Category Archives: Current Events

“Why I Love the Goddamned Hippies”

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Goddamned hippies in Austin, Texas

Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Beast:

The revolts in the West require nothing of the courage displayed by Egyptians or Syrians or Tunisians standing up to tanks and bullets and torture. But they have a similar dynamic. They have occupied public spaces in the center of cities, as if to reclaim ownership of a society they feel has been privatized into nonexistence. This is not Protest Wall Street; it is Occupy It. It does not march through; it stops and sits and waits—as if the genie of Tahrir Square could not be kept bottled up in Egypt for very long. The very act is empowering, a form of theater as well as politics. But the theater works only when it reflects underlying truths—truths that cut through cultural divides. Because this is not the 1960s. These are not the children of the affluent acting out for sexual and personal liberation. They are the children of the golden years of hyped-up, unregulated, lightly taxed capitalism—now facing the same unemployment and austerity as the rest of the world.

And that’s why polls have shown unusual support for the basic complaints of the hippies. The Occupy movement has, according to recent polling, significantly more general support than the Tea Party, and its specific demands are highly popular. Huge majorities agree that corporate special interests have too much clout in Washington, that inequality has gotten out of control, that taxes can and should be raised on the successful, that the gamblers of Wall Street deserve some direct comeuppance for the wreckage they have bestowed on the rest of us. Polling data do not show a salient cultural split between blue-collar whites and the countercultural drum circles in dozens of cities around America. And the facts are behind the majority position. Social and economic inequality is higher than it has been since the 1920s, and is showing no signs of declining.

Naomi Wolf Arrested at OWS; Frye on Police Power

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Wolf’s account of her illegal arrest and detention here.

Frye on police power in a free society:

But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. (Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 [November 1949]: 170)

A Report from Occupy Washington

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My wife Rachel and our neighbor Barbara Kingsolver went to an OWS demonstration in Johnson City, TN, on Saturday. Check it out here. You can see part of the interview with Kingsolver in the “Related Video” window on the upper left.

Below is an eyewitness account of Occupy Washington.

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Report on October 2011 by Cinny Poppen

Stop yer bitching. . . start a revolution! (message on a t-shirt)

The Occupy movement is spreading all over this country.  Roger and I felt extremely moved by the encampment we joined in Washington, DC, from its first day, Thursday, October 6, 2011, through Saturday, October 9.

People were well-organized, peaceful, angry, and determined to make their desires known. We found the hundreds of colorful signs dotting Freedom Plaza extremely entertaining.

The first night we witnessed a large crowed making decisions by consensus.  An excellent facilitator asked for proposals on the subject of where the demonstrators should sleep, limiting speakers to a minute apiece. People reacted with what I learned is called “sparkling”: hands in the air with fingers waving means agreement, hands pointed downward means disagreement. Through this process the many proposals were finally boiled down to one with two tiers. After much helpful clarification, especially by members of DC’s homeless population, it seemed that the plaza might be under federal jurisdiction, so sleeping there could lead to arrest by federal police. Sleeping on nearby streets might be less risky because the park police, or DC police, or transit police, or yet another of the many policing entities in our nation’s capitol, would be in control. As it turned out, around 300 people slept outside with no arrests at all.

During the subsequent days, several marches took off  down the street, at least once to another occupation in McPherson Square, and once to the Art and Space Museum in an ill-advised attempt to protest the current exhibit of drones there. When I first saw Bread and Puppet Theater in Chicago years ago, some of the actors, dressed in black,  pretended to be bombers, with great effect; nowmembers portrayed even more threatening drones.  On Saturday welistened to a talk on US national security policy by iinvestigative historian/ journalist Gareth Porter,  participated in a workshop on economics for the people, and then had the great pleasure of hearing from Ralph Nader. He advised us to keep our focus and warned us not to be co-opted–because we are the 99%.The permit was supposed to end on Sunday, October 10, but the city has agreed to extend it for four months.

From an article in the Washington Post on Tuesday, October 11, by Tim Craig:

Several D.C. Council members said Tuesday they have no problem with antiwar and anti-Wall Street protesters setting up extended encampments on National Park Service property in the city, and one council member hopes they ”‘stay for years.”

Two groups are entrenched in Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square downtown. Protesters with the Stop the Machine and Occupy DC groups have erected tents and piled up boxes and other living materials as they hold meetings, decamp for marches and protests and otherwise traverse the city. In Freedom Plaza, Stop the Machine group organizer Margaret Flowers said Tuesday that the group and the National Park Service agreed to extend its permit to stay there through Dec. 30. At McPherson Square, Occupy DC protesters have said they have no permit and have not been bothered by authorities.

