Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

Mortgages: Canada vs. US

Here is a bit by Sherry Cooper, chief economist for the Bank of Montreal. From BMO's weekly publication Focus:

Amid concern about a Canadian housing bubble, the question of the financial strength of the major Canadian mortgage insurer, CMHC, has come to the forefront. The bottom line is that CMHC is solid. CMHC has very prudent underwriting standards and the quality of its insured mortgage portfolio is strong. The rate of delinquencies is very low and stable, remaining in line with the levels for Canadian banks—under 0.5%, compared to 8% in the U.S.

CMHC is governed by a Board of Directors and accountable to Parliament through the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development. As a Crown corporation, CMHC is also required to meet a number of governance and accountability requirements under the Financial Administration Act and the CMHC Act.

CMHC’s capital is funded by its insurance premiums, fees and investment income on the securitization portfolio of the Canada Housing Trust (CHT). It holds capital at a level nearly three times the mandatory minimum level set by OSFI to protect Canadian taxpayers from the costs arising from the risk of mortgage defaults1. CMHC has an internal (self-imposed) capital target of 150% of the OSFI Minimum Capital Test (MCT) and a capital holding target of 200% of MCT. In addition, they maintain additional capital reserves in retained earnings and unearned premiums and fees.

If CMHC is uncomfortable with the terms of a mortgage loan presented by lenders, then mitigating measures, such as an additional down payment or reduced amortization, would be requested—the minimum standard for the latter was officially reduced in Q1 of last year.

CMHC is also subject to stress testing for extreme circumstances similar to the banks. Even under the most extreme tests, with house prices plunging 30% and the economy going into a deep recession (with spiking interest rates—highly unlikely), CMHC comes through without relying on taxpayer funding.

Indeed, historically, CMHC earns an annual budget surplus that reduces the federal government’s outstanding deficit. Over the last decade, CMHC contributed over $14 billion to the government’s coffers.

The difference between Canada and America is very simple: Canadians believe in government and our regulators take their job seriously. In the US the people hate government and taxes and the regulators drank the kool-aid of "deregulation". Simply put: Canada believes in civil society while the US is a Hobbesian struggle of all-against-all.

America Has a Choice of Victims

Maureen Dowd has a good op-ed in the NY Times in which she looks at the Obamas since of "underappreciation" by the American public. Then she widens it to include Newt Gingerich who feels he is similarly underappreciated and misprepresented by the press:

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.

The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimization, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama” (the same Obama who told Time he was victimized by the press). Newt’s gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.

Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?

This is ridiculous. A leader needs to be psychological secure and have a joy in backslapping and glad-handing with people. But the dsyfunctional US political system is giving the American people a choice between flub and flop in the November poll.

Voting in introverts, narcissists, or those who see themselves as victims is asking for perverted politics and a poisoned civil society.

Radicalism: How to Do Effective Politics

Here is a lecture by Lawrence Lessig:

The 1% Attack on Public Goods

Here is a bit from a post by Robert Reich on his blog:

America no longer values public goods as we did before.

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good — improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades — through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War — this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and then communism. The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. (It was no coincidence that the greatest extensions of higher education after World War II were the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, and the largest public works project in history called the National Defense Interstate Highway Act.)

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations, and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as “them,” the notion of the public good has faded. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships;” or, for Republicans, simply “vouchers.”

Mitt Romney’s speaks derisively of what he terms the Democrats’ “entitlement” society in contrast to his “opportunity” society. At least he still envisions a society. But he hasn’t explained how ordinary Americans will be able to take advantage of good opportunities without good public schools, affordable higher education, good roads, and adequate health care.

His “entitlements” are mostly a mirage anyway. Medicare is the only entitlement growing faster than the GDP but that’s because the costs of health care are growing faster than the economy, and any attempt to turn Medicare into a voucher — without either raising the voucher in tandem with those costs or somehow taming them — will just reduce the elderly’s access to health care. Social Security, for its part, hasn’t contributed to the budget deficit; it’s had surpluses for years.

Other safety nets are in tatters. Unemployment insurance reaches just 40 percent of the jobless these days (largely because eligibility requires having had a steady full-time job for a number of years rather than, as with most people, a string of jobs or part-time work).

What could Mitt be talking about? Outside of defense, domestic discretionary spending is down sharply as a percent of the economy. Add in declines in state and local spending, and total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent by 2011.

Only in one respect is Romney right. America has created a whopping entitlement for the biggest Wall Street banks and their top executives — who, unlike most of the rest of us, are no longer allowed to fail. They can also borrow from the Fed at almost no cost, then lend the money out at 3 to 6 percent.

