OCTOBER 13, 2011
Four weeks into its life, Occupy Wall Street has already confounded both critics and well-wishers. Far from twittering away its energies after an initial burst of enthusiasm as predicted (or feared), it appears to have touched something in average Americans in every corner of the country. Nor does the lack of visible leaders seem to affect its durability; a long list of visible issues no doubt more than making up for the absence of prominent names.
This by itself is one huge achievement. Too long have American politics been muddied by the insistence on glitter, the distraction of television charisma extinguishing fundamental political debate.
More significant by far is its other contribution. Packing a wallop the size of Texas, the Occupy movement’s “99% versus 1%“, has hit home as no other phrase in recent times. Like Gandhi’s brilliant 1942 slogan, Quit India, it says it all. That it is here to stay needs no more proof than Dean Baker’s smart heading to his article this morning, “David Brooks, Bard of the 1%“. Like the term, “Catch-22″, 99%-1% is now an indelible piece of the national lexicon. And just as worthy are its authors of this famous praise of the novel’s author, “if Mr. Heller never writes another word, his reputation is (still) high and secure.”
In a sense, then, a great battle has already been won. The usual presidential year network-ballyhooed emptiness of non-issues and side-issues is ready to be replaced by a simple and stunningly obvious statement of fact; one that underlies so many familiar problems – jobs, education, housing, health…even the Patriot Act and the wars real and virtual. Imagine a campaign speech that starts with, “Does the Declaration of Independence begin with, ‘We the 1%’?” Capable (but hopefully, untainted) hands could run that single statement all the way to the end zone, whether the uprights lie in a state legislature, a Governor’s mansion, the Capitol, or the White House.
To many, a disquieting aspect of the Occupy movement is the myriad of slogans that animate its throngs. Even in a relatively small city, an Occupy rally may boast of several dozen unrelated themes, each expressing some issue dear to its proponent. Recently there have been several articles suggesting that these disparate strands be streamlined into two or three succinct demands. One such article by Rand Clifford outlined three focused demands:
1) End corporate personhood
2) End the Fed
3) End military adventurism
Nothing wrong with these, or other equally logical, demands. But I have an even more basic problem, with the entire notion of ‘demanding’. Let me explain.
More than three decades ago in New Delhi, India, I was attending a protest seminar. Speaker after speaker denounced the double dealing and mendacity of the government. At the end of two days of such berating the assembly was set to pass a resolution making demands — of the same government! It was left to one of the last speakers, the writer and thinker Arun Shourie, to gently touch upon the incongruity here. Instead of asking such a supposedly terrible government to do something, he suggested, why don’t you say what you will do? His words have always remained with me.
Similarly, here you are, assembling on the streets because the politicians have sold you out, the higher judiciary has judges who sup with the Koch’s, and the 1% who own all three branches of government don’t care a hoot about you, your jobs, or your lives. To paraphrase what Arundhati Roy once wrote of the Indian elite, they have seceded from their own country and fellow citizens to form a virtual republic. You have recognized what is happening and denounced this 1% as conniving, ruthless, greedy, rapacious, self-serving, even traitorous (what else is profiting by sending jobs overseas, or making fortunes out of national calamities). At the end of it all, you want to make demands… of…these same people and their hirelings?
Instead the Occupy movement needs to have simple things that its supporters can do. What we demand of ourselves makes the difference, not what we demand of the other side [see The Banality of Hype].
When the British Raj, on behalf of the English textile tycoons, decimated the native spinning and weaving cottage industry in India (globalization ain’t all that novel), Gandhi did not run for the Viceroy pleading for increased Indian production quotas. Instead, he went to the Indian people asking them to boycott foreign cloth and wear Indian homespun, even though it was costlier and coarser. It sparked a revolution all its own.
Many years ago in 2004, I wrote an article called American Swadeshi, suggesting that John Kerry or any other American politician could start a prairie fire by doing something similar in America. Kerry, and Obama after him, were never serious about the hemorrhaging of American jobs. The Republicans, of course, actually think outsourcing and Free Trade are all part of Divine Purpose. This is therefore something neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will do. It has to be done by us.
A very simple idea, then. Each time you go to the store, whatever you are buying, note where it is made. If it is made outside the USA (as it is 99% of the time – another 99%-1% issue!), ask the store if they have a made in the USA substitute. If not, either leave saying that you will look for another store where an American-made equivalent is available, or tell them that you will stop buying this non-American-made product after six months. And do. Thousands and thousands of customers insisting on American-made products will make for a groundswell of consciousness, besides sending word up the chain to the 1%, where dollars and cents light up attention as no demand can.
As another well-known slogan goes, Just do it.
NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN lives on the West Coast. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Consciousness of Guilt Is It Immoral to Vote for Obama? by MIKE WHITNEY
OCTOBER 13, 2011
I don’t like mixing politics with morality, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. What I mean is this: how can anyone cast a ballot for a man who they know will continue to kill people in other countries merely to advance US policy objectives? That’s the question people need to ask themselves.