In interviews Tuesday, eight of 13 council members supported the protesters’ presence.

“Sometimes for people without means, the only way to get a message out is a public display,”’ said council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), a constitutional law professor at George Washington University. “Other issues could develop, such as public health, but I think we shouldn’t be too quick to sweep them off the public plaza. Flowers said Tuesday that while her group has a permit for the entire Freedom Plaza park area, other groups have permits for events there and she would make sure space is cleared. Meanwhile, she said her group may apply for another extension that would run through February. “’We can’t say how long we’ll be here,’ Flowers said. ‘We’ll see an end when our groups accomplish what they need to accomplish.’”

And from the most recent email from the Occupy 2011 organizers:

One of the beautiful aspects of the occupation is that it has brought people out into the open to talk about the issues. Everywhere we look right now as we gaze out at Freedom Plaza in Washington DC, people are engaged in conversations. Some are standing in groups, and some are sitting in circles in the assembly area or between the tents. This is the first step in this evolution to a more peaceful, just and sustainable planet. For too long we have been focused on divisions. Now we are finding what unites us.

Increasing numbers of people are becoming unemployed, uninsured, losing their homes or pensions or dignity. Students are dropping out of college due to cost or graduating with lifelong debt in a deteriorating job market. The days of sitting in silence and blaming ourselves for not working hard enough are over. The first step in the process of change is awareness of the problem. We are encouraging all people to come out of their homes. Join us in the streets either through your local occupation or on the local playground. Talk to those around you. Talk about the way things are with increasing wealth disparity and poverty. Talk about the way you want things to be – a society based on openness, acceptance, honesty, transparency and kindness.Following are the 15 issues we’re working on. Please talk about them and share what you learn with your family, friends and colleagues. This is the first step in the nonviolent transformation of our country.

Occupy Protests Around the World

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From The Economist:

Spain’s Indignados have been protesting against the gloomy economic situation in which they find themselves since May. They have been joined by similar movements from New York to Sydney. The protesters’ preoccupations vary from place to place, as do the economic data that underpin them. Education is the focus in Chile, frustration with bankers in Britain. But they do share a common demand: someone, somewhere, should do something to right the problems of global capitalism as currently constituted. One reason why these protests are so interesting is that their targets, those cheerleaders for globalisation, capitalism and free markets, tend to agree that the system needs fixing. This makes the ‘occupy’ protests, as they have come to be known in the English-speaking world, hard to argue against.

Frye on “the tension between concern and freedom”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhrwmJcsfT0

Former Florida congressman Alan Grayson pushes back against self-described “Republican reptile” P.J. O’Rourke on last week’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

Here is a quote from Frye cited in Bob Denham’s essay, “Frye and Soren Kierkegaard,” in his new collection Essays on Northrop Frye, posted in our library this week. The quote is particularly relevant to the rise in the last few weeks of what is now an international “Occupy” movement.

The basis of all tolerance in society, the condition in which a plurality of concerns can coexist, is the recognition of the tension between concern and freedom. . . . Concern and  freedom both occupy the whole of the same universe: they interpenetrate, and it is no good  trying to set up boundary stones. Some, of course, meet the collision of concern and freedom from the opposite side, with a naive rationalism which expects that before long all myths of concern will be outgrown and only the appeal to reason and evidence and experiment will be  taken seriously. . . . I consider such a view entirely impossible. The growth of non-mythical  knowledge tends to eliminate the incredible from belief, and helps to shape the myth of concern according to the outlines of what experience finds possible and vision desirable. But the growth of knowledge cannot in itself provide us with the social vision which will suggest what we should do with our knowledge. (233)

Frye Quote of the Day: “Those excluded from the benefits of the social contract feel no obligation to it”

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Here’s Frye in The Modern Century:

In political thought there is a useful fiction known as the social contract, the sense that man enters into a certain social context by the act of getting born.  In earlier contract theories, like that of Hobbes, the contract was thought of as universal, binding everyone without exception.  From Rousseau on there is more of a tendency to divide people into those accept and defend the existing social contract because they benefit from it, and the people who are excluded from most of the benefits, and so feel no obligation, or much less, of it.  (CW 11, 41)

Occupy Toronto Canada begins today as part of what is now an international Day of Action.

