Tutti A Roma

Some interesting developments are going on in Italy right now. Last night, Giorgio Napolitano was re-elected president:

Giorgio Napolitano, an 87-year-old political veteran who had been planning to embark on a well-earned retirement within weeks, has become the first Italian president to be re-elected to serve a second term, after squabbling and discredited party leaders who had failed to agree on his successor begged him to stay on "in the higher interests of the country".

In an unprecedented move which observers said raised Italy's chances of seeing the formation a broad coalition government, the widely-respected former Communist was re-elected with cross-party backing that included Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Freedom People (PDL) party and the centre-left Democratic party (PD).

Giorgio Napolitano re-elected as Italy's president, prompting relief and protests

Napolitano was one of the Italian leaders responsible for ushering in the recent austerity measures that have threatened to make Italy the latest economic basket case in Europe. Needless to say, he is less popular with ordinary Italians than he is with the folks who run things there.

A few hours ago, Italian comedian turned politician Beppe Grillo sent out this Twitter message:

Twitter message from Beppe Grillo, Apr. 20, 2013, prior to start of march on Rome

Google translate renders the text as this in English:

I'm going to Rome. I will be before the House tonight. We must be millions:

Within hours, people were marching on Rome, as this article illustrates:

Caption: Tutti a Roma, April 20, photo via @_0Marco0_

Dear people,

It’s going down, right now, in Rome.

Seven years ago, the Berlusconi party cried wolf when Giorgio Napolitano was elected president without Berlusconi’s consent. I still remember the headline of his personal newspaper. “As from today, the hammer and the sickle are flying over the presidential palace”, in reference to Napolitano once having been a member of the Italian Communist Party.

Now, Berlusconi has been one of the architects of Napolitano’s re-election, together with Mario Monti and left wing leader Bersani. They hadn’t been able to convince their backbenchers to agree on two other candidates who would guarantee the status quo – and impunity for Berlusconi – so they settled on the 88-year old incumbent president, simply because he hasn’t made trouble for anyone during his first mandate.

The Italian gerontocrats will do everything to cling on to power, and to prevent change from happening.

Tutti a Roma!

As an update to that article, along with a video link make clear, things are just getting started there. Italians are used to dysfunctional government, but if ever there was an example of what the phrase "re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic" implies, it's this political situation.

Since I know almost nothing about Italian politics, I have no idea how this will turn out, but it's at least a hopeful sign that people there are determined to make things change, despite their alleged leaders' inability or unwillingness to have those changes come about.

Quote Of The Day

Usually, quotes of the day here at Slobber And Spittle are statements that I agree with to some degree. I'm sad to say, this isn't one of them. Today's QOTD comes from attorney Wylie Stecklow, who represented two women who were abused by then New York Police Department Captain Christopher McCormack, who has since been promoted to Deputy Inspector:

Lawyer Wylie Stecklow, who represented Corbin and another arrested protester, Robin Wilson, called McCormack’s subsequent promotion “a prime example of failing upward,” which he said “happens too often with the NYPD.”

McCormack is expected to testify at the stop-and-frisk trial in Manhattan federal court about allegations that he was secretly recorded telling a Bronx cop to stop “black males” between 14 and 21 to fight crime in the Mott Haven section.

‘Taped’ cop cost city 78G

I don't think of this as failing upwards. That term, to me, implies that the individual failed to achieve the goals set out for him, but was promoted anyway. It's pretty clear, given the cases Mr. Wylie refers to, including this one, that McCormack did exactly what was expected of him, and was promoted for it. In none of those cases has anyone received more than a mild penalty. In that case, the one I linked to, the police officer in question had a long history of that sort of behavior.

It's hard to see this as anything other than employees fulfilling their responsibilities to the satisfaction of their bosses.

Patriotism

While I was watching a Fourth of July parade today in Burien, Washington, I saw acts of patriotism. One of them was by someone who identified herself as part of Occupy West Seattle, an Occupy movement in the nearby neighborhood of the city of Seattle. She was handing out flyers pointing out what her group thought were problems about the sustainability of our economy. This is the other act:

Image credit: Cujo359

I don't know if the young lady was part of Occupy West Seattle, or some other organization. For all I know, she was part of the local TEA Party. Doesn't matter.

The Fourth of July is a celebration of the signing of the seminal document of this country - the Declaration of Independence. It was a radical act that shaped not only this nation, but the world. Our country was born in rebellion, and it's been in turmoil much of the time since. Ending slavery, bringing about organized labor and the rise of the middle class, trying to bring equality to racial, gender, and religious minorities didn't happen because the leaders of the country just decided to do them one day. They were brought about because ordinary Americans made sure our leaders knew it was in their interests to get them done.

