(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movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining.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 “kvetchocracy.”) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve 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 nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting…
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Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently — as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s 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 that’s just another form of bank robbery…
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Some critics think that Occupy Wall Street is simply tapping into the public’s resentment and covetousness, nurturing class warfare. Sure, there’s a dollop of envy. But inequality is also a cancer on our national well-being.
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I don’t 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 — 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.
Monday Morning Open Thread & OWS/Together UpdatePost + Comments (54)