Under normal circumstances, I can understand the “lesser of two evils” theory of voting, just as I can understand why people would think that Obama would be better president than his GOP opponent. But these aren’t normal circumstances, are they? After all, we’re not just talking about which candidate might be more inclined to protect Social Security or Medicare. We’re talking life and death. The question is whether one is willing to throw their support behind a policy that kills people in exchange for the presumed protection of Social Security?That’s a pretty cynical calculation.
Knowing what we know now, we can say with 100% certainty that Obama will continue killing people wherever he deploys the US military, the US intelligence services and US drones. How can anyone in good conscience sign on to that type of thing?
Now I know people will say,”If you don’t vote for Obama, you’re handing the White House and our children’s future over to crackpots and extremists”.
This is a very persuasive argument, but it’s also misleading. The real issue is whether one is willing to support the administration’s policies, policies that we all know will continue to kill defenseless women and children wherever the US is involved.
At present, there’s only one antiwar candidate on the ballot, Ron Paul. And while I bitterly disagree with him on economic and social matters, these issues pale in comparison to America’s homicidal foreign policy. If the balloting were held today, I would vote for Paul in a heartbeat and I would try to convince others to do the same.
As for those who choose to vote for Obama; that’s fine, only, please, don’t pretend you don’t know what the consequences will be.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
I don’t like mixing politics with morality, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. What I mean is this: how can anyone cast a ballot for a man who they know will continue to kill people in other countries merely to advance US policy objectives? That’s the question people need to ask themselves.
Under normal circumstances, I can understand the “lesser of two evils” theory of voting, just as I can understand why people would think that Obama would be better president than his GOP opponent. But these aren’t normal circumstances, are they? After all, we’re not just talking about which candidate might be more inclined to protect Social Security or Medicare. We’re talking life and death. The question is whether one is willing to throw their support behind a policy that kills people in exchange for the presumed protection of Social Security?That’s a pretty cynical calculation.
Knowing what we know now, we can say with 100% certainty that Obama will continue killing people wherever he deploys the US military, the US intelligence services and US drones. How can anyone in good conscience sign on to that type of thing?
Now I know people will say,”If you don’t vote for Obama, you’re handing the White House and our children’s future over to crackpots and extremists”.
This is a very persuasive argument, but it’s also misleading. The real issue is whether one is willing to support the administration’s policies, policies that we all know will continue to kill defenseless women and children wherever the US is involved.
At present, there’s only one antiwar candidate on the ballot, Ron Paul. And while I bitterly disagree with him on economic and social matters, these issues pale in comparison to America’s homicidal foreign policy. If the balloting were held today, I would vote for Paul in a heartbeat and I would try to convince others to do the same.
As for those who choose to vote for Obama; that’s fine, only, please, don’t pretend you don’t know what the consequences will be.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
The Bandit Economy The Myths of the Market by PAUL CANTOR
OCTOBER 13, 2011
“Greed is good,” said Gordon Geko played by Michael Douglas in his academy award-winning performance in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street. “Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
“Not so!” say the hodgepodge of individuals occupying Wall Street. Indeed, if there is one single issue they agree upon it is that greed is responsible for our current economic morass. And they are right. Greed led Wall Street traders to mislead their customers about the risk of the assets they sold them and that in turn led to the 2008 market crash and the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Nevertheless, the view that greed is good continues to resonate with many because it is consistent with Adam Smith’s observation in the Wealth of Nationsthat in a market economy individuals are “led by an invisible hand” to promote the interests of society. The baker, for instance, doesn’t bake bread to mitigate hunger. She bakes bread in order to exchange it for money she needs to purchase other goods. Yet hunger is eliminated just the same.
But because their goal like Smith’s before them is to make the case for fewer government regulations what Gordon Geko and other miracles of the market mythmakers fail to point out is that the invisible hand is also responsible for the kind of malfeasance that led to the Great Recession. And to further their case they have a mantra that along with the invisible hand includes the myth of consumer sovereignty, the myth that an individual’s income is a measure of her contribution to society, the myth that market economies breed democracy, and the myth that markets when left to themselves lead, in the words of one economic textbook, to “the particular mix of goods and services most highly valued by society.”
Consumer sovereignty is the idea that in market economies consumers determine what gets produced. Hence we should not blame the bankers and Wall Street traders for selling us a bill of goods and walking away with our money while we lost our homes and our savings went up in smoke. They were just giving us the loans and mortgaged backed securities we asked for. But of course that is not true if they were lying about the risk embodied in the assets they were selling.
The myth that an individual’s income is a measure of her contribution to society, furthermore, is belied by the fact that a world-class athlete like Serena Williams earns many millions while a world-class high school science teacher earns a tiny fraction of that amount. And the myth that markets breed democracies is belied by the fact that the highly unequal distribution of income and wealth that results when markets are left alone to allocate resources undermines democracy.
The democratic ideal, after all, is one-person one vote. But in the market it is one dollar one vote. Hence those who have the most dollars have the greatest say in determining what gets produced and the greatest ability to bankroll the campaigns of favored politicians and pay lobbyists.