Protesting a perceived injustice is as American as it gets. The day I see an Independence Day parade that doesn't have something like this is the day I know we're no longer fit to call ourselves free.

Saturday Entertainment: Tom Morello

Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello was on Moyers & Company this week, talking about his music and how it relates to his activism. You can watch the embedded video here, or follow the video credit link to the Moyers & Company page, where there's a high definition version available.


Video image credit: Moyers & Company

They discussed the history of protest music, and some of the reasons why it matters:

BILL MOYERS: Tell us about the Wobblies. Why do they--

TOM MORELLO: Sure, sure. Two things that inspire me about the Wobblies is it was a singing union, first of all. And they realized that, in order to organize diverse groups of immigrants who often didn't speak the same language, they would do it through song. And their solidarity came through music.

And Joe Hill, the great poet laureate of the early 20th century, you know, said, "You--" I'm paraphrasing. But--"A pamphlet you'll read once. But a song you can sing again and again and stays in your heart." That's one of the things that I hope that some of my music will do.

And they suggested some very, very radical things before they were even on the plate. One was that people of every ethnicity could join their union. One was that women could have leadership in their union. One was that everyone should vote. One was the everyone should sing their protests. They are things that are now sort of taken for granted but you know, be realistic and demand the impossible.

Full Show: Tom Morello, Troubadour for Justice

Of course, anyone who came of age in the 1960s has heard a lot of protest music. You could say that much of rock and roll back then was a protest of one sort or another, whether it was about politics or just the mores of the time. And yes, long after the pamphlets and the speeches are forgotten, we still remember many of those songs.

If you're a rock fan, or interested in some of the history of the relationship between music and protest in America, you will probably enjoy watching the show.

What's In A Name?

Caption: A graphic from the web site of the German Pirate Party, which captures for me their "technischengeweltshaftlich" (see NOTE 1) take on things.

Image credit: Cropped by Cujo359 from German Pirate Party web site


I ran across this bit of European political news as I was checking in at a tech site I sometimes visit:

Germany's upstart Pirate Party has overtaken the Greens to become the third strongest political grouping in the country, according to a new poll.

The survey by Forsa for broadcaster RTL showed support for the Pirates, whose platform is based on internet freedom and more direct participation in politics, pushing up to 13 percent and outstripping the Greens for the first time.
...
At first dismissed as a passing fad by the established parties, the Pirates followed up their success in Berlin with a strong showing in the state of Saarland last month and now look on track to make it into regional assemblies in two other states -- North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig Holstein -- next month.
...
The Greens, who rose to prominence in the 1980s on a pacifist, anti-nuclear platform, are now struggling to differentiate themselves from the big established parties after CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped her support for nuclear power last year following the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

German Pirate Party overtakes Greens, survey by Forsa shows

In many European countries, it's possible for minor parties to achieve representation if they can capture a certain minimum percentage of the vote. It's been more than a few times I've wished we had that here.

What I found interesting about this was the Reuters article's description of this new party. It sounds like the sort of things the Occupy movements are after here. It also sounds like a better way to organize a society than the sort of top-down approach the major parties favor both there and here. It's also interesting that they have now overtaken the Greens, an established party that has an imitator here in America, too. In America, of course, the Greens have always been politically irrelevant, but there are times I think they don't mind that as much as they ought to.

A quick cruise of their website suggests that Reuter's description of the Pirate Party isn't too far off. Their position statements emphasize the importance of modern electronic communications and their use as a tool for political and other forms of collaboration. Their emphasis, if my rather bad german is to be trusted, is on making as many aspects of it as possible free to the general public, at least, to borrow from American open source software advocates, in the "libre" sense of the word "free".



Well, if that's true, then sign me up.

There was a discussion of this topic at that tech site, and one of the comments I found especially interesting was this one, which responded to the earlier comment about the name of the party:

Every time I see news about these "pirate" parties I keep thinking that using the word "pirate" in the name is not that good an idea.
Sure, we all know pirates (the swashbuckling kind) are cool but I'm pretty sure that's not the associating most people will make.

I agree, but I love the fact that names seem to become less important. It has always been one of the biggest flaws. Everyone associates different things with them and they are nothing more like a historical thing that has nearly nothing to do with reality.