All told, Wall Street’s entitlement is the biggest offered by the federal government, even though it doesn’t show up in the budget. And it’s not even a public good. It’s just private gain.

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

America is becoming a banana republic. As the public sphere melts away, little fiefdoms are left where private armies control access. The rich get "special treatment" and the masses are left to mob the gates and beg for a crust of bread. Sad.

2011 as a Turning Point

Here is a bit from an interesting article by Rick Salutin in The Toronto Star:

Time magazine named The Protester its 2011 “Person of the Year” because, for decades till recently, most protests “seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.” That’s just silly. You can always find resistance and, depending on how you judge, it’s often relevant. ...

What may have been unique this past year was something else: a collapse of the conventional fountains of authority and respect. In the Arab world that meant governments. But in the West, it meant big business and finance. The brilliance of Occupy Wall Street was that it didn’t go to Washington. The Tea Party did; it directed its rage toward politicians and so it was eclipsed by the Occupiers, who targetted the bankers and financiers who control governments. That clearly resonated, but it wouldn’t have, 20 or 30 years ago.

Think back to the torrent of bestselling business bios and takeover epics like Iacocca or Barbarians at the Gate that began around 1980. Business was the hero; government was the “problem” because it impeded business’s freedom (even if business icons like Lee Iacocca demanded and relied on public money). Pro-business think-tanks proliferated; they disgorged “educational” series, often on public TV, by advocates like Milton Friedman. This accelerated through the Clinton-Bush years and beyond. Disdain for the über-rich was unthinkable until —

It wasn’t the crash of 2008 that led to their fall from grace, nor exposure of the greed and stupidity that required a massive public rescue. It was their graceless reaction to the bailouts: no apologies, remorse or gratitude — even faked; just more arrogance, bonuses, takeovers, foreclosures. Wall Street begged to be occupied. The Unrepentant Financier could have been Time’s Person.

...

Whose authority has also declined? How about Time magazine? The newsmag style used to sound authoritative and serenely confident. Now it sounds inane. “Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough. . . . They dissented; they demanded —” Everywhere? Like out my window right now? And “it seems”? Seems to who(m)? Who makes these claims? What voice would you need to actually say words so pompous and vacuous? You can see Jon Stewart (if he did print) wincing as he reads it. Where did that invincible authority go?

The power of authority diminishes when you can hear credible, contesting voices. Print tends to be monotonal and univocal, unlike the oral tradition that preceded it. But the Internet, though it often lacks actual speech, is oral in the sense of interactive, like a Socratic dialogue. In oral mode, less is often more because speech is so laden with gesture, tone etc.; even something as short as a tweet can suffice. That too diminishes normal authority, which likes to rumble on.

Go read the whole article. It is very thought-provoking.

I personally like the analysis that says that our culture is moving from hierarchy where the "experts" dictate to a collective where everybody's voice gets a chance to contend for attention and authority. I understand the need for an organizing principle to reduce the cacophony, but I'm also aware that elitism tends to suffocate the voice of the dissenter and prevents the rise of the new. We need diversity. Life is a race and we need change and innovation to help us to get from here with all its problems to there with its promise of a better future.

David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

This is an excellent speculative historical review of how debt, money, slavery, coinage, and government arose. It is chock-a-block full of obscure but interesting facts. The analysis is fresh and thought-provoking. I'm not in a position to assess the scientific validity of his reconstruction of ancient societies, but it rings true to me.

If you want a new perspective on how economic forces shape us and our societies, this is a "must read" book.

Here is just a tidbit from his chapter on the Axial Age (800 BC to 600 AD):

This is the key to Seaford's argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance -- as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it -- but whose nature was a profound enigma.

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else -- or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl -- it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality. With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athen's owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be used to acquire anything anyone wanted.

The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war -- the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block -- the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.

The war between Spirit and Flesh, then between the nobile Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal -- all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since -- can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.

It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? re they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

I heartily recommend that you read this book.

Mario Savio Lives!

Here is a speech by Robert Reich in honour of Mario Savio and the Berkeley FSM (Free Speech Movement)...



Sadly, Mario Savio is dead, but his words live on. I love this bit:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.



What sparked FSM? Students wanted to include "political" tables on the plaza along with the others about fraternities/sororities and other campus groups. Here is a video of the original "Occupy" Berkeley demo:

The struggle for a better world is an eternal fight. It can't be fought and won and forgotten. Sadly it is an on-going struggle. As Thomas Jefferson said of Shay's Rebellion which occurred shortly after the War of Independence:

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Unlike Jefferson, I would propose that the focus of the struggle should be focused on education, voting, and the moral suasion of protest and not bloody revolution. Violence too often goes off the rails. But an organized and motivated social movement has a legacy. It is potent.