Finally, what about the myth that markets lead to the production of those goods society values most? Just ask yourself whether people would mind if we traded some of the automobiles we produce for better public transportation systems.
“These kids just don’t understand how the world works,” said the Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore on Fox News, referring to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. But in fact the protesters understand the question Geko was addressing when he made his greed is good speech better than he, Moore and others for whom the myths of the markets are gospel. Economists call it the principal/agent problem.
Think of our country as USA Inc. We are the owners or principals. Our elected representatives are our agents. We want to design an incentive compatible set of rules to ensure our agents act in our interests and not just the interests of a small group of Wall Street traders and wealthy benefactors who have made out like bandits while we have lost jobs and homes. That is the message, pure and simple, that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are sending the rest of the world.
“Greed is good,” said Gordon Geko played by Michael Douglas in his academy award-winning performance in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street. “Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
“Not so!” say the hodgepodge of individuals occupying Wall Street. Indeed, if there is one single issue they agree upon it is that greed is responsible for our current economic morass. And they are right. Greed led Wall Street traders to mislead their customers about the risk of the assets they sold them and that in turn led to the 2008 market crash and the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Nevertheless, the view that greed is good continues to resonate with many because it is consistent with Adam Smith’s observation in the Wealth of Nationsthat in a market economy individuals are “led by an invisible hand” to promote the interests of society. The baker, for instance, doesn’t bake bread to mitigate hunger. She bakes bread in order to exchange it for money she needs to purchase other goods. Yet hunger is eliminated just the same.
But because their goal like Smith’s before them is to make the case for fewer government regulations what Gordon Geko and other miracles of the market mythmakers fail to point out is that the invisible hand is also responsible for the kind of malfeasance that led to the Great Recession. And to further their case they have a mantra that along with the invisible hand includes the myth of consumer sovereignty, the myth that an individual’s income is a measure of her contribution to society, the myth that market economies breed democracy, and the myth that markets when left to themselves lead, in the words of one economic textbook, to “the particular mix of goods and services most highly valued by society.”
Consumer sovereignty is the idea that in market economies consumers determine what gets produced. Hence we should not blame the bankers and Wall Street traders for selling us a bill of goods and walking away with our money while we lost our homes and our savings went up in smoke. They were just giving us the loans and mortgaged backed securities we asked for. But of course that is not true if they were lying about the risk embodied in the assets they were selling.
The myth that an individual’s income is a measure of her contribution to society, furthermore, is belied by the fact that a world-class athlete like Serena Williams earns many millions while a world-class high school science teacher earns a tiny fraction of that amount. And the myth that markets breed democracies is belied by the fact that the highly unequal distribution of income and wealth that results when markets are left alone to allocate resources undermines democracy.
The democratic ideal, after all, is one-person one vote. But in the market it is one dollar one vote. Hence those who have the most dollars have the greatest say in determining what gets produced and the greatest ability to bankroll the campaigns of favored politicians and pay lobbyists.
Finally, what about the myth that markets lead to the production of those goods society values most? Just ask yourself whether people would mind if we traded some of the automobiles we produce for better public transportation systems.
“These kids just don’t understand how the world works,” said the Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore on Fox News, referring to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. But in fact the protesters understand the question Geko was addressing when he made his greed is good speech better than he, Moore and others for whom the myths of the markets are gospel. Economists call it the principal/agent problem.
Think of our country as USA Inc. We are the owners or principals. Our elected representatives are our agents. We want to design an incentive compatible set of rules to ensure our agents act in our interests and not just the interests of a small group of Wall Street traders and wealthy benefactors who have made out like bandits while we have lost jobs and homes. That is the message, pure and simple, that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are sending the rest of the world.
Paul Cantor teaches economics at Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut.
A New Challenge to the Corporate State Criminalize Fracking by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
OCTOBER 13, 2011
Activists in New York have drafted legislation that would criminalize the practice of hydraulic fracturing – also known as fracking.
The law was drafted by the Sovereign People Action Network (SPAN) of Ulster and Green counties.
“In early summer, seeing so many anti-fracking people across the state pouring their time, resources and hopes into the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), we began drafting a law to rip decision making from this illegitimate agency, and drive it into our state legislature,” Richard Grossman, one of the members of SPAN, told Corporate Crime Reporter.
“Our law criminalizes fracking and fracking-related activities,” Grossman said. “Corporate frackers would be Class C felons.”
“In August, a bunch of anti-frackers from different parts of the state, representing various anti-fracking groups, participated in three sequential workshops I presented on at the New York Green Fest gathering in Western New York,” Grossman said.
“Some decided to join SPAN on criminalization.”
“Together we came up with the current draft of the law. We are now creating a new coalition group to concentrate on compelling the legislature to pass our law.”
“This law is not a magic bullet, of course. We could never pass it unless we build a mass movement in New York.”
The legislation has yet to be introduced into the New York State legislature.
