(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
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Occupy Wall Street/Together has moved so far beyond the “overnight novelty” that the Media Villagers tried to brand it, that it’s gone from celebrity drop-bys (okay, Zachary Quinto’s new project gave him a reasonable excuse) to overt ratfvcking… and, of course, whinging. The NYTimes gives “Wall Street bankers” a front-page slot to “dismiss protesters as unsophisticated“. The Washington Post helpfully adds that “Occupy movements across the country lack diversity“, and also, are responsible for “a new generation of protest songs” (crappy, earnest protest songs being a favorite anti-DFH trope since the days of Maynard G. Krebs).
Paul Krugman is refreshingly shrill about the banksters “losing their immunity“:
As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movementâs targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the âkvetchocracy.â) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Donât they understand what weâve done for the U.S. economy?
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The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nationâs economic elite have done for us. And thatâs why theyâre protesting…
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Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industryâs money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industryâs behavior, no matter how gently â as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industryâs shock over recent events.
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You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.
Even Nicholas Kristoff lowers his global-focused gaze upon the kvetchocrats:
… Living under Communism in China made me a fervent enthusiast of capitalism. I believe that over the last couple of centuries banks have enormously raised living standards in the West by allocating capital to more efficient uses. But anyone who believes in markets should be outraged that banks rig the system so that they enjoy profits in good years and bailouts in bad years.
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The banks have gotten away with privatizing profits and socializing risks, and thatâs just another form of bank robbery…
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Some critics think that Occupy Wall Street is simply tapping into the publicâs resentment and covetousness, nurturing class warfare. Sure, thereâs a dollop of envy. But inequality is also a cancer on our national well-being.
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I donât know whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will survive once Zuccotti Park fills with snow and the novelty wears off. But I do hope that the protesters have lofted the issue of inequality onto our national agenda to stay â and to grapple with in the 2012 election year.
And Charlie Pierce, at Esquire‘s Politics Blog, lambastes Joe Klein’s latest plea for “civility” from “the Silent Majority”:
This country has faced serious problems before, and it has overcome them, and of all the tools it used to overcome them, “civility” is one of the least significant. The fight against slavery took place in a lot of different arenas, public and private, but in none of them was it civil. (Civility, in fact, was the excuse used by the defenders of slavery in 1835 when they enacted the infamous “gag rule” by which the subject could not ever be discussed in the Congress. It took 10 years of decidedly uncivil argument to eliminate that rule.) The battle for a unionized workforce had a substantial body count on both sides, and it extended into the years when the country was wrestling with the Great Depression. The civil-rights movement was polite, but it was not “civil,” in the sense that the word is used here, where modest people of good intentions air their grievances and come to a compromise solution.
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Klein has put politics in an awfully small box here, and, now that we’re seeing genuine populist outrage against the depredations of organized wealth, it’s not helpful. As Max Weber wrote in 1919, “What is possible would not have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.” That is not a civil enterprise. It can be as angry and brutal as any other kind of discovery can be. It can disarrange the comfortable social order for a spell. What Klein argues for is not civility, but a kind of slow suicide by civic lassitude. That’s a lot of things. But Real American isn’t one of them.
Keith G
Charlie Pierce just keeps hitting home runs.
He needs to be on the White House payroll (as if they would ever use what he wrote).
arguingwithsignposts
I suppose I could spend some time looking this up, but I don’t quite understand the use of the name Civil War. Wouldn’t it be the Intra-national War or something?
It’s certainly easier to say than the War of Northern Aggression or whatever the losers call it.
ETA: Also, as to Pierce’s piece, this might be a good place to link to Aimai’s encounter with Joke Lein (It was Joke Lein, wasn’t it), but I can’t remember her blog.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Work!
arguingwithsignposts
I understand Kristof “believes” this, but is it historically correct?
A Mom Anon
@arguingwithsignposts: I was wondering about that too. I suppose when banks have backed projects related to infrastructure or some great medical breakthrough or something that creates public good it’s probably true,but beyond that it seems like the banks are responsible for a pretty large share of misery and destruction as well. Lately it seems like they are hoarding resources and doing anything but public good.