The last few minutes of the video make it very, very clear how actions have consequences and the social struggle continues through the ages. Reich recalls his friend Michael Schwerner who died in 1964 during the Freedom Summer when Mario Savio and many hundreds of other activists went into the Deep South to help register blacks to vote and to help bring change to that deeply brutal and ugly racist society. They won that struggle, but it was a bitter one. Robert Reich is evidence of how a thread of struggle knits the ages together. We are inheritors of previous struggles and our present struggle helps endow the future with a better world. It is an endless struggle, but a necessary struggle and a fruitful struggle.

What the Elite Offers When You Ask for Democracy

The ultra-rich don't like the bottom 99% "demonstrating". It is just too messy. Those 99% don't have a clear agenda. They don't have polished spokesmen who can step forth with a program.

The elite just don't like the messiness of "democracy". There are too many loose ends. It can't easily be controlled from one centre. So here is what the ultra-rich offer:



The rich like to leave running things to themselves. They have the money, so they can afford to buy the politicians, the police, the judges, the lawyers, the bureaucracy. The above video shows the elite of Egypt beating "good sense" into the heads of recalcitrant Egyptians, foolish people in the bottom 99% who don't understand that their "job" is to serve the rich. The military and police are simply on the street to remind the bottom 99% where their place is in society.

Public Enemy #1

US police have gone after an 84 year-old-woman, arresting her, pepper spraying her, at an Occupy Seattle demonstration. This is "justice" in America...



It is incredible that the police would become violent just when the group was very publicly deciding to go home. It shows that the police are not "forced" into brutal behaviour. This is gratuitous brutality just to "prove" that the cops are "in control". This is what the top 1% want. They want to keep the bottom 99% scared and disorganized. So they intimidate and brutalize.

As everybody knows... it is the 84 year old grannies who are the real threat to America. Not the trillion dollar crimes of Wall Street that have created 25 million unemployed and 10 million families losing their homes.

It is interesting that she ties the violence and repression from on top with the kind of violent repression used by Nazi Germany. She's lived the politics and she can testify to reality on the ground. And as she points out, the media don't carry any stories about real popular protest. Big corporations can "buy" the news coverage they want. The poor and middle class have to fight via protests in the street to get any coverage.

I don't buy all the "issues" of the left and political activists, but most of the time they are speaking the truth. They need to be heard. Democracy is the only tool to achieve a true civil society in which all interests get represented fairly. A real civil society needs an uncorrupted politics and a free media and a citizenry who pay attention and get out to vote. This combination is hard to achieve. That is why democracy so often is dysfunctional. But ultimately democracy is the only political system that can assure a fair society. Anything else leads, in the long run, to repression and collapse.

Update 2011nov18: Here's a photo of the woman being helped after being pepper-sprayed:

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Reclaiming America

Here is Lawrence Lessig on a new coalition to educate Americans about the corrupting influence of big money in politics and their society:

Lawrence Lessig Welcomes Rootstrikers to United Republic from Rootstrikers on Vimeo.

More details at unitedrepublic.org.

What Passes for "Justice" in America

From a post by Matt Taibbi on his Rolling Stone blog:

Woman Gets Jail For Food-Stamp Fraud; Wall Street Fraudsters Get Bailouts

Had a quick piece of news I wanted to call attention to, in light of the recent developments at Zuccotti Park. For all of those who say the protesters have it wrong, and don’t really have a cause worth causing public unrest over, consider this story, sent to me by a friend on the Hill.

Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.

Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.

The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.

Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.

He ultimately gave her three years, saying, "The defendant's criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court."

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank have "been the beneficiary of government generosity." Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIG bailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees.

All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court for fraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced to give back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gotten gains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi, in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively, for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi’s debt.

Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got to keep their jobs.

Anita McLemore, meanwhile, lied to feed her children, gave back every penny of her "fraud" when she got caught, and is now going to do three years in prison. Explain that, Eric Holder!

Here’s another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance.

This is the reason why all of these settlements allowing banks to walk away without "admissions of wrongdoing" are particularly insidious. A normal person, once he gets a felony conviction, immediately begins to lose his rights as a citizen.

But white-collar criminals of the type we’ve seen in recent years on Wall Street – both the individuals and the corporate "citizens" – do not suffer these ramifications. They commit crimes without real consequence, allowing them to retain access to the full smorgasbord of subsidies and financial welfare programs that, let’s face it, are the source of most of their profits.

