundreds of strikers and their replacement by non-union workers.

At the time, I had some sympathy for the strikers but thought their cause hopeless. Union wages were out of whack, we were told. Globalization means that Americans will have to work for less or be out of a job. Large-scale industry will disappear from Maine and most of the rest of the country.

 Those assertions weren’t entirely wrong, but they were half-truths. The real trouble with Maine’s paper industry was that its corporate owners had stopped investing in their plants years before – an invariably fatal decision in such a capital-intensive industry.

 The Great Northern plant in Millinocket, which a group of New Hampshire investors is again trying to resuscitate, is perhaps the most dramatic example. This is where modern papermaking began, where the “Magic City” appeared out of the woods a century ago. Yet by the 1980s the mill was so outdated, so uncompetitive, that it’s a wonder it lasted another 20 years.

Great Northern tried to convince the state that, to “remain competitive,” it should be allowed to dam the West Branch of the Penobscot River to create hydroelectricity for the plant — in the process turning the Northeast’s premier whitewater stream into something resembling an amusement park. And the company would have gotten the dam had it been willing to maintain employment levels. It wasn’t.

For by that time, the Millinocket mill was already on the way out. It wasn’t unions that started the decline; it was corporate decision-makers who apparently lost faith in the very business they knew best.

 It’s no coincidence today that the most efficient, most modern paper mills in Maine are owned by foreign companies. The SAPPI mills in Westbrook and Skowhegan are owned by the national paper company of South Africa, and Madison Industries is owned by a Scandinavian consortium. Many American corporate executives, sad to say, seemed bent on blaming others –  labor unions and government are the usual targets –  for their own failure to innovate.

So the next time we’re told that America can’t afford to provide the same retirement pensions through Social Security that the last three generations have enjoyed, we need to be more skeptical and ask, “Why not?”

 And when we’re told that the absolutely worst thing that could happen to health care is for the federal government to organize a truly national plan, we need to ask, “Why?” Private corporations have not served us well there either.

 Very few Americans want to junk corporations, and few see the profit motive as inherently evil. But we should be asking whether we have an appropriate balance between public and private resources, and whether repeated demands to cut the federal and state budgets, while continuing to cut taxes, might be just a bit self-serving.

 In 2012, we might think again about what Occupy has been saying.

Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 25 years. He may be reached at drooks@tds.net.