And donate at our new Elizabeth Warren ActBlue page.
Update. Even eemom drew a blank on the title reference.
by DougJ| 23 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Politics, Readership Capture
And donate at our new Elizabeth Warren ActBlue page.
Update. Even eemom drew a blank on the title reference.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
__
Since I may not yet have persuaded every single one of you to start reading Esquire‘s Political Blog regularly, here’s Charlie Pierce on “What They’ve Come to Find at Occupy Wall Street“:
NEW YORK — Sal Cioffi and Randy Otero are union electricians from Local 3 of the IBEW in New York. They’re working on the Freedom Tower a few blocks over in lower Manhattan. Over the past couple of days, they’ve taken to having their lunch in Zuccotti Park, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have set up camp here. The event has grown sufficiently that it’s now attracted almost as many food trucks and mobile falafel units as it has television-news trucks, so there’s always some place for Sal and Randy to buy lunch. So they park themselves on the stone bench, put their hard hats on the ground and, almost organically, they become part of the event.
__
“We’ve had demonstrations, and it never makes the news,” says Sal. “We could have 10,000 workers demonstrating, and it won’t make the news. At least, something like this, they get the publicity.”
__
“We had a rally for the workers, two months ago, and we marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and there were people crossing that bridge for an hour-and-a-half, and it didn’t hit the news,” Randy adds. “All organized labor, no press coverage whatsoever.
__
“Now, this here, they’re not leaving, so the media has to cover it. And it’s very close to Ground Zero, and once the police get involved, they have to cover it.”
__
“They’re waiting for someone to do something wrong,” Sal says.
__
What the two of them have found for themselves, here amid the guitars and the drums, and the indistinguishable forms shifting in their sleeping bags against the advancing autumn chill, is a public space for ideas. If the primary criticism of the ongoing demonstrations is that they seem to lack, as a hundred media reports have put it, “a cohesive public message,” that is also one of their great strengths. This is a very loud and clear yawp against the irresponsible use of power by unaccountable institutions, including, increasingly, the government itself. The protests here are omni-directional. They appear inchoate because their target is so diffuse — an accelerating sense in the country that there is no pea under any of the shells, that the red Jack is not in the deck, that the wealth of the country is being swindled and gambled and frittered away by so many people in so many ways that to sharpen the focus on one of the long cons is to let a dozen others reach fruition. This is a protest about declining wages and corporate greed, about baroque financial schemes and the unfathomable fine print on the back of your credit-card statement, about a grand critique of mutated capitalism and outrage at the simple tragedy of foreclosure fraud. So, for today, Sal and Randy are sitting on the stone bench and talking about the life of a union electrician in New York City in 2011 and, in what they say, there is the shadow of all these other things, waiting for one slip, one accident, one missed paycheck. Except for the very few, economic survival in America is a fragile, perilous journey over an increasingly narrow road. That’s the cohesive public message here in the park, if you can see past all the dreadlocks and hear it over the drum circles, which most of the mainstream coverage of this event has been sadly unable to do.
__
“We have 200 guys out [of work] now,” Sal explains. “There’s a 60-week wait now if you get laid off today. That’s the wait now, but the wait’s going to get longer because it always does. The 70’s were bad — the late 70’s — but this is worse. Sorry to say it but, if that didn’t happen down here — 9/11 — we’d have had a lot more people out of work.”…
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Damon Poeter at PCmag.com posts “Anonymous Threatens to ‘Erase NYSE from the Internet’“:
Anonymous declared “war” on the New York Stock Exchange this weekend and vowed to “erase” the NYSE from the Internet on Oct. 10 as the Occupy Wall Street protest entered its third week in New York City after a weekend that saw hundreds of protesters arrested during a planned march across the Brooklyn Bridge…
__
The AnonMessage channel has been used to post several Occupy Wall Street-related video messages since the protest against lax regulation of the financial sector and growing economic inequality began on Sept. 17. Those messages include Anonymous’ initial “official” video regarding Occupy Wall Street and a warning sent last week to the New York Police Department that threatened retaliation if “the brutality does not stop” against Occupy Wall Street protestors…
__
The threat to “erase” the NYSE from the Internet was not explained, though in comments on the YouTube video, some speculated that Anonymous was planning a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on the public-facing NYSE.com website, similar to DDoS attacks the group has used to take down websites in the past.
__
Others felt that would only be a minor setback for the NYSE and guessed that Anonymous was planning a larger attack, perhaps even an attempt to actually disable trading on the exchange.
