I’ve heard you guys talking about this video in the comments. It’s very good.
Excellent Links
Friday Pimpcast
Here are the folks who wrote in about their organization or cause during the last week:
* If you’re in the Seattle area, there’s a Veterans Therapeutic Massage benefit brunch on November 6.
* Dames for Danes is “dedicated to saving the lives of homeless, abused and neglected Great Danes in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, as well as to areas resources will allow.”
* In Warren County, Ohio, the local National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) chapter had a tough time at their fundraiser this year and could use some help. Here’s their donation page. NAMI is a worthwhile organization — here’s their national webpage.
* Finally, one person wrote in to suggest mailing a brick to credit card companies using their postage-paid return mail envelopes.
Every Friday, I pimp the legit causes people send me during the week. Send me an email (my email is in the upper right-hand corner) if you’d like your cause highlighted.
Open Thread: “You Smell Like Bacon to Us”
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Felix Salmon has a nifty little post on meme generation, OWS, and what he calls “The Abacus Sign“, Abacus being the bankster grift Thot Expermint referenced in the quote. It’s a good pic, which deserved to go viral, but it also gave Salmon an opportunity to brag on his contribution to Probably The Greatest Work of Art Created in 2011 If Not In This Entire Century.
ETA: If you’re not clicking the second link (William Powhida), you’re missing out. Seriously.
Open Thread: “You Smell Like Bacon to Us”Post + Comments (57)
Monday Morning Open Thread & OWS/Together Update
(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)
OccupyWS/Together: More Links & News
(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)
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I wanted to link to Plutocracy Files, which has been doing great work aggregating information on the smaller protests across the country that don’t attract big-media punditocracy attention. Special props for Taryn Hart’s interview with Jeff Madrick, author of Krugman-approved The Age of Greed — YouTube clips at the link, for your weekend listening pleasure.
Per Charlie Pierce, a Very Relevant Celebrity will be visiting OWS:
The fact that Lech Walesa apparently is planning to come to New York to visit the Occupy site is just about the coolest thing that’s happened since the movement’s reach began to spread. I am looking forward to hearing David Brooks and George Effing Will and the rest of the people react to the presence of a genuine hero without whom the likes of Brooks and Will — and just about every conservative on the planet — would not be allowed to lie all the time about Ronald Reagan’s having won the Cold War. (Hint: It was far more the doing of people like Walesa and his fellow Pole, the guy who was sitting in the Chair of Peter at the time.) It would also be hilarious to hear someone call Lech Walesa a Communist.
Matt Taibbi, who also has some experience with the banksters, advises OWS to “hit the bankers where it hurts“. And Joe Coscarelli at NYMag‘s Daily Intel solicits the opinions of “protest historians” Mark Naison and Todd Gitlin on “What Will Become of Occupy Wall Street“.
Finally, Politico (you have been warned) reports that “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner suggested Friday that a new round of ‘dramatic enforcement actions’ against Wall Street wrongdoing is coming.“:
Asked on CNBC about the Occupy Wall Street movement’s frustrations over the lack of criminal charges related to the financial crisis, Geithner said action is on the way.
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“You’ve seen very, very dramatic enforcement actions already by the enforcement authorities across the U.S. government, and I’m sure you’re going to see more to come. You should stay tuned for that,” he said…
When promised future relief for an immediate problem, my country-born Irish grandparents had an old proverb referencing the difficulty of keeping the stock alive during the late-winter starvation months after the stores ran low and before the green shoots appeared: Live, horse, and you’ll get grass!
Friday Pimping
Here are a couple of links that might be of interest to Juicers:
* Find a Food Pantry (www.findafoodpantry.org)
We’ve already got information on about 10,000 food pantries, more than twice as many as any previous effort, but only about a third of the national total. So, if any BJ’ers who are involved in some way with food pantries in their communities wanted to visit the site and add or update the listing for said pantr(ies), that would be excellent. It would also be great if any readers who had their own blogs posted a similar opportunity for their readers, both in terms of spreading the word, and in terms of helping make the site easier to find via Google, etc.
* On October 22, the Allegan County Michigan United Way’s Volunteer Medical Corps will be holding a free clinic. They’re looking for medical professionals to volunteer. There’s a number and more information at the link.
As I mentioned last week, if you send me your legit organization or activity, I’ll pimp it on Friday. Don’t be shy.
Soros and #OWS
This Felix Salmon piece where he takes Reuters to task for their bullshit story attempting to claim that Soros is somehow funding #OWS is a must read.
What has done more damage to our public discourse? The “gotcha” mentality of the press, always looking for a scandal when there isn’t one, the “horse-race” style coverage of elections, crowding out issues in favor of superficial analysis, or the “both sides do it” crap we get spoon-fed every day? Honorable mention must surely go to “Cavuto Mark” journalism, as well.