Why, I wonder, does a bank that has committed fraud multiple times get to retain access to the Federal Reserve discount window? Why should Citigroup and Goldman Sachs get to keep their status as Primary Dealers of U.S. government debt? Are there not enough banks without extensive histories of fraud and malfeasance that can be awarded these de facto subsidies?

Go read the original post to get all the embedded links. These are worth following up. You need to really appreciate the "tilt" of justice in America. The makes all too obvious that there is one "justice" for the 99% and a very different "justice" for the 1%.

What surprises me is that most people don't join the protests. They simply put up with the vast and ugly injustice in American life. They continue to hope for a better day, a fairer deal. But it is a fruitless hope. Only if there is profound change in America will the bottom 99% get a chance to improve their lot. They need to fight so that they can get a fair piece of the economic pie. For 30+ years under Republican rule, the rich have gotten fabulously wealthy while the middle class has treaded water and the poor have actually become poorer. Tragic.

Keith Olbermann Takes Oakland's Mayor to Task

Olbermann starts out by praising Mayor Jean Quan's previous service to Oakland. It is an impressive list. But then he gets down to the horror that she unleashed by turning her police loose on peaceful protesters and makes it utterly, utterly clear the crime she has perpetrated by her actions. You must watch this video:



For a first person narrative by somebody on the ground in Oakland, read this article by Mike Godwin in reason.com:

If you've been following the mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests, odds are that you've heard about events at Occupy Oakland. What you can't tell from the news clips is how the situation has played out for those of us who live here. I can't speak for everyone, but I do know that my reaction, both to the protestors and to the violent police interventions against them, is hardly an uncommon one.

...

The vibe where I was standing was tense. Occasionally an individual shouted at the arrayed police, “This is America! What are you doing here?” Or, “I can't believe you're doing this! We love you guys but what you're doing is wrong!” I didn't think it was a great idea to shout at the (silent but intent) array of police—it wasn't likely they were going to suddenly relent, and I knew they had been wearing heavy riot gear and carrying weapons (including astonishingly large batons) for six or more hours. My instinct was that it was not particularly safe to shout at tired men and women with weapons, no matter how righteous one's outrage is.

...

One guy passing me on the way downtown warned about tear gas. I spotted New York Times reporter Malia Wollan talking into her mobile—as she walked past I heard her describing the apparent effects of the gas on individuals exposed to it. Her account is available here.

Of the people headed toward me, I first thought a disproportionate number were bicyclists—only a few minutes later did I realize, embarrassingly, that there were other reasons for wearing a bicycle helmet that night. The tension in the crowd was palpably building so I decided it was time to head home. Keeping my distance turned out to have been wise, because this is what I missed getting caught up in:



I was also standing 50-100 feet south from where a police officer appears to have thrown a flash grenade into a crowd of people gathered to help 24-year-old Scott Olsen, who suffered massive head injuries after allegedly being struck by a tear gas canister.



I confess that it breaks my heart to watch this clip. If I had seen someone collapsed in the street, I'd have tried to help that person too. These people were apparently punished for their impulse to help.

...

I don’t know how to interpret everything I saw, and I can’t state with any authority what Occupy Oakland or any of the other protests ultimately mean. But I do know this: The millions of dollars California just spent on this crackdown did nothing to dispel or discourage the protestors. In fact, the police intervention has echoed around the world. Occupy Wall Street committed to sending $20,000 to Occupy Oakland and protestors as far away as Tahrir Square in Egypt have expressed their solidarity with the Oakland protestors.

History tends to happen when you least expect it, and my new neighbors have taken their first steps into its pages.

Go read the full article.

If you want to see the sympathy protest in Tahrir Square Egypt for the Occupy Oakland violence, here is a post on BoingBoing with pictures.

Here is political commentary in Wired magazine on the fallout from the police violence at Occupy Oakland:

But the police forces’ violent tactics worked only temporarily, and have, for the moment at least, handed the Occupy movement a moral and political victory so big that not even Occupy protestors seem to recognize it.

The nation, and even much of the world, seemed to recoil in shock from the images coming out of Oakland Tuesday night, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse unarmed protestors, who built a camp in the city as part of the nationwide protest against an unfair political and economic system.

Critically wounded Marine veteran Scott Olsen became a rallying point for Occupy, following widely seen footage of protestors trying to carry him to safety in the midst of a tear gas assault. There were other pictures and videos: streets littered with rubber bullets, people in wheelchairs trapped in the tear gas, and bloodied faces and bruised bodies of unarmed protestors.