OS News Comment thread

It's fair to say that this is true of our parties. Whatever the Democrats and Republicans once stood for, that distinction ended a long time ago. In a sense, both are republican, since they both run to be elected as our representatives in our various governments. At the same time, neither seem to be all that interested in representing us. Neither party strikes me as the least bit interested in more direct citizen involvement, either. Occupy Oakland's experiences are an excellent example of how Democrats deal with direct action these days. This cartoon sums up their attitude as well as it does Republicans'.

Names for organizations quickly become meaningless in most areas of human endeavor. A catchy name can grab peoples' attention, but after a while, once the instinct most organizations have for self-preservation kicks in, it means very little. Maybe American corporations' habit of changing names every few years isn't such a bad thing, after all.

NOTE 1 Badly mangled psuedo-German for "technician's view of the world".

Cartoon Of The Day

This, and a whole lot of other apt observations on what we see versus what politicians see at Pleated Jeans:

Image credit: Cartoon by Pleated Jeans

Given what I've been reading about New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reaction to the resurgence of Occupy Wall Street, I thought it was especially topical at the moment.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: OWS Posters


Expounding on an earlier statement about how the Occupy movements took months to change national discourse in a way that the Democratic Party hadn't done in years, Lambert Strether notes:

[I]t's not really fair to say that Occupy changed the discourse in months, since Occupy is part of a worldwide movement that took years of patient work to gain critical mass, was fueled by some who gave their lives, and built on successes in Morocco, Egypt, Spain, and the capitol occupations in WI and elsewhere. But dear lord, the D[emocrat]s and their enablers had nothing to do with it, and in fact fought it every step of the way. If the Ds had a single smidge of willingness to do the right thing anywhere in the bloated bodies and corroded souls they drag over the unprotesting earth there wouldn't need to be an Occupy in the first place.

MoveOn weasel and Obama lifer Ilya Sheyman tries to hijack Occupy brand in Illinois Tenth District House run

It's certainly true that some Democratic candidates, Ilya Sheyman being one of them, are trying to capitalize on the Occupy movements. I think it also goes without saying that Lambert's right, and the irony is nearly unbearable. There are probably Democratic candidates running somewhere who are worth supporting, and more who are at least worth voting for, but the supply of either is pretty meager these days. From his background and some of the quotes Lambert highlighted, I doubt that Ilya Sheyman is one of them. He strikes me as a young Barack Obama, minus having done something else for a few years besides politics.

(h/t Joyce Arnold for that Corrente link.)

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Eric Walton/Occupy Together

I love this. Michael Moore, writing in The Nation about Occupy Wall Street:

It’s important to remember, though, that Occupy Wall Street is about occupying Wall Street. The other Occupies that have sprung up around the country are in solidarity, and while they attack the tentacles and the symptoms of the beast that exist locally everywhere, the head can be chopped off only in one place—and that place is in downtown Manhattan, where this movement started and must continue.

Our kids—the heart and soul of this movement—have watched us for years beating our heads against the walls of power, always marching on Washington, sending in checks to the environmental groups, giving up red meat—and what they got from this is that they are the first generation who will now be worse off than their parents. They still love us (which is remarkable when you think of the world we’ve handed them), but they are taking a different path from ours. Let them. The kids are all right. Do they know where their path will lead? Not necessarily—but that’s the beauty of Occupy Wall Street. The mystery of what’s ahead is the lure. Millions want in on that adventure because, deep down, they know they have no choice. And they know that there’s more of them than the men on Wall Street who currently occupy America. They have no choice but to win.

The Purpose of Occupy Wall Street Is to Occupy Wall Street

What I love about it is that if you read this article I wrote months ago:

You don't arrange a protest to deliver a doctoral thesis. You arrange a protest to deliver one simple demand to your rulers: Get it done.

Besides, there is a more specific message, and to anyone who is willing to listen for a moment, it's loud and clear. It's our first "bullet point":

• Stop letting this place suck the life from our country

Phrase that any way you want. Stop the greed. Stop the "I've got mine, the hell with you" attitude. Stop obsessing about taxes when we already pay less than just about any advanced country. Stop the ruthless pursuit of profit, no matter what the cost to the society you live within. Stop the endless control fraud with no one being punished except people who had a friend willing to tip them off.

They're protesting at the black heart of our nation's financial sector - the place where people did their level best to ruin our economy, were bailed out by the government to the tune of trillions of dollars, and gave themselves bonuses while exclaiming about how it's "class warfare" to make them pay more to clean up the mess they made.