Hypnos
Italy’s leading centre-left newspaper, La Repubblica, has an interview with one of the “black blocks” who trashed Rome on the 15th.
He says they had been training for a year in Greece. They had military tactics, had stashed away weapons before the protest even took place, were divided by role, and had divided in “phalanxes”. Some of them hid in the pacific part of the march until the clashes started, to confuse the police about their true numbers. The strategy worked and they were able to set an armored truck on fire, with the cops inside managing to run out at the last moment.
All in all, they used urban warfare tactics and won hands down. Very few arrests were made.
This is one step away from Red Brigades levels.
I wonder if the European elites have realized how fast we are getting there.
arguingwithsignposts
Because DougerheadJ’s earlier post was all f’d up and now is dead, I’m going to comment here about the Tea Party/Occupy spectrum.
The big difference to me seems to be the term “occupy.” The Tea Party really is a traditional political organization (realizing that it’s not a centralized organization, but bear with me). Their methods have been the methods used by political groups for the last forty years – organize some one-day protests with banners and signs, work the system to primary some politicians, etc.
The Occupy movement has gone back to an earlier form of effective protest, that used by the Montgomery bus boycotts, Ghandi’s methods in India, the Solidarity Movement, the union strikes of previous decades – sustained, constant presence.
Yes, they got the spark from the Arab Spring protests (but think of Tiananmen Square, for another example), but the method of sustained presence has a longer history than that.
So they aren’t acting through the traditional political channels. And that’s a huge difference between the two, and partly why the two won’t co-mingle. Among many other things.
Anyway, that’s my amateur protest history stayed-in-a-holiday-inn-express thought for the morning.
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts:
@A Mom Anon: International trade, the industrial revolution, home and auto ownership are possible because banks have served as clearinghouses for investments and the extension of credit. Imagine how many of these things would be possible if the money supply basically equaled your own cash and whatever cash you could scrounge from friends and family.
JPL
@arguingwithsignposts: Yesterday a friend said if the group lasts through the winter, then she’d consider it a successful movement. I was surprised because I think it already is a success. They have drawn attention to the fact that bailouts made wall street happy but did nothing for main street.
Keith G
@arguingwithsignposts:
I assume so. Collecting capital into blocks where it can be efficiently, safely, and even democratically used by communities and individuals is an important step in societal progress (but not without of troubling issues, of course)
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus: Prior to the FHA, home ownership was much harder to get, even with banks.
arguingwithsignposts
@JPL: I do worry about the effect winter is going to have on the movement. I do consider it a short-term success, now. The long-term success depends on what change occurs elsewhere.
Lit3Bolt
Thanks for the links and quotes, Anne Laurie.
Charlie Pierce makes me want to buy Esquire magazines. That’s a good writer.
An important thing to remember is that Wall St. feels like they have suffered the most from the recent financial disasters. Their entire industry nearly collapsed, threatened to bring the world down with it, and those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs feel they deserve gratitude for keeping things as good as they are now. They speak a language no one else can speak, see things no one else can see, etc. All of this contributes to the mentality, and the indignation they suffer.
However, to paraphrase Michael Reynolds, if you don’t want 90% of the blame, don’t claim 90% of the political power in this country.
As to people who say OWS is a bunch of socialists and anarchists, all I have to say is…dude, John Brown was a fucking murderous lunatic. He was still right about slavery.
Mino
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): I posted this in the repair thread where you probably won’t read it so I’m reposting….Use arnica to speed healing on a bruise. It’s amazing how fast it works.
arguingwithsignposts
@Lit3Bolt: To recall a quote from a NYT story that puts it in perspective:
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts: Doesn’t negate my point. The development of a system of credit and investment, i.e., banking, was central to much of the societal development since the renaissance.
Jay C
@arguingwithsignposts:
Heh. I emailed a copy of that quote to my Senators (Schumer and Gillibrand) for their opinion. I’ll share any response I get (other than form-letter acknowledgements) with you all here.
(Hint to BJ commentariat: don’t hold your breath…)
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus: I think where I may have trouble is the equation of what OWS is talking about wrt “banks” and what Kristof is talking about regarding the positive features of “banking.”
A system of credit and investment is one thing. What happened over the last 10 years (at least) is another.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: yeah a lot of us have read the Baroque Cycle.
