That Insignificant, Ignored Protest in NY

The major media has studiously ignored Occupy Wall Street. If they write anything about it, they report it to be crazies and diehards, a hundred at most, who persist in hanging out in the Wall Street area, aimless, pointless.

Funny... that "less than 100" resulted in over 700 being arrested while thousands stormed the Brooklyn Bridge. At least the UK's Guardian newspaper is reporting what is happening in the US:

More than 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening during a march by anti-Wall Street protesters who have been occupying a downtown Manhattan square for two weeks.

The group, called Occupy Wall Street, has been protesting against the finance industry and other perceived social ills by camping out in Zuccotti park in New York.

During the afternoon a long line of protesters numbering several thousand snaked through the streets towards the landmark bridge across the East River with the aim of ending at a Brooklyn park.

However, during the march across the bridge groups of protesters sat down or strayed into the road from the pedestrian pathway. They were then arrested in large numbers by officers who were part of a heavy police presence shepherding the march along its path.

Will the major media in the US recognize this event? Will they continue to report it as a handful of odd mentally unstable youth with no political agenda? Will it take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands mobilized and seizing major urban centres before the US media acknowledges that there is a public movement afoot in the US that is neither right nor left, but a mobilized citizenry who is fed up with the lies of the media and the fact that Wall Street has bought the politicians and control the news and police and the politicians?

By the way... this protest seems to have been carefully manipulated by the police so that it could arrest in bulk the whole crowd. Yet again, proof that the police and the politicians are conspiring to suppress the democratic impulse by prevent popular demonstrations:

But others said the sit-down protest appeared to happen only after the protesters were deliberately blocked off by police after actually being allowed onto the roadway. "They met the police line and ended up being arrested one by one," said Damon Eris, another protester.

The march ended in chaotic scenes with police buses driving up the bridge to be filled with arrested marchers. The packed buses then drove off to central booking. Meanwhile, other marchers waited at the bottom of the bridge's Manhattan side and cheered as some released protesters, or those who had escaped being blocked off, came back down. "Let them go! Let them go!" was a frequent chant.

From an Associated Press report:

More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

...

Some of the protesters said they were lured onto the roadway by police, or they didn't hear the calls from authorities to head to the pedestrian walkway. Police said no one was tricked into being arrested, and those in the back of the group who couldn't hear were allowed to leave.

...

Elsewhere in the U.S. on Saturday, protesters assembled in Albuquerque, N.M., Boston and Los Angeles to express their solidarity with the movement in New York, though their demands remain unclear. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been camped in Zuccotti Park and have clashed with police on earlier occasions. Mostly, the protests have been peaceful, and the movement has shown no signs of losing steam. Celebrities including Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon made recent stops to encourage the group.

This is going to blow up into a major social movement because the heavy-handedness of "the authorities". The police and the politicians are showing themselves to be puppets of Wall Street and the big money that for too long has controlled everything.

This is the Arab Spring come to America.

James Fallows on Police Abuse of their Power

Here is a bit from a post by The Atlantic editor James Fallows in his blog:

Adrian Lesher, a staff attorney with the NY Legal Aid Society, writes with the following observation about police abuses-of-power during the Wall Street protests, noting that he's speaking not for Legal Aid but for himself:

One point that I haven't seen made is that this sort of abusive behavior is reported routinely by people of color and by people of lower economic status. Yet their complaints are routinely dismissed or ignored in the media. Sometimes it takes middle and upper class white people getting hurt to get the media moving.

Of course that's true. But I think there's an additional interesting and crucial element in this case. Despite the largely white, largely educated nature of the crowd in these protests, to me it's obvious that the abuse stories would have disappeared if not for the videos. Very much like the original Rodney King police-beating video, they have the amazing property of rendering debate moot. The NYPD spokesman can talk all he wants about the pepper-spraying being "appropriate." But no reasonable person who spends a minute looking at the video, even allowing for selectivity in filming, can think that the coward-cop* behaved appropriately (or in accordance with NYPD guidelines).