The Place Is The Message

It's perfectly clear that many of us knew it was about the place. All the people who were asking what the point of it was didn't have a clue. I suspect most still don't, because when you don't want to understand something it's a whole lot less likely that you will. But that's what this lovely Darwinian world that is being handed to us by our rulers is really about: Adapt or perish. Our kids will adapt. They're strong, and I'm amazed how smart they are given how little we taught them.

They'll do all right. The useful idiots who can't figure it out will be gone soon enough.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Occupy Together

Rose Aguilar writes in a column at Al Jazeera, on the U.S. Catholic Bishops' determination to battle the recent decision by the Obama Administration to require health insurance policies to cover contraceptives with no co-pay charge:

Catholic bishops in the US want every single act of sexual intercourse to result in the birth of a child, but once that child is born, they are on their own, especially if their priest abuses them.

The birth control bishops

She also wrote something else in that column that I found impossible to believe - none of the witnesses called have any medical background. All were clergy of some sort. Of course, all were men.

Of course.

There was no one there to discuss the relative merits of contraception versus abortion, other than some people who have little or no personal experience with these things. There were no witnesses with a secular point of view, of any sort, like for instance, the cost and disadvantages of unwanted childbirth. Even in a hearing ostensibly about religious freedom in America, there's reason to ask the people who are most affected by those freedoms what their opinions might be. For instance, they might ask them if it's freedom of religion when it's not religious institutions that are affected, but, rather, the businesses those churches own.

At least, there would be in a democracy.

This is how things are decided, apparently. It's why there are Occupy movements. The people most profoundly affected by the decisions government makes are almost never the ones whose opinions matter.

Afterword: Why did I choose that particular Occupy poster to lead this article? Simply, it's because this is really about power. The Catholic church has the power to swing elections. If they were some little splinter sect out in the middle of nowhere and they held these views, there would be no one paying attention. The religions represented at that hearing have lots of money, and in the new post-Citizens United world, they can spend as much as they want making the faithful believe anyone who supports contraception is the anti-Christ.

Quote Of The Day

Regarding Twitter's master plan to censor messages that governments want them to censor, Ryan J. Davis writes:

It's great @Twitter is gonna start censoring. All those "let's bring down our brutal dictator" tweets were clogging up my Lady Gaga feed.

Twitter Message by @RyanNewYork

Yes, Twitter really is planning to do this. This is one of many reasons I mistrust large Internet services to do right by their users - they have to make a profit, and sometimes what users do with their services interfere with that.

For movements like Occupy to prosper, they are going to have to figure out how to provide their own communications, at least in certain instances. Any for-profit corporation can be gotten to, given enough time.

UPDATE: For a brief moment, this article identified the author of the Twitter message as "Ryan J. Adams". That mistake is now corrected.

Speaking of mistakes, though, what happened with this message? I wrote that article yesterday, but the announcement just appeared on Twitter half an hour ago.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: OWS/Tumblr

Alternet's Lynn Parramore, discussing Newt Gingrich's bona fides as a populist, in an article on the effect that Republican politics and the Occupy movements are having on each other:

The worst thing about Newt is what political economist Thomas Ferguson pointed out in a paper for the Institute for New Economic Thinking – namely that Newt was the key architect of the current pay-to-play system in Congress. More than anyone else, he is responsible for building the system in which members of Congress who bring in the most cash get the plum and powerful committee appointments. It was not always thus. Before Newt and his buddy Tom Delay saw the potential for pay-to-play, committee appointments came through seniority. But after Newt & Co. came to power, influence in Congress was nakedly up for sale. Today, both parties actually post prices for key positions, as Ferguson noted in the Financial Times.

Will the Mitt/Newt Slugfest Boost the Occupy Movement?

[links from original]

Not only has this system been a powerful source of corruption that now affects both parties, it has also been a hammer that party leaders can hold over the heads of dissenting members. It's a rare individual who can stand on his own and continue to win office without the support of his party, and the system virtually guarantees that those who don't play ball will be out on their ears.

I don't know if all this hypocritical, and largely fact-free, debating of populist economic concerns is likely to mean much to the Occupy movements. My own perception is that there are just as many people on the Right as on the Left who are looking for easy solutions, and aren't terribly interested in being told the ugly truth of things. It's far better to tell conservatives that it's the fault of immigrants, the Muslims, or the Mormons that we're in the state we're in. It's been far too easy to tell progressives that if we just find candidates who aren't "divisive", everything will be fine.