This is the end game of the “freed” market. No one wants to admit.
The natural progression of freed markets is jobs flow to cheapest labor, and exhaustion of resources.
For example modern medicine has figgered out how to keep old ppl in compromised health alive almost indefinitely. At least until their resources have been consumed by heroic care effort.
It costs ~75k a year for a double in a private nursing home and that is just maintenance.
Farming old people.
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts: The text you quoted refers to the past couple of centuries, not the past couple of decades.
cathyx
A success that is being overlooked is Americans are waking up to this reality of the banks taking over the country. Those of us who read websites like this didn’t need to be made aware of what is happening, but very many others did and do need to be made aware. The longer the protests go on, the more that out of touch neighbor, college kid, even highschooler, is learning about the imbalance that is happening more and more.
I’m sure you all know someone who is completely clueless about these things. This can have the ability to teach them an important lesson. Then they may actually get involved.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus:
yeah and the white patriarchy social cohesion model was central to the development of the United States …….until it crashed and burned when blacks and women got the vote.
:)
that is the beauty of democracy.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: we are also now farming students.
For profit charter schools and college-mortgages are two examples.
College-mortgages are the new sub-primes for the paper flippers.
Its games theoretic.
Samara Morgan
cue some some idiot from the juicitariat raging about what an awful person i am for telling the truth.
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan:
@Samara Morgan: What is your point? I am not acting a wholesale defender of the the current Wall Street banking system, so don’t try to hang that on me. I was answering a question raised by another commenter.
RL
Just as I was reading this, Klein appeared on CBS talking about the article. Only caught the end of it, and it’s early so I’m paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of: We have had it so easy for so long that Americans have forgotten how to be citizens. What does that even mean?
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: I’ll stir the hornet’s nest.
I don’t think “crashed and burned” means what you think it means.
arguingwithsignposts
@Omnes Omnibus: And thank you for answering. I see what you’re saying, and I think Kristof could have worded his sentiments to better get across a larger point.
Valenciennes
This is one of the more uplifting things I’ve seen come out of OWS, and I’ve been watching the livestreams with an almost religious fervor the past three weeks:
#OWS Hails a Cab. The Rest is Legend.
I didn’t think I was going to cry, but by the end? The tears, they tasted of happy.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Keith G:
I just wish he’d read Paul Krugman, as opposed to, you know, these idiots:
With the exception of Dionne, that list contains some of the worst purveyors of mealy-mouthed concern trolling and cheerleading for false “centrism”.
It’s really not very mysterious that we’re in the mess we’re in. People who ridiculed pundits like Brooks, Friedman, and Klein for their vapid uninformed talking points and then defended essentially the same nonsense when Obama said it get no sympathy from me, nor much respect.
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: sure it does,
Read much Dead White Male Phailosophy?
Hayek was wrong.
In proto-America the churches were the local engines of social welfare. But when blacks and women got the vote they couldn’t join.
So the federal gov’t had to intervene to deliver civil welfare and civil rights in the south.
Civil welfare is waay cheaper in social capital then church welfare. Church welfare requires attendance, tithing, behavioral conformation, etc.
And anyone can get federal welfare, including blacks and women.
So Hayek was WRONG.
The welfare state doesnt lead to socialism…..it leads to secularism.
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts:
sure it does,
Read much Dead White Male Phailosophy?
Hayek was wrong.
In proto-America the churches were the local engines of social welfare. But when blacks and women got the vote they couldnât join.
So the federal govât had to intervene to deliver civil welfare and civil rights in the south.
Civil welfare is waay cheaper in social capital then church welfare. Church welfare requires attendance, tithing, behavioral conformation, etc.
And anyone can get federal welfare, including blacks and women.
So Hayek was WRONG.
The welfare state doesnt lead to soc1al1smâŠ..it leads to secularism.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus: the past is dust, Omnes.
what do we do NAOW?
Omnes Omnibus
@Samara Morgan: Ignore you since you are adding nothing. Have a nice day.
THE
@Samara Morgan:
BTW I pinched your link yesterday to the story about US leaving Iraq and used it on my private website.
Do you want h/t credit?