“We met with a state Senator who wanted to learn more about it,” Grossman said. “But he was pretty resistant. That’s okay. This work will take time.”
Grossman wouldn’t identify the Senator.
“To his credit, he met with us twice,” Grossman said. “He was patient and courteous, we had some healthy conversations.”
“We have no illusions about the New York State Legislature. But theoretically at least, that is where laws are made. And that’s where sovereign people go to instruct our representatives. Our approach to our legislators is: we wrote this law – now you pass it.”
“But we know we can’t do that until we build a formidable statewide movement that is not only talking about fracking as a destructive technology, but also about illegitimate rule by a very small corporate class.”
“We’re hoping to move the exciting struggle to prevent the fracking of New York State from the dead end, energy sink regulatory realm to the place where sovereign people make law, decide what is anti-social behavior.”
“We have no illusions about our state legislature. Both houses are tyrannies. Most of the legislators are colonized. We understand that part of our task is to re-make our legislature, and our legislators. And that to do this, anti-frackers and others confronting diverse assaults of illegitimate private governance must build a powerful state-wide movement.”
“Our new state-wide coalition is only now coming together. We haven’t begun taking our message across the state. I can say that whenever any of us talks to folks, their response is – of course fracking should be criminalized, should be declared felonious.”
“But we’re still under the radar,” Grossman said. “I don’t think it will take long to emerge. Think back to the evolution of the anti-nuclear movement.”
“The fracking struggle involves most of the giant corporations of the country, not just business and industrial corporations, but also law corporations and insurance corporations.”
“The whole corporate class and its vast usurping structures of governance and propaganda are behind fracking.”
“The reasons are clear: the corporate class is committed to endless more.”
“The fuel for endless more is constantly expanding energy.”
“So people opposing fracking for oil and gas and water are standing up not just to a few giant energy corporations, but to the entire corporate class, and to their vast corporate state, just like the anti-nukers of yore.”
“In New York, people are already organized in hundreds of groups. We think this legislation will help unify anti-frackers, so that one day in the not too distant, the State of New York will declare fracking, corporate frackers, and fracking-related activities to be Class C felonies.”
“We will be provoking conversation and discussion about the histories and realities of minority rule and usurpation that we’ve been talking about here. It’s my hope that unlike the anti-nuclear movement – that magnificently stopped the construction of 850 nuclear radiation factories – New Yorkers will criminalize fracking in ways that begin to challenge the corporate state, that set new and liberating conversations in motion, that begin asserting we the people’s authority to govern our communities and our state.”
Activists in New York have drafted legislation that would criminalize the practice of hydraulic fracturing – also known as fracking.
The law was drafted by the Sovereign People Action Network (SPAN) of Ulster and Green counties.
“In early summer, seeing so many anti-fracking people across the state pouring their time, resources and hopes into the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), we began drafting a law to rip decision making from this illegitimate agency, and drive it into our state legislature,” Richard Grossman, one of the members of SPAN, told Corporate Crime Reporter.
“Our law criminalizes fracking and fracking-related activities,” Grossman said. “Corporate frackers would be Class C felons.”
“In August, a bunch of anti-frackers from different parts of the state, representing various anti-fracking groups, participated in three sequential workshops I presented on at the New York Green Fest gathering in Western New York,” Grossman said.
“Some decided to join SPAN on criminalization.”
“Together we came up with the current draft of the law. We are now creating a new coalition group to concentrate on compelling the legislature to pass our law.”
“This law is not a magic bullet, of course. We could never pass it unless we build a mass movement in New York.”
The legislation has yet to be introduced into the New York State legislature.
“We met with a state Senator who wanted to learn more about it,” Grossman said. “But he was pretty resistant. That’s okay. This work will take time.”
Grossman wouldn’t identify the Senator.
“To his credit, he met with us twice,” Grossman said. “He was patient and courteous, we had some healthy conversations.”
“We have no illusions about the New York State Legislature. But theoretically at least, that is where laws are made. And that’s where sovereign people go to instruct our representatives. Our approach to our legislators is: we wrote this law – now you pass it.”
“But we know we can’t do that until we build a formidable statewide movement that is not only talking about fracking as a destructive technology, but also about illegitimate rule by a very small corporate class.”
“We’re hoping to move the exciting struggle to prevent the fracking of New York State from the dead end, energy sink regulatory realm to the place where sovereign people make law, decide what is anti-social behavior.”
“We have no illusions about our state legislature. Both houses are tyrannies. Most of the legislators are colonized. We understand that part of our task is to re-make our legislature, and our legislators. And that to do this, anti-frackers and others confronting diverse assaults of illegitimate private governance must build a powerful state-wide movement.”
“Our new state-wide coalition is only now coming together. We haven’t begun taking our message across the state. I can say that whenever any of us talks to folks, their response is – of course fracking should be criminalized, should be declared felonious.”
“But we’re still under the radar,” Grossman said. “I don’t think it will take long to emerge. Think back to the evolution of the anti-nuclear movement.”
