We Are the 1%
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Occupy Protests Around the World
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”
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)
Saturday Night Video: Occupy Everywhere
First OWS commercial.
Jesse LaGreca interviewed by Russian Television.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONYcVIgSqlw
Early footage from Toronto.
I haven’t been posting video of police violence against the protesters because it puts the emphasis in the wrong place. However, if you want to see clips, you can find them at YouTube easily enough. What’s striking is that not only are the crowds peaceful and refusing to respond to police provocation, they are duly recording everything, which is why so much of this video exists. It’s worth recalling that what sparked this protest to become the international event it is today was viral video three weeks ago of a number of young women who were kettled and then pepper sprayed in the face at close range by a senior New York City police officer.
UPDATE:
Raw footage out of Toronto this afternoon.
This movement no longer belongs just to the young people whose determination got it going. As this footage makes clear, it is now a middle class affair, including young families and retirees.
Frye Quote of the Day: “Those excluded from the benefits of the social contract feel no obligation to it”
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.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Ravel, “Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé”
More treasure from Bob Denham’s Essays on Northrop Frye, “Frye and Stéphane Mallarmé”:
[A]lthough Mallarmé speaks of God as an old scarecrow whom he has at last overcome,[i] he also speaks in his letters of a symbolic death and resurrection that he has attained through his search for a pure poetry, and speaks also of the poet who creates in the teeth of the creation, so to speak, as though he were the vehicle of a holy spirit. “Man’s duty,” he says, “is to observe with the eyes of the divinity; for if his connection with that divinity is to be made clear, it can be expressed only by the pages of the open book in front of him.”[ii] He also describes himself, in a letter to Cazalis, as “one of the ways the Spiritual Universe has found to see Itself, unfold Itself through what used to be me.”[iii] (457)
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[i] Frye is referring to the oft‑quoted passage in Mallarmé’s letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867: “I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage [vieux et méchant plumage]––God––whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth” (Selected Poetry and Prose, 87)
[ii] The passage is from Mallarmé’s “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument” (Selected Poetry and Prose, 80).
[iii] Letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867 (Selected Poetry and Prose, 87). In one of his early plans for Words with Power Frye proposed organizing the first three chapters on a Trinitarian scheme––the Book of the Father, the Book of the Son, and the Book of the Spirit––based on Joachim of Floris’ theory of the three epochs. Only in the Age of the Spirit, according to Joachim, would humankind be able fully to understand spiritual truth. Mallarmé was to be a part of the Book of the Spirit (Late, 171).
Quote of the Day: “The 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption”
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”
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.
“Alice in Wonderland”
The first film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, made in 1903, with the entire story rendered in just under nine minutes. For the time, the special effects are Spielbergian.
Here’s Frye in one of the late notebooks, cited by Bob Denham in his newly posted Essays on Northrop Frye: “I’ve often said that if I understood the two Alice books I’d have very little left to understand about literature.” (“Frye and Lewis Carroll,” 284)
Photo of the Day