On Wednesday, OccupyOakland’s fortunes reversed.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan announced that people could reoccupy Frank Ogawa plaza, renamed Oscar Grant plaza by the occupiers in honor of a black Oakland man shot to death by transit police in 2009. When people arrived for the General Assembly, the occupation’s standard open meeting, the grassy area of the plaza was fenced off. But through the course of the evening, and not without violent conflict among the occupiers, the fences came down.

People fought each other over the fences, pulling at each other, some linking arms to protect the fence, and screaming, all while the GA went on in the distance. Despite the fears of those attempting to protect the fence, no police moved in after it went down. The GA proceeded through the evening undisturbed by anything but news choppers overhead and a turn-out too big for the sound system to cover.

But word came in that an attack was imminent on OccupySF across the bay, and a large contingent moved to get on the BART transit to join San Francisco’s Occupiers in Justin Herman Plaza. But when they arrived at the station they found it closed; BART wasn’t letting the occupation on in Oakland, or letting people off at Embarcadero, the station closest to OccupySF.

The roused crowd took to the streets, marching down Broadway towards the police station. They met no resistance. The police stayed a block away on all sides, and melted back in front of the path of the crowd, directing traffic away from the protestor-filled streets of Downtown Oakland. Many protestors were looking for a confrontation with police, but found none — staying peaceful and well behaved, if boisterous and peripatetic. The only property damage I observed were a couple incidents of graffiti-tagging, of which only one was definitely attributable to the OccupyOakland march. There were no broken windows or even overturned trash bins, and police stayed largely out of sight for the evening.

...

During the slow, tweeted protestor pursuit of police, OccupySF drilled for a police raid, practicing locking arms around their camp and removing vital gear from the site. As the hours wore on, many tired occupiers became paranoid, and every bus or van that went by startled people and sent them into conspiratorial speculations. Some occupiers went around writing the National Lawyer’s guild phone number on the arms of occupiers who didn’t already have a lawyer.

Five members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, several running for mayor, arrived and used the people’s mic to address the occupiers. They stayed put for hours, and many occupiers credited them for preventing the police raid.

On Thursday, the SFPD stretched credulity by telling ABC Channel 7 that the whole thing was a training exercise, resulting in a sarcastic local news report regarding the whole event. At the same time, OccupySF posted a picture of a notice given to businesses around the occupation warning of “…increased activity by the SFPD in the immediate vicinity of One Market Plaza starting around this evening’s commute.”

In Oakland the occupation was returning Thursday, growing from one tent in the reclaimed area Wednesday night to eight tents. OccupyOakland is rebuilding against the background of a campaign to recall Mayor Quan, calls for OPD to be disciplined, solidarity marches around the country and the world, and the New York City GA’s consensus to devote 100 sleeping bags and $20,000 for legal and medical expenses to OccupyOakland.

...

Sheamus Collins, a bartender from Dublin, showed off his rubber bullet wound.

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...

No one seemed aware of how crushing their political victory in the last 24 hours had really been.

The Right to Petition the Government, the Oakland "Occupy Wall Street" Version

Lots of countries have high-sounding "Constitutions" with lots of "rights" and "liberties". The real test is when the citizenry attempt to exercise their rights.

The US has its First Amendment as part of its "Bill of Rights" to its Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Sadly, the authorities interpret that as the right to assemble and petition in some far away scruffy corner where nobody will see you or hear you. If you decide to assemble in an urban area, the authorities will soon decide that you are an "eyesore" that there are "health concerns" and that you have "overstayed your welcome". In short, protest, but not too loudly, not to visibly, and not too long.

You can tell when your rights are "fishy"... they send in the cops in riot gear in the middle of the night and unleash the hounds of hell to drive you away...









News coverage:

• Here is the story of the Iraqi war vet injured by police in Oakland from the UK's Guardian newspaper.


• And here is a timeline account from the UK's Guardian newspaper.


• And here is
  local coverage from the Oakland Tribune.

A legitimate government would assemble the police without riot gear, invite in the press, bring in cameras, send in high profile officials to explain why they want to move and/or suppress the demonstration, and rely on public consensus to get the protesters to leave.

I have no problem with cops in riot gear going in full force on the crazy nihilists who use "protests" as a cover for trashing the city. But if the government is legitimate, they should be able to get all but a handful to leave peacefully if the government truly has the consent of the governed behind them. That they are doing this in the middle of the night with such violence says to me that the government is bought-and-sold by big corporate money and the billionaires behind the scenes. There is nothing "legitimate" in handling peaceful protest in this manner.