Chris
@Hypnos:
It has popular support the Red Brigades and the rest of these clowns could only dream of. In terms of effectiveness I’d say it’s outdone them easy.
@Lit3Bolt:
Yeah, and even comparing OWS to John Brown would be ridiculous… These people are just standing there, not attacking army forts or killing people. Frankly, if you’ve got a problem with OWS, you’ve got a problem with free speech.
catclub
@Bill E Pilgrim: “does reserve a certain respect”
can have various meanings. We do know that Obama is centrist number one in this country, so it should not surprise anyone that he ‘has a certain respect’ for other centrists. Just remember his performance at the Republican house retreat. He does have a mastery of both facts and trends, even if he does not always express it.
Plethded
It’s a good thing to protest for the sake of showing the public’s anger at Wall Street, and I hope something concrete comes from the effort. It’s just hard to look at the Senate and not see a giant roadblock against any reform.
Judas Escargot
SaMo has at least one good point here: We’re no longer really ‘cattle’ to the Galtians. Rather, they harvest us (our labor and our wealth, such as it is)… like wheat.
As for OWS, I’ve given up trying to predict what will happen. It spread faster than I would have expected. It hasn’t been infiltrated, hijacked, or turned violent (yet). We’ll see if it lasts through the winter.
I will say this one thing: Until these protests have any effect on actual poll numbers (and actual election results), it’s all just meaningless show and distraction. The bankers are not afraid, and their enablers in DC still couldn’t care less. Recent polls show that the little turnips out there still blame DC more than they blame Wall St for our current troubles. And Obama’s poll numbers just keep sinking (if the election were today, IMO he’d lose– Romney’s up in VA, FL and OH and would probably take PA as well).
I realize that polls lag events by a week or two, but I’m just not seeing the effect that people seem to expect.
Scott P.
It’s a Civil War because it’s a war between citizens, not a war with foreigners. I.e. “Civil” in the sense of the Latin word for citizen, “civis”. Caesar entitled his account of his war with Pompey the “Bellum Civile”, which is generally translated as “The Civil War”.
Linda Featheringill
@Lit3Bolt: #13
Yes. Mr. Brown was probably totally unattractive but he pushed the antislavery movement forward quite a bit. And yes, he was crazy. Saint? Well . . . . .
FlipYrWhig
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Here’s the whole paragraph:
That suggests that we’re being given a list of people’s opinions he “cares about,” as opposed to a list of people’s opinions he endorses.
ETA: Then again, I always felt like Al Gore was excessively preoccupied with what the pundits would say, and it appeared to hem him in strategically.
jayackroyd
The NYTimes gives [anonymous] âWall Street bankersâ a front-page slot to âdismiss protesters as unsophisticatedâ
FYT.
(BTW, there is absolutely no justification for granting anonymity to any of those cowards under the Times rules for such grants.)
jayackroyd
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Last couple of days, Dean Baker’s been trying to figure whether Friedman or Brooks is the bard of the 1%.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: One of VP Gore’s problems was he didn’t kiss butt to them when VP & they shivved him in 2000.
He didn’t care enough what they thought, IMO.
Valenciennes
@FlipYrWhig: That’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever read about Obama.
Kola Noscopy
Note K-Thug’s use of the proper American term “WHINING,” not “whinging.”
All BJ FP’ers please take note and follow suit.
Thank you.
slag
@Valenciennes: Seconded. Really…the question of judgment has become an imperative one at this point.
slag
@Kola Noscopy: Stop your whinging. Asshole.
Kola Noscopy
Oh my. Uncivil!
A Conservative Teacher
I’m a nice guy and want to help out all you Occupy Wall Street supporters… your message has already been articulated clearly before. Check out the 1938 publication Stato Corporativo or read Venticinque scritti e un discorso di da lui proibiti.
A lot of what these people are trying to say has been said before and articulated more clearly- just do a little bit of reading and you’ll figure out what you’re trying to say.
Less Popular Tim
@slag: To be consistent with “whinging,” you should have called him a “wanker.”
Fax Paladin
@A Conservative Teacher: Um, no. Precisely the opposite, in fact. But thanks for playing.
Valenciennes
@A Conservative Teacher: buttes