And the make-or-break nature of the videos in this case not only raises the obvious questions about the other cases that are never captured. It also underscores the importance of a point another reader makes:

What disturbs me most about this incident - even more than the abuse of pepper spray - is the evident targeting of people carrying cameras and video cameras. Also, the focus on going after women. In one of the videos we see a different white-shirted cop seize a loudly-protesting dark-skinned woman by her big head of hair, drag her across the barricade and smash her head on the ground. (I think this is the attack that caused the group of women to start freaking out, just before the pepper spray attack) Yes, granted, she's being very loud and obnoxious, but she appears to be behind the netting and is not offering any physical threat to the cop.

In another one of the videos, apparently taken just prior to the pepper spray attack, a large woman with what looks to be a professional-level video camera is set upon by police, pulled into the street, thrown down and handcuffed. It doesn't appear that she did anything wrong at all, or even said anything, before being targeted. I think these elements of the story are worth going into. If the cops are intent upon preventing citizens from taking photos/video of them doing their work, there's obviously a problem.

Yes. The only time I got in trouble with the police in China, as I'll say more about in a forthcoming book, was when I made the same mistake -- that of taking pictures of cops who were roughing up someone else. At the time I thought: cops hyper-sensitive about being photographed? What do I expect: this is authoritarian China. It turns out that I could just as well have been saying: this is America. This is New York.

For the record: police have a hard job; most of them (especially the blue shirts rather than the higher-ranking white shirts) in these videos seem to be keeping their cool, often under provocation; videos could be selective or misleading; and the point is not to be anti-police. But enough people in uniform, starting with the coward, seem to have assumed that they could casually abuse people and not be called on it, that they need to be called.


* And, yes, OK I know from the Daily Show last night that the pepper sprayer, Anthony Bologna, is on the verge of being immortalized Onion-style as "Tony Baloney." There is a danger of the whole episode passing straight to oddball joke status. You can imagine this guy showing up soon on the talk shows, Joey Buttafuoco style. But there is a serious side to it -- which is why I have harped on it this long.

Police need to be held accountable. In British Columbia most policing is done by the federal police, the RCMP, and they refuse to allow any outside group to investigate complaints against them. Consequently they have a very long history of abuse from beating to killing. And they literally get away with murder. I'm all for a professional police force and I'm willing to pay to attract top quality people to the field. What I'm against is thugs in uniform getting their jollies beating up those at the bottom of the social heap because they know they can get away with it. (Click on the tag "police" to see other cases of police abuse including many by RCMP.)

Defining Your Terms in a Debate

The Republican Rick Perry has shown his disregard for the dictionary and his careless contempt for history and institutions by confusing a Ponzi scheme with Social Security. The following diagram shows the overlap between the two...

Click to Enlarge
Figure taken from a Mother Jones article
Using Perry logic I can conclude that he is really a she-devil who underwent a sex change which successfully transferred the gender but unfortunately left the intelligence behind.

Corruption and Economic Growth

Here is a bit from an interesting post by Tim Harford in his blog:

An old joke: a bureaucrat from Sani Abacha’s Nigeria visits a bureaucrat in Suharto’s Indonesia and is impressed that his Indonesian counterpart lives in a nice house and drives a Mercedes. “Do you see that road? Ten per cent,” the Indonesian explains.

A couple of years later the visit is reciprocated. Suharto’s man finds the Nigerian civil servant in a palace with a pair of Ferraris. “Do you see that road?” says the Nigerian, gesturing at virgin rainforest. “One hundred per cent.”

There is more to the joke than meets the eye, of course: Indonesia managed to combine severe corruption with many years of strong growth, while Nigeria stagnated over a similar period. Corruption matters, but so does the type of corruption.

And here is a conundrum. Technocrats have long offered economic policy advice to powerful people in developing countries, yet powerful people may have much more to gain by ignoring the advice and lining their own pockets. The problem is so severe it is a wonder that economies ever develop at all. But the situation is not hopeless, because contrary to the joke, it may be better to get 10 per cent of a booming economy than 100 per cent of a stagnating one.