“The fracking struggle involves most of the giant corporations of the country, not just business and industrial corporations, but also law corporations and insurance corporations.”
“The whole corporate class and its vast usurping structures of governance and propaganda are behind fracking.”
“The reasons are clear: the corporate class is committed to endless more.”
“The fuel for endless more is constantly expanding energy.”
“So people opposing fracking for oil and gas and water are standing up not just to a few giant energy corporations, but to the entire corporate class, and to their vast corporate state, just like the anti-nukers of yore.”
“In New York, people are already organized in hundreds of groups. We think this legislation will help unify anti-frackers, so that one day in the not too distant, the State of New York will declare fracking, corporate frackers, and fracking-related activities to be Class C felonies.”
“We will be provoking conversation and discussion about the histories and realities of minority rule and usurpation that we’ve been talking about here. It’s my hope that unlike the anti-nuclear movement – that magnificently stopped the construction of 850 nuclear radiation factories – New Yorkers will criminalize fracking in ways that begin to challenge the corporate state, that set new and liberating conversations in motion, that begin asserting we the people’s authority to govern our communities and our state.”
Rusell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.
[For the complete transcript of the Interview with Richard Grossman, see 25 Corporate Crime Reporter 40, October 17, 2011, print edition only.]
An All-American Occupation The Street of Torments by STEVE FRASER
OCTOBER 13, 2011
Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn’t be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters.
The fact is that the end of the world as we’ve known it has been taking place all around us for some time. Until recently, however, thickets of political verbiage about cutting this and taxing that, about the glories of “job creators” and the need to preserve “the American dream,” have obscured what was hiding in plain sight — that street of streets, known to generations of our ancestors as “the street of torments.”
After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history. And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.
The Street of Torments
Peering back at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street,” so full of sound and fury signifying quite a lot, it’s astonishing — to a historian of Wall Street, at least — that the present movement didn’t happen sooner. It’s already hard to remember that only weeks ago, three years into the near shutdown of the world financial system and the Great Recession, an eerie unprotesting silence still blanketed the country.
Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. The economy slowed and stalled. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached record levels. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged — but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” financial goliaths, not the legions of victims their financial wilding had left in its wake.
The political class then prescribed what people already had plenty of: yet another dose of austerity plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that, for 99% of Americans, was never much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future withered and bitterness set in.
Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. In the light of American history, this passivity was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again Wall Street found itself in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry mobilized thanks to political parties, labor unions, or leagues of the unemployed. Such movements were filled with a polyglot mix of middle-class anti-trust reformers, bankrupted small businessmen, dispossessed farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, out-of-work laborers, and so many others.
If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon? Finally!
What began as a relatively sparsely attended and impromptu affair has displayed a staying power and magnetic attractiveness that has taken the country, and above all the political class, by surprise. A recent rally of thousands in lower Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from the city’s government center to Zuccotti Park, the location of the “occupiers” encampment, was an extraordinarily diverse gathering by any measure of age, race, or class. Community organizations, housing advocates, environmentalists, and even official delegations of trade unionists not normally at ease hanging out with anarchists and hippies gave the whole affair a social muscularity and reach that was exhilarating to experience.
Diversity, however, can cut both ways. Popular protest, to the degree that there’s been much during the recent past — and mainly over the war in Iraq — has sometimes been criticized for the chaotic way it assembled a grab-bag of issues and enemies, diffuse and without focus. Occupy Wall Street embraces diverse multitudes but this time in the interest of convergence. In its targeting of “the street of torments,” this protean uprising has, in fact, found common ground. To a historian’s ear this echoes loudly.
Karl Marx described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. We’ve spent a long generation learning not to mention Marx in polite company, and not to use suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor,” among many others.
In times past, however, such phrases and the ideas that went with them struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as true depictions of reality. They used them regularly, along with words like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class,” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced.
Never before, however, has “the Vatican of capitalism” captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that’s run the country for a generation and has now run it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville, no Marxist he, confessed as much during the Clinton years when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”
Perhaps that era of everyday intimidation is finally ending. Here are some of the signs of it — literally — from that march I attended: “Loan Sharks Ate My World” (illustrated with a reasonable facsimile of the Great White from Jaws), “End the Federal Reserve,” “Wall Street Sold Out, Let’s Not Bail-Out,” “Kill the Over the Counter Derivative Market,” “Wall Street Banks Madoff Well,” “The Middle Class is Too Big To Fail,” “Eat the Rich, Feed the Poor,” “Greed is Killing the Earth.” During the march, a pervasive chant — “We are the 99%” — resoundingly reminded the bond market just how isolated and vulnerable it might become.
And it is in confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament, in gathering together all the multifarious manifestations of our general dilemma right there on “the street of torments,” that Occupy Wall Street — even without a program or clear set of demands, as so many observers lament — has achieved a giant leap backward, summoning up a history of opposition we would do well to recall today.