Videos & transcripts at the link. And, no, Columbus Day is not a stock market holiday , although it’s probably been a light-volume day in previous years…
Open Thread: V for Vampire-Squid-HuntingPost + Comments (83)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Open Threads
Dave Weigel, libertarian, has an article at Slate on what he calls “The Occupy Wall Street protests and the creation of the post-Obama left“:
… I hung out with Occupy Wall Street on Friday and Saturday, which wasn’t enough time to figure out what the movement is about, because no one knows what it’s about. The professional radicals who provided the jargon and call-and-response technique had not pressed their agenda onto the protesters. The union members who’d started to show up, like the SEIU volunteers who dropped off free ponchos and food, admired the protest without co-signing it. They’re saving that for an Oct. 5 march, which will bring dozens of unions in league with the nascent movement…
__
The anarchists and minarchists in the crowd might not like this observation—no parties, man!—but Occupy Wall Street is post-Obama left-wing populism. It will be post-Obama even if the man himself holds office until January 2017. Seven years ago, the people protesting in Zuccotti Park had marched outside the Republican National Convention, decrying George W. Bush. Three years ago, they had channeled their energy into the messianic candidacy of Barack Obama. And here they were again, inspired by AdBusters and Democracy Now, ashamed of how the Tea Party movement became the de facto populist response to the crisis.
__
On Saturday, before the arrests happened, the volunteer organizers of the protest handed out a four-page newspaper called The Occupied Wall Street Journal. They had raised more than $10,000 to quickly print 50,000 copies. “There is a worldwide movement of resistance and rebellion building,” write Eric Ribellarse and Jim Weill in the paper’s lead story. A timeline starts the movement on Dec. 17, 2010, when Mohammed Bouazizi poured gasoline on his head, then sat in public in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, then lit a match. The Tea Party has always been ostentatious in its American exceptionalism, starting rallies with recitations of the Pledge of the Allegiance. The loudest mic-checkers in Occupy Wall Street want the opposite—a mind-meld with the developing world. Americans are letting financiers rob them and foreclose on them because they think this country gets a pass from the global class war. On Saturday night, as the occupiers got debriefed on the arrests, the connection was complete.
__
“Why isn’t the Tea Party here?” says one occupier, darting past me to get a better position near the speaker. “They got no balls!”
I don’t think I agree with Weigel’s take, but he’s trying out a meme that may get traction because it’s comforting to the Media Village courtiers.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links, Grifters Gonna Grift, Assholes, Decline and Fall
Tom Junod, at Esquire‘s Politics Blog, picks on “Tom Friedman and the Fattening of the American Center“:
… So why is the idea of the center so seductive, when the actuality of the center is so negligible? Well, it’s simple: There is status in the center. There is the opportunity to look down at people of both political extremes, while having one’s own smarts — one’s own reasonability, which has become the calling card of the new center — affirmed. Friedman, in particular, makes use of class insecurities to make his sale; he is a skilled politician, in that he knows how to make people feel better about themselves, and he is at the same time a skilled motivational speaker, in that he knows how to make them feel worse… which is to say that he knows how to make them worry about China. […] __
But then, that’s one of the attractions of attending a Friedman lecture. It’s
not that he reads from his books, so that you don’t have to; it’s that he doesn’t read from his books, because his books aren’t meant to be read. I was going to say that the books are lectures, rather than books, but that’s not quite right; they’re PowerPoint presentations, rather than lectures. Their arguments are numbered and bullet-pointed, in the manner of the instructions and exhortations typically found in books about how to respond to one’s cheese being moved or how to avoid eating too much of it. Friedman’s book even sounds like a diet book; tinker with the pronoun, and That Used to Be Us becomes That Used to Be Me, and can be used to sell grapefruit, tomato juice, and colonic irrigation. It’s billed as an optimistic book about national renewal — and it’s supposed to be pretty good — but really it’s a diet book for the national soul, and, as in all such books, it’s underlying message is that we had better worry about getting fat.
__
“When I got out of college, I was able to find a job,” Friedman said in his lecture. “Now I’d have to invent one.” That was his “optimistic” message: that what he calls the “flattening” of the world due to globalization means that nothing is safe, that everything is in play, and that no one can be comfortable with where they are or what they’ve got. We can’t just go to to work anymore; we have to be able to create our work. He repeated this bromide, pretty much word for word, in his column on Sunday: a promise of economic slavery, done up in the trappings of personal — or technological — freedom, to the point where he actually seems to be rooting for the robot. Now, this message should have sent audiences and readers rushing to join their nearest labor union; Friedman is guaranteeing roughly 80 percent unemployment, after all. But labor unions aren’t part of the American center that Friedman and his ilk are promoting; they’re part of the past, and they’re beholden to party as much as party is beholden to them. No, the American center that Friedman conjures likes to think that it is self-sufficient, intellectually and otherwise, and so the people who listen to his lectures and read his columns like to think that they’ll be the ones who will be able to invent their jobs. They don’t like to think of themselves as the working stiffs who will inevitably get left behind — as the fatties whom Friedman’s fad diet is really addressing.
In that column, Friedman quotes the owner of Freelancer.com: “Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: ‘They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.’” And yet the prevalence of well-educated, debt-burdened people at Occupy Wall Street is treated as a marvel or an anomaly by the media courtiers…
The Moustache of Understanding — <em>Robots!</em>Post + Comments (69)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Assholes, Decline and Fall
__
Hat tip to Southern Beale for the news that Bloomberg Markets magazine has uploaded a new expose on “The Secret Sins of the Koch Brothers“:
… A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.
__
Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.
__
From 1999 through 2003, Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments. In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mismeasuring the amount of crude it was extracting. Koch paid a $25 million settlement to the U.S.
__
Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat — using techniques they called the Koch Method.