What the world needs now is a more intelligent criminal class, parasites with preferences, and official who limit their offensive behaviour to pilfering and not plunder. We need to throw out the current bums and try to set up a "better world". Be we all know you can't get rid of the grifters and cheats. So our only hope is to put rules in place to keep corruption under control. Out with the insanity of the "Reagan revolution" with its "deregulate, deregulate, deregulate" and back in with "good government" and rules to control corruption.

I'm not big on the "solution" to greed and corruption that Harford points out as the system at work in South Korea:

Perhaps this is why export markets have proved such an important element in the success of many Asian economies: domestic markets may be sewn up in corrupt deals, but the government can still insist on export success as a precondition for political favours. Only productive firms are allowed to join the corrupt club – with export markets a good test of genuine productivity. For a case study, consider decades of South Korean growth.

Instead, I vote for honest government agents tied to a healthy middle class that feels an ownership for their communities and government. This is exactly what the Republicans have been busily working to destroy in America for the last 30 years with their message of "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" and "reduce it [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub".

More TSA Security Theatre

Here is yet another story of a person humiliated by TSA in their "pretend" security. They subject innocents to harassment and degradation wasting valuable resources while spending next to nothing on real threats.

From the Lori Dorn blog:

At what point does the need for security eclipse human dignity and compassion?

Yesterday I went through the imaging scanner at JFK Terminal 4 for my Virgin America flight to San Francisco. Evidently they found something, because after the scan, I was asked to step aside to have my breast area examined. I explained to the agent that I was a breast cancer patient and had a bilateral mastectomy in April and had tissue expanders put in to make way for reconstruction at a later date.

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information (pictured) and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a TSA Supervisor.

To my further dismay, my belongings, including my computer, were completely out of sight. I had no choice but to allow an agent to touch my breasts in front of other passengers.

I just didn’t understand why these agents were so insensitive to the situation. I would have been happy to show her which bag was mine and have her retrieve the card, but she did not allow even that. I have been through emotional and physical hell this past year due to breast cancer. The way I was treated by these TSA agents added a shitload of insult to injury and caused me a great deal of humiliation.

I understand the need for safety when flying, but there is also a need for those responsible to be compassionate and sensitive to each situation. These agents were neither.

Compare Lori Dorn's story with the following...

http://www.ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=112091

A security breach at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport forced the evacuation of Concourse A, which serves six airlines. Paul Mason, Chief of Police at Lambert, said police were called to the concourse around 6:20 p.m. after airport screeners found a prohibited item in a bag. When airport police and TSA security officers arrived a few minutes later, the individual and the bag were gone. Mason said the item appeared to be a double-barreled derringer handgun. After security officers were unable to detain the person, the concourse was evacuated and passengers on five planes waiting to take off were unloaded and screened again. The entire process took about 1.5 hours.

Yeah... you humiliate a woman over her breast implants -- which are clearly identifiable in a scan -- but you let a guy with a double-barrelled derringer handgun just "melt away". Now that is class A, #1, top-of-the-line security!

Update 2011oct04: Here is a bit from a post on the NY Times blog of Tara Parker-Pope:

Since posting her story this weekend, several Web sites, including her husband’s blog, Laughing Squid, as well as the blog Boing Boing, have picked up her story. She said she has been contacted by T.S.A. officials and plans to speak with them soon.

The T.S.A. e-mailed a statement about the incident, saying that proper screening procedures were followed.

We strive to treat every passenger with dignity and respect. In this case, that may not have happened. During the screening process, if advanced imaging technology detects an anomaly that cannot be cleared, secondary screening is required to ensure the passenger does not have threat items, such as explosives concealed under clothing.

... [yada, yada, yada and more officialese ignoring responsibility and bad behaviour by TSA staff]

Ms. Dorn said the screening at the San Francisco airport before her return flight was uneventful, but she walked through a traditional metal detector rather than an imaging machine.

“The embarrassment came from trying to explain my situation to someone who didn’t want to hear it,” she said. “I was not refusing a pat-down if that’s what was necessary, and ultimately I submitted to one. I was objecting to how I was being treated.”

Ms. Dorn joins a long list of passengers with and without medical issues who have complained of mistreatment by T.S.A. screening workers.