An honest government wouldn't be using violation of "camping laws" or the so-called worries over "sanitation" to send in riot cops to beat people with billy clubs and tear gas them. That isn't how you deal with campers and trash. That is how a police state deals with political dissent. So much for the "rights" of Americans under their constitution. US citizens have a Constitutionally "guaranteed right to protest" so long as they do it at home, in a closet, in a whisper, in the dark, and don't let anybody know about their "protest".

The Dilbert Version of "Occupy Wall Street"

Here is a nice bit by Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon, to put the issues of Occupy Wall Street into simple terms people can understand:

If you and a friend go to lunch with each other on a regular basis, but you pay for lunch three times as often as your friend, is that fair?

Your mind immediately wonders if there are extenuating circumstances. Is the friend doing something for you in some other way? Are you wealthy whereas your friend is not? Is your friend also a client? Did your friend drive from out of town? Are these lunches always in the same place?

When evaluating fairness, we understand that you need to throw everything into the mix. You can't isolate one variable. For example, when comparing the tax burden on the rich versus the other 99%, you want to look beyond the federal income tax rate and include payroll taxes, sales taxes, and any other taxes. That's fair, right?

Wait...Are we leaving something out? Why don't we also tally up the benefits of the taxes? That's part of the equation too. Let's go back to our lunch example to see why.

Suppose you buy lunch three times more often than your friend, but in every case you eat at your favorite place in the world and your friend can barely tolerate the cuisine. Let's also assume it's a long drive for your friend, but very convenient for you. In fact, it's the only restaurant that's near enough to your workplace for you to have lunch in an hour. You both get the benefit of your friendly banter, but only one of you enjoys the food and convenience. With this new information, it seems a bit fairer that you pay for lunch more often than your friend because you get the most benefit.

Now back to taxes. Doesn't the fairness argument demand that we at least try to determine who gets the most benefits from taxes paid? I think it does. (This is a good time to remind you that fairness isn't a real thing. I'm just chasing shadows here to make a point.)

So who benefits most from taxes? Is it the wealthy person who benefits from protecting his fortune, or is it the people who consume the greatest percentage of the social services? Let's consider some specifics to tease out an answer.

Consider Social Security. The wealthy pay a much lower percentage of their total income towards social security because the tax only applies to the first $106,800 of income. And the wealthy also make a lot of money from investments that are not subject to the tax. But on the benefit side, Social Security has no real value to the wealthy. The retirement payout isn't enough to change their lifestyles. Social Security is an odd tax in the sense that you're really just letting the government hold your dollar with the promise that if you live long enough they might give you one or even two dollars later. In that sense, the tax is only unfair to the people who die young.

How about the military? All citizens get the same bodily protection. But the rich also get to protect vast fortunes whereas the poor and middle class have less to protect. But remember that half of the country pays zero federal income tax. Financially, they get a free ride from military protection, unless they are in the military. And a typical rich person might pay a hundred times more in federal taxes, on an absolute dollar basis, than a typical middle class taxpayer. That seems about right.

If you think of paying taxes for military protection as a sort of insurance policy, I would argue that it has great value for protecting your first $100 million of assets and a rapidly declining value for protecting anything above that arbitrary number. In other words, if a wealthy person loses all but his last $100 million, his lifestyle would be about the same as before. A wealthy person's practical benefit from the military is capped even if his fortune is not.

We can't ignore the physical and emotional cost to military people and their families, which is concentrated in the non-wealthy portion of the population. But as long as military service remains voluntary, I think we can view that noble calling as a separate issue from taxes.

How about sales taxes? There are no sales taxes on groceries, rent, education, medical care, garbage service, water, or any of the essential services provided by public agencies. That covers most of the budget for low income families. My guess is that most people pay about 1% of their income for sales taxes and get more than their money's worth in state services in return. The rich pay a much higher dollar amount, but arguably that's a good value for them too. They have more assets to protect from criminals, more cars on the road, and so on.

I don't have an overall conclusion in terms of tax fairness because fairness isn't a real thing. People simply do whatever they think will maximize their benefit, give or take some irrationality. Fairness is just the marketing spin. All I'm saying today is that any discussion of tax rate fairness needs to include a discussion of who gets the most benefits. A more complete discussion of fairness, as I'm suggesting, will still be ridiculous, because fairness is an illusion. But for some reason I can't settle for half an illusion. I like my absurdities in full servings.

Looking at society is a lot like the three blind me inspecting the elephant. Each "sees" something different. The billionaires are convinced that it was their genius and hard work that got them their wealth. Others, like Warren Buffett, point out that you can't make a billion without a society with the infrastructure in place to support your entrepreneurial spirit.