A Century of Our Streets and Wall Street
One young woman at the demonstration held up a corrugated cardboard sign roughly magic-markered with one word written three times: “system,” “system,” “system.” That single word resonates historically, even if it sounds strange to our ears today. The indictment of presumptive elites, especially those housed on Wall Street, the conviction that the system over which they presided must be replaced by something more humane, was a robust feature of our country’s political and cultural life for a long century or more.
When in the years following the American Revolution, Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the “moneycrats” and their counterrevolutionary intrigues — they meant Alexander Hamilton and his confederates in particular — they were worried about the installation in the New World of a British system of merchant capitalism that would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the Revolution.
When followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States — otherwise known as “the Monster Bank” — they were up in arms against what they feared was the systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite. Just after the Civil War, the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties freed themselves of the two-party runaround, determined to mobilize independently to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.
Later in the nineteenth century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street “devil fish” (shades of Matt Taibbi’s “giant vampire squid” metaphor for Goldman Sachs). Its tentacles, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy, but also corrupted churches, the press, and institutions of higher learning, destroyed the family, and suborned public officials from the president on down. When, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, the Populist-inspired “boy orator of the Platte” and Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan vowed that mankind would not be “crucified on a cross of gold,” he meant Wall Street and everyone knew it.
Around the turn of the century, the anti-trust movement captured the imagination of small businessmen, consumers, and working people in towns and cities across America. The trust they worried most about was “the Money Trust.” Captained by J.P. Morgan, “the financial Gorgon,” the Money Trust was skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering Congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposés of “muckraking” journalists, and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.
As the twentieth century began, progressive reformers in state houses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities and out on the prairies, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists, antiwar activists, and numerous others were still vigorously condemning that same Money Trust for turning the whole country into a closely-held system of financial pillage, labor exploitation, and imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by “the Street.”
The tradition the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have tapped into is a long and vibrant one that culminated during the Great Depression. Then as now, there was no question in the minds of “the 99%” that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country’s crisis (however much that verdict has since been challenged by disputatious academics).
Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.
“System, System, System”: It would be foolish to make too much of a raggedy sign — or to leap to conclusions about just how lasting this Occupy Wall Street moment will be and just where (if anywhere) it’s heading. It would be crazily optimistic to proclaim our own pitiful age of acquiescence ended.
Still, it would be equally foolish to dismiss the powerful American tradition the demonstrators of this moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall Street has functioned as an icon of revulsion, inciting anger, stoking up energies, and summoning visions of a new world that might save the New World.
It is poised to play that role again. Remember this: in 1932, three years into the Great Depression, most Americans were more demoralized than mobilized. A few years later, all that had changed as “Our Street, Not Wall Street” came alive. The political class had to scurry to keep up. Occupy Wall Street may indeed prove the opening act in an unfolding drama of renewed resistance and rebellion against “the system.”
Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, a regular at TomDispatch (where this originally appeared) and co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). A historian of Wall Street, his most recent book on the subject is Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He teaches history at Columbia University.
Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn’t be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters.
The fact is that the end of the world as we’ve known it has been taking place all around us for some time. Until recently, however, thickets of political verbiage about cutting this and taxing that, about the glories of “job creators” and the need to preserve “the American dream,” have obscured what was hiding in plain sight — that street of streets, known to generations of our ancestors as “the street of torments.”
After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history. And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.
The Street of Torments
Peering back at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street,” so full of sound and fury signifying quite a lot, it’s astonishing — to a historian of Wall Street, at least — that the present movement didn’t happen sooner. It’s already hard to remember that only weeks ago, three years into the near shutdown of the world financial system and the Great Recession, an eerie unprotesting silence still blanketed the country.
Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. The economy slowed and stalled. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached record levels. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged — but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” financial goliaths, not the legions of victims their financial wilding had left in its wake.
The political class then prescribed what people already had plenty of: yet another dose of austerity plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that, for 99% of Americans, was never much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future withered and bitterness set in.
Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. In the light of American history, this passivity was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again Wall Street found itself in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry mobilized thanks to political parties, labor unions, or leagues of the unemployed. Such movements were filled with a polyglot mix of middle-class anti-trust reformers, bankrupted small businessmen, dispossessed farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, out-of-work laborers, and so many others.
If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon? Finally!
What began as a relatively sparsely attended and impromptu affair has displayed a staying power and magnetic attractiveness that has taken the country, and above all the political class, by surprise. A recent rally of thousands in lower Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from the city’s government center to Zuccotti Park, the location of the “occupiers” encampment, was an extraordinarily diverse gathering by any measure of age, race, or class. Community organizations, housing advocates, environmentalists, and even official delegations of trade unionists not normally at ease hanging out with anarchists and hippies gave the whole affair a social muscularity and reach that was exhilarating to experience.
Diversity, however, can cut both ways. Popular protest, to the degree that there’s been much during the recent past — and mainly over the war in Iraq — has sometimes been criticized for the chaotic way it assembled a grab-bag of issues and enemies, diffuse and without focus. Occupy Wall Street embraces diverse multitudes but this time in the interest of convergence. In its targeting of “the street of torments,” this protean uprising has, in fact, found common ground. To a historian’s ear this echoes loudly.