Still, Occupy movements are having an effect on the debates, and will continue to as long as they can find ways to get their message across. Changing the nature of the debate is a good first step. The next is to make sure it's at least somewhat honest.

If the recent Republican debates are any example, that's going to be a lot harder.

The Candle Or The Dark?

Image credit: Occupy Wall Street

Apparently, today is a day to light candles:

January 15th, 2012 @ 7:00pm in Each Time Zone Globally

Via J15global.com: On his birthday and in the spirit of Dr. King’s vision for racial and economic equality, peace, and non-violence, we are holding candlelight vigils to unite our world in a global movement for systemic change.

The Vigil for Unity is followed by Occupy the Dream on January 16, and the first day of Occupy Congress actions, on January 17.

Wherever we may be, whether in our homes, in city squares, online, Occupies, or at work, we lift a beautiful message high above the political dialogue. We light the dream of a more equitable world in our hearts. We can overcome!

Dr. King said ‘A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and say: ‘This is not just.’

Occupy Wall Street announcement about Jan. 15 vigil

I'm not much into candle burning, but I love the expression "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness", so consider this a virtual candle in our virtual world.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

For anyone who is active in politics, or wants to understand how activism works, one of Dr. King's most important legacies may have been the Letter From A Birmingham Jail (see UPDATE 2 below). While being held for his actions in a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, King used the time to compose a letter that explained the reasons he and his compatriots used demonstrations and civil disobedience to protest the injustices that African Americans faced in the South of those days. One of the paragraphs that stands out for me, as if it were calling directly from that time to this is:

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]

We, too, live in a time of monologue. Our press is largely controlled by the people who don't want things to change, who like them fine the way they are. Until the Occupy movements changed the discussion, we seldom even saw discussions of the widening gap between the upper few percent of our population and the rest of us. As first the poor and lower middle class, and now the rest of the middle class have lost ground, we have been told by the people who are pleased to call themselves our leaders, that everything is just fine, and we should just shut the hell up.

Caption: Where did all the economic growth end up? Into the hands of the richest people in the country, mostly.

Image credit: Economic Policy Institute

What Dr. King was saying, in essence, was what I was saying:

You don't arrange a protest to deliver a doctoral thesis. You arrange a protest to deliver one simple demand to your rulers: Get it done.

The Place Is The Message

Demonstrations happen because there is no talk, or nothing but talk. All we have gotten the last few years, when we haven't gotten screwed, is talk. And that talk has been a monologue.

Absolutely nothing has changed since I wrote this on MLK Day a year ago:

Caption: Soldiers from Company A, 3-187th Infantry watch from an observation post as bombs are dropped on insurgent positions during Operation Iron Blade II in Ghazni Province Nov. 28.

Image credit: Lt. Col. David Fivecoat/U.S. Army

In a time when we have no real enemies worthy of the name, we've become obsessed with defense, spending far more than any other advanced country and getting even less. We pay for these priorities in lost jobs and diminished prospects. After the Second World War, we were the world's leader in physics. Now, thanks to our neglect, coupled with Europe's interest, they appear to be regaining the lead they had in the early part of the Twentieth Century. From going to the Moon in a decade, our space program can't even service the space station it built. The next generation of boosters has been canceled. Our infrastructure inadequate and crumbling thanks to decades of neglect. We sacrificed all this, not to mention our health care and retirement, to be better at destroying someone else's country than anyone else is.

Dr. King's Nightmare

That's why there are demonstrations, because when we talk, we're not listened to. As another African American activist, Frederick Douglass, once wrote:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Until demands are made, until there's a clear implication that the next step will be even more unpleasant for those in power if things don't change, nothing will change. That's as clear now as when Douglass was trying to free his people from the slave owners, or when Dr. King was battling white racists and their enablers a century later.

As Jackson Browne would say, no one rides for free.

We're headed for a dark time. With income inequality getting worse, there is no way that the power shift can be halted without a lot of, to use Dr. King's word, "tension". How dark it will be, and how it ends, will be largely dependent on how insistently we demand what we need, and what we do when we don't get it.

That's what Dr. King taught us.

UPDATE: Slight edit to remove a sentence that I didn't complete...

UPDATE 2 (Jan. 16): The University of Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute has an annotated version of MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail online. If you're not too aware of the history of the civil rights movement (and who below the age of 60 is these days?), it's a good way to read the letter.

And So This Is Christmas...