For too long -- roughly 40 years -- the radical right has been selling the American people a pig in a poke. They have claimed that if you bow and scrape when the rich pass by they will toss dollar bills out the window to make your life better (the infamous Reagan "trickle down" economy). The latest incarnation is "don't tax the rich because they are the 'job creators' and if you tax them they will go on strike and there will be no more jobs". It is an utter lie, but it scares a lot of people. The OWS movement is finally breaking the mental shackles of 40 years of right wing propaganda.

Is Democracy Coming to America?

It is starting to look like the people are going to claw back a voice in government. After 50 years of being marginalized by politicians bought and sold by lobbyists, there is a force in the streets with Occupy Wall Street that looks like it may grow to the point where numbers will finally overcome money.



Here are some key bits from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

...

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.

...

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

This is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are about: social justice. The bottom 99% have been fleeced and squeezed and abused. They have finally risen up and demand a better deal. America has seen a New Deal, a Fair Deal, a Great Society, and it is asking for a Just Society with a fair deal for the bottom 99%.

Corporatocracy

Jeffrey Sachs has an article in Huffington Post that lays into the right wing politician Paul Ryan and the "corptocracy" that the Republicans are building in place of democracy:

My new book, The Price of Civilization, describes why America needs a "mixed economy," one where a more effective federal government regulates business and invests alongside the business sector. In his review of my book, Congressman Paul Ryan, an avowed libertarian, describes my book as anti-American in its values. ...

Ryan ignores the extensive evidence in the book showing that Americans support the values of a mixed economy, not of Ryan's free-market libertarianism. Americans today by large majorities support public education, Medicare, Social Security, help for the indigent, stronger regulation of the banks, and higher taxation of the rich. ...

On issue after issue, Washington is presently bucking the public's values, rather than respecting them. A majority of the public wants to preserve social programs, but they are being cut anyway. A majority wants higher taxes on the rich, but they are being cut rather than raised. A majority wants to end the wars, but they continue anyway.

The reason is the following. America is losing its democracy as our politicians trade their votes for campaign contributions from the corporate lobbies. We have a corporatocracy rather than a democracy, and Ryan stands at the center of it. The Wall Street Journal, which commissioned Ryan's review of my book, is the leading print mouthpiece for the corporatocracy.

While Sachs -- who was part of the problem with his "cold turkey" capitalism for Russia and his globalization crusading -- has now turned against the corporate greed and crime, he doesn't mention the people who are putting their bodies on the line to clean up this mess and bring back democracy, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and groups like them putting in the hard work to bring back a better world. Instead, Sachs is selling his latest book. I'm glad he is on the right side of this issue, but he has a miserable track record.

But I fully agree with Jeffrey Sachs on this:

On issue after issue, Washington is presently bucking the public's values, rather than respecting them. A majority of the public wants to preserve social programs, but they are being cut anyway. A majority wants higher taxes on the rich, but they are being cut rather than raised. A majority wants to end the wars, but they continue anyway.

The reason is the following. America is losing its democracy as our politicians trade their votes for campaign contributions from the corporate lobbies. We have a corporatocracy rather than a democracy, and Ryan stands at the center of it. The Wall Street Journal, which commissioned Ryan's review of my book, is the leading print mouthpiece for the corporatocracy.

...

America's corporatocracy is governed by vested interests rather than moral or economic principles. After financial deregulation led to the 2008 collapse, Ryan's enthusiasm for free enterprise suddenly took a second place to his new enthusiasm to rescue the banks through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout. The "free-market" Wall Street Journal similarly defended the bank bailout, all of a sudden lecturing its readers about market failures and the limits of the free market.

This is why Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.".

Press Coverage of the "Occupy Wall Street" Demonstration

Here are some bits from a good post by Allison Kilkenny in The Nation where she questions the "official media" coverage of this demonstration:

Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from people who had just read this New York Times article (though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees, depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline-psychotic transients.

Bellafante, who is not a reporter but a columnist for the Times, offered a representation of the protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists’ motives she presents in the span of the article. She first claims a Joni Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement. In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as “leaderless.” Either the people at Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way). So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight.

The more serious aspect of the protest—the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend including the arrests of more than eighty people, several of whom the police first penned and then maced—is offered as an aside in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all). By the way, none of the young women in the following video are in their underwear.

Bellafante goes on to (rightfully) wonder why the response to the widening class divide hasn’t come in the form of a more serious movement. A proposed hypothesis never emerges, even though Bellafante almost stumbles across one when she describes a young man who is stopping by only in “fits and spurts” because his mother fears he’ll be tear-gassed by the police. It sounds as though Bellafante is on the cusp of critiquing the US police state that has completely terrified the activist community into submission, but then she retreats.