Karl Marx described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. We’ve spent a long generation learning not to mention Marx in polite company, and not to use suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor,” among many others.
In times past, however, such phrases and the ideas that went with them struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as true depictions of reality. They used them regularly, along with words like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class,” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced.
Never before, however, has “the Vatican of capitalism” captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that’s run the country for a generation and has now run it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville, no Marxist he, confessed as much during the Clinton years when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”
Perhaps that era of everyday intimidation is finally ending. Here are some of the signs of it — literally — from that march I attended: “Loan Sharks Ate My World” (illustrated with a reasonable facsimile of the Great White from Jaws), “End the Federal Reserve,” “Wall Street Sold Out, Let’s Not Bail-Out,” “Kill the Over the Counter Derivative Market,” “Wall Street Banks Madoff Well,” “The Middle Class is Too Big To Fail,” “Eat the Rich, Feed the Poor,” “Greed is Killing the Earth.” During the march, a pervasive chant — “We are the 99%” — resoundingly reminded the bond market just how isolated and vulnerable it might become.
And it is in confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament, in gathering together all the multifarious manifestations of our general dilemma right there on “the street of torments,” that Occupy Wall Street — even without a program or clear set of demands, as so many observers lament — has achieved a giant leap backward, summoning up a history of opposition we would do well to recall today.
A Century of Our Streets and Wall Street
One young woman at the demonstration held up a corrugated cardboard sign roughly magic-markered with one word written three times: “system,” “system,” “system.” That single word resonates historically, even if it sounds strange to our ears today. The indictment of presumptive elites, especially those housed on Wall Street, the conviction that the system over which they presided must be replaced by something more humane, was a robust feature of our country’s political and cultural life for a long century or more.
When in the years following the American Revolution, Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the “moneycrats” and their counterrevolutionary intrigues — they meant Alexander Hamilton and his confederates in particular — they were worried about the installation in the New World of a British system of merchant capitalism that would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the Revolution.
When followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States — otherwise known as “the Monster Bank” — they were up in arms against what they feared was the systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite. Just after the Civil War, the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties freed themselves of the two-party runaround, determined to mobilize independently to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.
Later in the nineteenth century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street “devil fish” (shades of Matt Taibbi’s “giant vampire squid” metaphor for Goldman Sachs). Its tentacles, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy, but also corrupted churches, the press, and institutions of higher learning, destroyed the family, and suborned public officials from the president on down. When, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, the Populist-inspired “boy orator of the Platte” and Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan vowed that mankind would not be “crucified on a cross of gold,” he meant Wall Street and everyone knew it.
Around the turn of the century, the anti-trust movement captured the imagination of small businessmen, consumers, and working people in towns and cities across America. The trust they worried most about was “the Money Trust.” Captained by J.P. Morgan, “the financial Gorgon,” the Money Trust was skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering Congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposés of “muckraking” journalists, and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.
As the twentieth century began, progressive reformers in state houses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities and out on the prairies, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists, antiwar activists, and numerous others were still vigorously condemning that same Money Trust for turning the whole country into a closely-held system of financial pillage, labor exploitation, and imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by “the Street.”
The tradition the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have tapped into is a long and vibrant one that culminated during the Great Depression. Then as now, there was no question in the minds of “the 99%” that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country’s crisis (however much that verdict has since been challenged by disputatious academics).
Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.
“System, System, System”: It would be foolish to make too much of a raggedy sign — or to leap to conclusions about just how lasting this Occupy Wall Street moment will be and just where (if anywhere) it’s heading. It would be crazily optimistic to proclaim our own pitiful age of acquiescence ended.
Still, it would be equally foolish to dismiss the powerful American tradition the demonstrators of this moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall Street has functioned as an icon of revulsion, inciting anger, stoking up energies, and summoning visions of a new world that might save the New World.
It is poised to play that role again. Remember this: in 1932, three years into the Great Depression, most Americans were more demoralized than mobilized. A few years later, all that had changed as “Our Street, Not Wall Street” came alive. The political class had to scurry to keep up. Occupy Wall Street may indeed prove the opening act in an unfolding drama of renewed resistance and rebellion against “the system.”
Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, a regular at TomDispatch (where this originally appeared) and co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). A historian of Wall Street, his most recent book on the subject is Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He teaches history at Columbia University.
Latin American Social Movements and the Occupation of Everything From Argentina to Wall Street by BENJAMIN DANGL
Latin American Social Movements and the Occupation of Everything
From Argentina to Wall Street
by BENJAMIN DANGL
Massive buildings tower over Wall Street, making the sidewalks feel like valleys in an urban mountain range. The incense, drum beats and chants of Occupy Wall Street echo down New York City’s financial district from Liberty Plaza, where thousands of activists have converged to protest economic injustice and fight for a better world.