__
In 1999, a Texas jury imposed a $296 million verdict on a Koch pipeline unit — the largest compensatory damages judgment in a wrongful death case against a corporation in U.S. history. The jury found that the company’s negligence had led to a butane pipeline rupture that fueled an explosion that killed two teenagers.
__
Former Koch employees in the U.S. and Europe have testified or told investigators that they’ve witnessed wrongdoing by the company or have been asked by Koch managers to take what they saw as improper actions…
__
“How much lawless behavior are we going to tolerate from any one company?” asks David Uhlmann, who oversaw the prosecution of the Koch refinery division when he was chief of the environmental crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Corporate cultures reflect the priorities of the corporation and its senior officials.”…
It’s worth reading the whole thing, although if you’re easily agitated you may want to have your blood-pressure medication at hand. Charles and David Koch have been accused, and frequently convicted, of every possible crime this side of dog fighting & kiddy porn — and if they could find a safe-at-one-remove “corporate” method of profiting from those hobbies, it sure doesn’t sound like they’d hesitate due to issues of morality or the general public welfare. They’re living embodiments of the old J.P. Morgan quote: “Whatever isn’t nailed down, is mine. Whatever I can pry loose, wasn’t nailed down.”
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links
(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
If three stories on the same day indicate a trend, even the WaPo is getting tired of listening to the One-Percenters snivel. Barbara Ehrenreich snarks on Super-Rich People Problems:
The latest group to claim victim status is the rich. Actually the super-rich, whose wealth ordinarily exempts them from pity. While they are not yet subjected to airport profiling (except for early boarding and club access), they sense that the public is turning subtly against them — otherwise how could President Obama propose raising their taxes?
__
Admirers of the rich, led by pundits and politicians on the right — from Laura Ingraham to Larry Kudlow — have long derided the victimization claims of African Americans, women, gays and the unemployed, but now they’re raising their voices to defend the rich against what they see as an ugly tide of “demonization.”
__
At a time when poverty is soaring, unemployment hovers grimly above 9 percent and growing numbers of Americans suffer from “food insecurity” — the official euphemism for hunger — this concern may seem a tad esoteric. At a time when executive compensation is reaching dizzying new levels and the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing as fast as the federal deficit, it may even seem a little perverse…
__
You would never guess from all the talk of demonization that the rich enjoy perhaps the strongest PR machine on the planet, far beyond their entourages of agents, publicists and assorted image-makers. The mainstream media, for example, are not owned by collectives of busboys and taxi drivers, and even the “liberal” outlets among them are not pitched toward the impecunious. They may snicker when the occasional hedge fund manager is brought to justice, but they’ve been equally snarky about populist actions against the rich, such as the ongoing occupation of Wall Street, which is newsworthy if only for the levels of brutality it’s elicited from the NYPD. Or did you know that the Transportation Security Administration just won union representation this summer? Probably not, because that’s “labor news,” which has been all but supplanted by “business news.”
Greg Sargent, at his Plum Line blog, highlights Warren Buffett:
QUESTIONER: Are you happy seeing your suggestion, this new Buffett Rule, becoming more of a basis of a political battle that really has turned into class warfare?
__
BUFFETT: Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically.
__
If you look at the 400 highest taxpayers in the United States in 1992, the first year for figures, they averaged about $40 million of [income] per person. In the most recent year, they were $227 million per person — five for one. During that period, their taxes went down from 29 percent to 21 percent of income. So, if there’s class warfare, the rich class has won.
And in the ‘Most Popular: Business‘ category, we’re told that the “Mental toll of extended unemployment looms large“:
… A recently released, comprehensive study of the long-term unemployed by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development found that 32 percent were experiencing a good deal of stress and another 47 percent said they had some stress associated with their joblessness. Moreover, at least 11 percent reported seeking professional help for depression in the past year.
__
One in two of the respondents in the two-year national study said they have avoided friends and associates, largely out of a sense of shame and embarrassment — a self-imposed isolation that hurt their ability to network to find employment.
__
Many of these unemployed Americans cannot afford to seek professional help because they lost their employer-provided health insurance with their jobs. At the same time, federal, state and local governments have cut back on spending for mental health clinics and outreach in response to budget crises spawned by the bad economy.
__
It could get even worse if Medicaid funding of mental health services is put on the chopping block later this fall, as a congressional “supercommittee” hunts for spending cuts to help reduce the federal budget deficit. Medicaid is the main source of funding of public mental health services for young people and adults, accounting for nearly half of state mental health budgets, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. […]
__
Tim Jansen, executive director of Community Crisis Services, a crisis hotline in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said that in the past few months there has been a sharp rise in the volume of calls that he and his 40-person staff have fielded from people experiencing unemployment-fueled mental breakdowns. His staff is hearing more and more about people draining their savings and losing homes after they lost jobs.
__
“We used to be able to be more of a cheerleader on the phone for people struggling to get work and buckling under that stress,” Jansen said. “But the challenges have piled on top of each other over a series of years and the government’s [role is] fading from view . . . it’s hard to know what to say.”
Well, there’s always Joe Hill’s famous last words: “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”