The main bone the article wishes to pick is the scattered ideologies of the attendees—a fair point. However, Bellafante never attempts to do the job of real journalism here, which is to use this slice of life to help her readers understand the world around them. Instead, she comes across as a rubbernecker leering at a particularly bloody wreck.

Go read the whole post. There is a lot more detail and points to consider (plus embedded links).

I remember my experience of demonstrations in the 1960s and 70s. Sure enough, there are a good number of kooks in a crowd. Even the idea of "demonstrating" is felt to be somehow wrong in a democracy where supposedly the people's voice is captured in the election. But elections presuppose and informed public which in turn presupposed an open and effective press. But these are rarely in place, so the role of a demonstration is to kick the system in the rump to force the press to pay attention. This in turn gets the wider public thinking about a topic that heretofore was ignored.

Demonstrations are important and effective. But a journalist who holds them up as a laughingstock is working hard to realize the right wing fantasy of shrinking government down to a size where it can be strangled in a bathtub. If you can turn the public into sleepwalkers by making demonstrations a joke, you will get the "government" you deserve, a robbers' haven where self-interested crooks run the show.

Here's the bottom line for Kilkenny:

... Bellafante reaches a far, far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving, stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only people on your side, why get off the couch at all?

This rubbernecking style of journalism is particularly dangerous right now because it amounts to criticizing a burning house for the color of its curtains. The curtains might be brash, ostentatious and completely unhelpful in maintaining the overall flow of the home’s ambiance, but it’s perhaps not the most pertinent detail of the moment. Here’s a more pressing question: Why are the people Bellafante described in her article the ones left behind?

The teargas aside starts to tap into something important: how the police state and its domestic weaponry and bureaucratic assist with the needs for permits to do anything in protests have successfully crippled the activism community. Activists are afraid. You can smell it in their midst. They talk about the constant presence of agent provocateurs and undercovers at every protest. They share battle stories of being abused by the police, like being tazed or held so long in makeshift police pens that they had to defecate in their clothing. And these are the brave ones that still show up to the protests.

It’s not mere paranoia. We know for a fact that the FBI monitors activism groups, and this practice reached a frenzied level during the Bush administration years. These intimidation practices continue under President Obama in the form of raids.

So much for democracy in America. So much for America having a future.

There's a reason why the founders of the America Republic made such blunt statements as the need to "water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots". Those who run a society are not interested in protests or demonstrations. They will always paint them as loonies and malcontents. Real democracy unfortunately requires a real struggle. The trick is to work for change without being corrupted by the dark forces that those in power use against you. The real task is to remain hopeful and sane while the powerful paint you as a nihilist and crazy.

Pay It Forward

This is what great civilizations are built on. People doing the right thing and giving a helping hand to the next generation. Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about Carl Sagan:



If you want to read a really good book, read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World.

Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World 2.0"

This book is a fast read looking at America's relationship with the rest of the world. It focuses on two up-coming competitors, China and India. Zakaria says interesting things. This is a solid book. There are no big surprises and nothing controversial.

He takes the US to task for failing to live up to its ideals in the post-9/11 world. There is too much fear, too much security and too little civil liberties, and too much fear of "the other". He gives some solid advice. Again, pretty mainstream stuff.

Here's a bit to give you a taste of the book:

As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak economy, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to begin with -- about 225 years old -- has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups. The result is ceaseless, virulent debate about trivia -- politics as theater -- and very little substance, compromise, and action. A "can-do" country is now saddled with a "do-nothing" political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure -- the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork-barrel spending the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades.

And this:

To foreigners, American officials seem clueless about the world they are supposed to be running. "There are two sets of conversations, one with Americans in the room and one without," says Kishore Mahbubani, who was formerly Singapore's foreign secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. Because Americans live in a "cocoon," they don't see the "sea change in attitudes toward America throughout the world."

The book is a pleasant read. It won't startle you, but it does give a perspective on America that most Americans don't have. Zakaria was born in India and came to the US for college and never left. As an American with a unique background -- and a day job at Time magazine and CNN that lets him monitor the world and think about politics -- he has some useful things to say which other Americans should listen to.

As a Canadian I find it startling that not only is the average US citizen ignorant of the outside world, they are even poorly educated about their own history and political system. Every American needs to spend more time thinking about the role of America in the world. Turn off the political demagogues and read something thoughtful and get a broader understanding. Zakaria's book is a good place to start.