Well, it's Christmas. For those of you who celebrate it, I hope it's a good one. For the rest of us, for whom it's a somewhat normal day, there's not as much to do. Thankfully, some folks have been beavering away on the Internet, providing new content.

First, let's listen to one of my favorite Christmas songs:

John Lennon - Happy Christmas (war Is Over) - Click here for more Metacafe videos

Just one year, I'd like to not have to think "Yes, I wish that's the way it was" when I listen to this song. Maybe next year. More likely about when Hell freezes over.

Now, let's start with a comment left yesterday by stanchaz:

You don’t need to be religious to understand -and embrace- the idea that "Whatsoever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." But many of the 1%, in blind greed and endless schemes, have forgotten this. They have closed their eyes to what the word "society" should really mean, what it can mean. But due to Occupy Wall Street, we are finally talking less about CUTS and more about BLEEDING.

Quote Of The Day, Dec. 23, 2011 (comment by stanchaz)

Go to the link to read the rest. It's a worthy rant. As I've often explained, to me the major religions are better as Rorschach tests than as inspiration - what people get from them tells you more about them than it does the religions themselves. It does amaze me though, as I've mentioned before, that a religion whose founder was executed for picking a fight with moneychangers in a temple has managed to accumulate so many greedy and feckless adherents.

Image credit: via Art Pronin/TM.com

Over at Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Oscar, James Ala has some thoughts on the ease with which the American upper class use the term "class warfare" any time we expect them to share more of the burden of running our society:

I have no patience with the meme, as I hope you have gathered. It is an over-the-top bit of hysterical heavy breathing. No one in the US is rallying the lower orders to fetch their weapons and torches to burn down the residences of the new Robber Barons. No one is advocating that the 0.1%, hyper-wealthy billionaires be chopped up into cat kibble. No one is advocating that the women-folk of this subset be raped, or that the even smaller subset of pregnant hyper-wealthy be cut open, or their infants be beaten to death before their mother’s eyes. Wall Street was temporary occupied, it was never burned down to its foundations.

I wonder when or how the super-wealthy became so thin-skinned. When did they come around to the notion that they should never, ever, hear a discouraging word? What weird form of egomania makes them need to hear how marvelous, great, wonderful, munificent, and super sexy they are? When did they become so thin skinned?

On Class Warfare

I think the trivial use of this term happens for a couple of reasons. The first is that this generation of upper-crust types has been so insulated from the world the rest of us live in, and so protected from any real danger, that they have absolutely no idea what a real war is. The other reason is that it's a cheap propaganda phrasing, and there are plenty of folks who think thoughts no longer than what you can print on a bumper sticker. They'll latch onto that phrase and repeat it endlessly.

Of course, the real irony is that it's the rest of us who are dying in this "class war", not they. We die because we can't get medical treatment, because we live in the pollution they cause and successfully lobby the government not to be forced to clean up, and when they cut our safety net programs to pay for their using the financial markets as a slot machine.

So, I guess maybe for us it actually is a war. If that's the case, we're definitely losing.

Finally, in keeping with our theme of (lack of) Christmas generosity among those most able to show some, here's a quote from Art Pronin at TM.com:

Recently Damon also said this great bit on paying higher taxes. Note the ending line there:

“The wealthy are paying less than they paid at any time else, certainly in my lifetime, and probably in the last century,” Damon told a reporter at the same event. “I don’t know what we were paying in the Roaring ’20s; it’s criminal that so little is asked of people who are getting so much. I don’t mind paying more. I really don’t mind paying more taxes. I’d rather pay for taxes than cut ‘Reading is Fundamental’ or Head Start or some of these programs that are really helping kids. This is the greatest country in the world; is it really that much worse if you pay 6% more in taxes? Give me a break. Look at what you get for it: you get to be American.”

Paying higher taxes to pay for better education, Pell grants and access to the American Dream. What a concept!

Progressive Notes: BREAKING NEWS ON SC VOTER ID LAW/DOJ, A Wyden-Ryan Take Down, Damon Strikes Again, Taibbi on OWS Pushing Pols, and Other Doings

Yes, what an idea. Making our economy more productive by educating people better - that's an idea most of us used to buy into. It's not just about being generous, it's about making your own world better. Which I think is what that Christ guy was talking about...

Merry Christmas, or happy Sunday, whichever it is for you.

Only In America

Image credit: Various artists

Well, maybe other countries could have come up with this sort of thing, but it's really just our style:

A new Occupy Wall Street-related art project: the "Police Brutality Coloring Book." The copy states explicitly that it's "not for kids." The description continues:

"This is an art project/zine. 46 contemporary artists have contributed drawings in response to the recent wave of excessive force used by the police in U.S. cities."