Last year, MSNBC.com told the story of a woman who was forced to show her prosthetic breast during an airport screening. Another woman said she was embarrassed when, during the pat-down, a worker manipulated her breast prosthesis from side to side.

Joe Sharkey, a reporter for The New York Times, has also written about what many travelers perceive as attitude problems among screening workers.

How the Whole Truth Never Makes it into what the Press Publishes

Journalism specializes in printing part of the news. The part that the elites want you to hear so they can shape your actions to what they want. Here is a post from Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that lays out how truth is doled out in dollops:

If Millennials Do Worse Than Their Parents, It Will Be Because Bill Gates' Kids Have All the Money

The Washington Post had a column by a millennial columnist complaining about the lack of opportunity. It is striking that the column never once mentioned income inequality.

There is no doubt that millennials will on average be far wealthier than their parents. Output per hour has roughly doubled over the last three decades, meaning that the real wage could be almost twice as high today as it was in 1980. Insofar as the typical millennial is not seeing the benefits of this productivity growth it is due to the fact that so much income has been redistributed upwards, not the result of any generational dynamics.

Here's a bit from Alexandra Petri's Washington Post opinion piece:

Youth unemployment is 18 percent — double the overall rate. The polls teetered, then tilted. Will your standard of living be better than your parents’? Probably not. Is the American Dream still in reach? Define dream.

What’s worse is that no one seems to realize that we’ve noticed.

“The kids are all right,” they say. “Let’s tweet them a bone. They love it when you tweet.”

It’s enough to give a self-respecting millennial a headache.

Right now, there are at least 100 people Occupying Wall Street. It’s a protest movement. We are the 99 percent who will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent, they say.

They have a nice Web site. They want to find some sort of solution as a group. They also don’t have jobs — or a real plan.

That’s basically millennials in a nutshell.

What bugs me is that she puts down the Occupy Wall Street protest as "a hundred kids". Here's a picture of what "a hundred kids" looks like when reported by a UK newspaper, The Daily Mail with the title "Thousands of protesters descend on Manhattan as police gear up for a weekend of mayhem... but is this the start of a middle class uprising?":


Only the mainstream press in the US continues to "report" this as a handful of disorganized malcontents who have "no message" and aren't worthy of any media attention.

Here is the only thing close to

• a proper mainstream press appraisal of what is going on with this demonstration by Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC
and
• this follow-up interview by O'Donnell with Michael Moore.

A Vision of the Future

It takes a twisted mind, a cartoonist's mind, to put things into perspective and come up with the whacko future that awaits us. Here is Scott Adams of Dilbert fame trying his hand at this game:

According to biologists, billions of years ago the first sea creature wiggled onto the beach. This was a pivotal moment in life's long march from amorphous sea snot into the highest form of mammalian beings—hedge-fund managers. Many people see that as an improvement, but I'm not judgmental. What we don't know is why the first sea creatures were so anxious to leave their ocean habitats. My guess is that it had something to do with taxes.

Reliable people on television have informed me that taxes are the root cause of all behavior. And that means we can predict the future by looking at tax policy. In fact, I hear tax-related predictions every time I accidentally stop thinking about myself long enough to notice that others are talking. What I haven't yet seen is anyone correctly predicting the future based on tax policy. Apparently that burden has fallen to me.

Go read his article in the Wall Street Journal to see his vision in all its gory glory.

My only quibble with Scott Adams is that he has chosen the wrong side in this struggle for the future. Instead of the hedge fund managers taking the great leap from land back to sea, the really serious historic step will be taken by the land lemmings rushing to form a "more perfect union" and creating a real democracy, i.e. realize what was only a gleam in the eye of the architect's of America's Constitution. They will take the fateful step of stopping the flow of taxes from the bottom 90% into the pockets of the top 1%.

OK, I admit I have a lousy track record at predicting the future. But at least my vision has the benefit of decency and honourableness to its credit. Instead of constantly caving to the demands of the greedy rich who have painted the US and the world into a corner of bankruptcy and ruin, my vision has the benefit of letting the legions of hard working get a chance to inherit the fruit of their labour.