Above are more statistics to remind us what this is all about. Note that these data are four years old and before the crash of 2008. It’s worse now. In what other context can 90% be characterized at the “bottom”?

As a further reminder, here is a link to Citigroup’s “Plutonomy” memo, which was issued to its preferred customers six years ago tomorrow. An excerpt:

➤ The World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest. The U.S., UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies – economies powered by the wealthy. Continental Europe (ex-Italy) and Japan are in the egalitarian bloc.
➤ Equity risk premium embedded in “global imbalances” are unwarranted. In plutonomies the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy and have a massive impact on reported aggregate numbers like savings rates, current account deficits, consumption levels, etc. This imbalance in inequality expresses itself in the standard scary “ global imbalances.” We worry less.

Business Insider has produced an extraordinarily comprehensive narrative using charts to illustrate how we got here. I’d strongly recommend you have a look.

Salon, meanwhile, asks “What Do the 1% Actually Do?”

I’d also like to note that the mindlessly repeated meme generated by the corporate media (Fox News in particular) that OWS is vague about its complaints and remedies is unfair. It is true that the movement is still evolving, but from the very beginning at least three identifiable problems and solutions have been repeated.

1. The banks are responsible for the collapse of the market three years ago and were subsequently bailed out with public money. They must therefore be taxed at higher rates, in order to refund the debt they owe (including hundreds of billions in quantitative easing), to make restitution for the tens of trillions of wealth they destroyed, and to decrease the worst income disparity in eighty years.

2. Because banks are responsible for the crash through demonstrably criminal activity, the perpetrators must be charged and tried.

3. Because the underlying cause of the crash is irresponsible government deregulation of the banking system, which was itself the result of relentless and remunerative corporate lobbying, the bond between government and corporate interests must be broken through legislation.

The fact that these kinds of specifics aren’t good enough is yet another symptom of the narrative-driven, fact-deficient pack mentality that has dominated mainstream American “journalism” for decades.

What has this to do with Canada, which has much stricter banking regulations and therefore, unlike Europe, did not find itself crippled as a result of the American banking crisis?

First of all, it is in everybody’s interest that these issues be addressed. The corruption of the American banking system triggered a worldwide economic crisis that is far from being resolved — the euro, in fact, is still threatening to collapse, and with it would go the global economy. Secondly, the underlying issue of widening income inequality is universal, and, at the moment, is advancing in Canada at a rate faster than even the U.S. Canada has a corporate tax rate that is among the lowest of OECD countries, and that lower rate of corporate taxation drives steadily increasing income disparity. Canada is identified in the infamous Citigroup memo cited above as one of three fully developed plutonomies. We are not on the periphery here. We are at the very heart of the problem.

Quote of the Day: “The 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sPx5qy61Mg&feature=related

Report on the way in which the mainstream media attempt to minimize, misrepresent and undermine OWS

Matt Taibbi enthusiastically supports the Occupy Wall Street movement, but offers some advice. An excerpt:

[A]fter a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.

That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it’s extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can’t be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn’t going to be an iconic “Running Girl” photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.

No matter what, I’ll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement’s basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on. But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street.

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To quote the immortal political philosopher Matt Damon from Rounders, “The key to No Limit poker is to put a man to a decision for all his chips.” The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they’re never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table. If Occupy Wall Street can do that – if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness – it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement. All it has to do is light a match in the right place, and the overwhelming public support for real reform – not later, but right now – will be there in an instant.

“Class Warfare”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kFD_DjDkVI

One of the most jaw-droppingly deft rhetorical reversals conservatives have ever accomplished has been to appropriate the term “class warfare,” which is being rolled out again as the Occupy Wall Street protests have finally made the people who matter nervous/annoyed.

Whenever the privileges of the 1% of the population who possess 40% of the wealth are questioned, we begin to hear that the criticism constitutes class warfare. Class warfare no longer involves what the rich do to everyone else. It is now exclusively about the threat everyone else represents to the rich.

Mitt Romney, who recently declared that “corporations are people too,” uses the term in the clip above. He also repeats another Republican talking point currently being endlessly repeated: “Half the people in this country don’t pay income taxes.” The reason they don’t pay federal income taxes is that they don’t make enough income. It certainly does not mean, as the point intends to suggest, that they pay no taxes. They pay lots of taxes, all of them regressive, like sales and payroll taxes. These are the only taxes conservatives seem to think are acceptable because regressive taxes literally cost them nothing.