The list of artists includes big names like Shepard Fairey (who caught some flak for his Occupy poster and did the art for Time Magazine's Person of the Year issue for "The Protester") and Quel Beast.

Shepard Fairey is also famous for this poster:

Image credit: Shepard Fairey/Wikipedia


Which, with the Obama Administration's efforts to coordinate all the beatdowns of Occupy movements lately, is something I find to be rich in irony. Apparently, so does Shepard Fairey, as his defense of a more recent variation on that theme has shown:

Caption: The version of Shepard Fairey's "Occupy Hope" poster that some Occupy members were complaining about. Fairey later altered the poster, as can be seen at the quote credit link.

I have zero contact with the Obama campaign. I am disappointed with many aspects of Obama's presidency and I am far from an unconditional Obama supporter. The round logo I made is not Obama's O logo. His O uses curved stripes and a white sun. The stripes in my 99% logo are straight. I saw my 99% logo as subverting his logo more than amplifying it. I wanted a patriotic frame for the 99% logo to assert that the Occupy movement IS patriotic. The use of the word HOPE is more saying that Occupy is the greatest Hope we now have, but it would be great if Occupy pushed Obama in the right direction.

Shepard Fairey Changes Unpopular 'Occupy Hope' Poster Under Pressure

Speaking of irony, what other country can honestly say that they've put so much money and effort into making police forces so well armed and so isolated from the people they do the things that are no doubt described in this book, and can also create a group of artists who are willing to chronicle the end product of that process in all its ugly detail?

I can't really recommend this book, because I haven't seen any of the art, even after poking around on the Internet for awhile. I can, however, observe that there is plenty of material out there, a fact that many of us have been documenting for some time.

Fearless Predictions For 2012

Caption: "Answer unclear".

Image credit: Mashup of this image and this one by Cujo359




I hate to make predictions, since I hate having to grind my teeth months later when I see what I wrote. Nevertheless, since I published these in a comment elsewhere, here are mine for 2012:

• Occupy will continue to change tactics. Realizing that their nonstop protests aren’t getting it done, they’ll make more efforts to cost Goldman Sachs, et. al., real money in hopes that they’ll change their ways. I think those predicting that there will be violence at one or both of the party conventions next year are accurate. What I will add to those predictions is that the violence will be mostly, if not entirely, perpetrated by police.
• The Republicans will nominate someone “safe”, like Mitt Romney, for President. He will win. Between progressives being so unconcerned with Obama’s re-election, and times getting even worse, he won’t stand a chance.
• Times will get worse. The stimulus has run out, and there’s nothing to replace it. Government will respond by doing the same things that got us here – more austerity, and less regulation.

Of these predictions, I think only the last one needs any elaboration. The first is pretty vague, but the events it describes are subject to rather vague forces, so I don't think one can do much better.

The economy will continue to get worse. By that, I mean that it will grow at a rate that is less than that which will create net jobs beyond what is needed for an expanding population. That typically means something less than two-ish percent growth. No, you don't get to say I was wrong if growth is 2.1 percent. You get to say I was wrong if there were more than a million net jobs added next year. That means a million beyond labor force growth, which I would conservatively define as:

12 months * 90,000 jobs/month = 1.08 million jobs.

So, if the numbers of employed grow by more than two million jobs, I was wrong. I say that this is a conservative estimate, because it's the smallest number of new laborers per month that I've seen any credible economists use. I think that number should be higher, but we'll be conservative here.

We'll be lucky if there's any net growth at all. Nothing that either our government or Europe's various governments are doing instill any confidence at all that things will get better. Austerity will continue until the economy improves, which is to say that the economy will not improve.

So there, fearless predictions. For the most part, this is obvious. The only risky one is predicting that Obama won't be re-elected, but I'd give that one at least two to one odds of being right.

Saturday Entertainment: The Game That Moves As You Play

Based on the subject matter, you'd never know that this song was composed thirty years ago:

Drink at the Bar Nothing bar anything
But the bottom step of the ladder
It keeps gettin' higher and higher

Dawn comes soon enough for the working class.
It keeps getting sooner or later.
This is the game that moves as you play.

X: The Have Nots

The song's lyrics make it clear that the things Occupy has been protesting, and the things that a whole lot of us have been pointing out in the last few years, aren't recent phenomena. The gap between the rich and the poor started getting wider back in the 1970s, and it was folks, as the composer put it, at the bottom of the ladder who were the first to notice.

This is one of the more well-known songs of a Los Angeles punk rock group called X. According to their website, they'll be doing a tour of the Southwest soon.

Progressive Idiocy: The Power Of Inconvenience

Image credit: Occupy Together



A few years ago, the transit workers in New York City went on strike over declining benefits. Needless to say, this inconvenienced a lot of people, most of whom had little or no power to affect things. But it worked because it also inconvenienced the people who really count. That was the only way things were going to change.

Anyone who says that they shouldn’t have gone on strike, and there were quite a few, were saying that the people in those unions should accept the lower benefits that were offered, so that they could go on about their own lives unaffected.

So it is with some "progressives" who complain about the tactics of the various Occupy movements. Actually, that's a rather broad claim. There's been senseless destruction and some criminal activity. That's not helpful. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the disruption, inconvenience, and other costs of having a bunch of people just suddenly show up somewhere that wasn't meant to handle them.

Most of us already have all the trouble in our lives we can handle, so when things like this happen, it’s natural to resent it. There will always be people among them who are going to claim,without ever offering viable alternatives that haven’t already been tried and shown to fail, that there were other things they can do. Someone yesterday thought he was justifying such a claim by passing along an article about how K Street lobbyists said they weren’t inconvenienced by what’s going on in DC. Seriously? Why in the world would I expect a group of people who make their living as lying hypocrites would be telling the truth all of a sudden? Of course they’ll say that. They want people to think that this is having no effect on them. It’s like asking a professional sports team before the game if they think they can win – if you don’t know the answer already, you don’t know what you’re looking at. They want you to think that you’re the only ones being inconvenienced, because if it is then what is being done is useless.

This is affecting the people who run things. It’s probably not affecting them a lot, and it’s certainly not affecting them enough, but it is affecting them. The only thing they care about is profit and loss. Make the losses big enough, and they’ll change. Don’t, and things will continue as they are.

They’ve made a big, coordinated effort to make this problem go away. That isn’t because they give a crap about whether we’re inconvenienced or not. It’s about them. When people choose not to go to some place because it’s crowded with protesters, or when the docks are shut down, or the homes they fraudulently repossessed are occupied, they’re taking losses, and they don’t like that.

I’d think that all this would be obvious by now, but apparently it’s not. I guess there are a lot of people out there who don’t know what they’re looking at, and see that as someone else’s failure. So we’ll go on belaboring the obvious until enough people catch up.

Afterword: This was a comment I left at another site, slightly edited.

Twittering Of The Day

Retweeted by several folks, this one captures a lot about Occupy Wall Street, the banks, and the sometimes daft priorities of our society in fewer than 140 characters:

#OWS should take a bath right after the banks get their haircut. #newtsbeautysalon

Twitter Message by @Casual_Obs

I see nothing to add.

Brutality Or Stupidity

For me, it's hard to tell which in this video. It's of last night's Occupy Philadelphia protests, with police horses injuring a reporter who is in the crowd. Kevin Gosztola referred to it in a Twitter message as being a deliberate attack, but if you watch the video carefully, it doesn't look that way:



I don't see the police officers who are on foot making offensive moves. The most assertive they get is when one of them urges the protesters to get back on the sidewalk. The horses, particularly the dark one with the white streak on his face that appears to be the one that hit reporter Vanessa Maria, seem to be very nervous, thanks to all the noise, the large number of people who are shouting and looking cross, and perhaps confusion on the part of their riders. Whatever the reason, they all look to be nervous and twitchy.

"They're Not The Counter-Culture. They're The Culture"

With those words, Bill Maher makes more sense of the Occupy movements, and what has motivated them, than most of what passes for our news:



But then, he is our answer to Mark Twain.


UPDATE: I guess we're doing videos today. Here's Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks explaining how the latest news about the bank bailouts by the Federal Reserve help explain the Occupy movements:



Long-time readers will recall that I mentioned this some time ago. What the documents have confirmed is the magnitude of that bailout. I wasn't one of those shocked or surprised by this announcement. The only thing that I find surprising so far is that Bloomberg, who also broke this latest story, had run articles back then saying there was anything from $15 to $23 trillion in financial support to banks. So far, the number appears to be more like $8 trillion, according to documents in the latest FOIA release. If you add that to the GAO audit's figure of $16 trillion, it just about adds up to $23 trillion.

That may just be coincidence, though. It's just as possible that most or all of the same money is being referred to in both reports.