As unemployment and poverty in the US reaches record levels, the protest is catching on, with hundreds of parallel occupations sprouting up across the country. It was a similar disparity in economic and political power that led people to the streets in the Arab Spring, and in Wisconsin, Greece, Spain and London. Occupy Wall Street is part of this global revolt. This new movement in the US also shares much in common with uprisings in another part of the world: Latin America.
This report from Liberty Plaza connects tactics and philosophies surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement with similar movements in Latin America, from the popular assemblies and occupation of factories during Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001-2002, to grassroots struggles for land in Brazil.
Latin America: Economic Crisis and Grassroots Responses
Almost overnight in late 2001, Argentina went from having one of the strongest economies in South America to one of the weakest. During this economic crash, the financial system collapsed like a house of cards and banks shut their doors. Faced with such immediate economic strife and unemployment, many Argentines banded together to create a new society out of the wreckage of the old. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment were countered with barter systems, factory occupations, communally-run kitchens, and alternative currency. Neighborhood assemblies provided solidarity, support and vital spaces for discussion incommunities across the country. Ongoing protests kicked out five presidents in two weeks, and the movements that emerged from this period transformed the social and political fabric of Argentina.
These activities reflect those taking place at Occupy Wall Street and in other actions around the US right now. Such events in Argentina and the US are marked by dissatisfaction with the political and economic system in the face of crisis, and involve people working together for solutions on a grassroots level. For many people in Argentina and the US, desperation pushed them toward taking matters into their own hands.
“We didn’t have any choice,” Manuel Rojas explained to me about the occupation of the ceramics factory he worked at outside the city of Mendoza, Argentina during the country’s crash. “If we didn’t take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action.” This was one of hundreds of businesses that were taken over by workers facing unemployment during the Argentine crisis. After occupying these factories and businesses, many workers then ran them as cooperatives. They did so under the slogan, “Occupy, Resist, Produce,” a phrase borrowed from Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), which has settled hundreds of thousands of families on millions of acres of land through direct action.
In 2008 in Chicago, when hundreds of workers were laid off from the Republic Windows and Doors factory, they embraced similar direct action tactics used by their Argentine counterparts; they occupied the factory to demand the severance and vacation pay owed to them – and it worked. Mark Meinster, the international representative for United Electrical Workers, the union of the Republic workers, told me that the strategies applied by the workers specifically drew from Argentina. In deciding on labor tactics, “We drew on the Argentine factory occupations to the extent that they show that during an economic crisis, workers’ movements are afforded a wider array of tactical options,” Meinster said.
Many groups and movements based in the US have drawn from activists in the South. Besides the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta reflected strategies and struggles in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where in 2000, popular protests rejected the multinational company Bechtel’s water privatization plan and put the water back into public hands. The Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirrors the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil. Participatory budgeting in Brazil, which provides citizens with direct input on how city budgets are distributed, is now being implemented by communities across the US.
These are just a handful of movements and grassroots initiatives that provide helpful models (in both their victories and failures) for decentralizing political and economic power, and putting decision making into the hands of the people. In the face of corrupt banks, corporate greed and inept politicians, those occupying Wall Street and other spaces around the US have a lot on common with similar movements in Latin America. Besides sharing the same enemies within global banks, international lending institutions and multinational corporations, these movements have worked to make revolution a part of everyday life. And that is one of the most striking aspects of about what’s happening with the Occupy Wall Street movement right now.
Occupying Wall Street
The organization and activities filling Liberty Plaza in New York are part of a working community where everyone is taking care of each other and making decisions collectively. During a recent visit, a kitchen area in the center of the park was full of people preparing food for dinner with donated cooking supplies. Other spaces were designated for medical support, massage therapy, sign-making and meditation. One area was for the organization of recycling and garbage; people regularly walked around the park sweeping up debris and collecting garbage.
A massive People’s Library contained hundreds of books along the side of the park. As with the cooking, sign-making and medical supplies, the movement had received donated materials and support to keep these operations thriving. Occupy Wall Street also has its own newspaper, the Occupy Wall Street Journal, copies of which were being handed out in English and Spanish editions on nearly every corner of the park. A media center where various people sat around computers and cameras provided ongoing coverage of the occupation.
Within this community were pockets of areas with blue tarps and blankets where people were resting and sleeping, having meetings or simply holding home made signs on display. Singing, drumming, chanting, guitar and accordion playing were also going on in a wide array of places.
Ongoing meetings and assemblies, with hundreds to thousands of participants, dealt with issues ranging from how to organize space in the park and manage donated supplies, to discussions of march plans and demands. Police outlawed the use of megaphones, so people at the park have just been relaying what others say during these assemblies by repeating it through the layers of the crowd, creating an echo so everyone can hear what is said.
At the Comfort Station, where well-organized piles of clothes, blankets, pillows and coats were stacked, I spoke with Antonio Comfort, from New Jersey, who was working the station at the time. Antonio, who had his hat on backwards and spoke with me in between helping out other people, said that the donations of clothes and sleeping materials had been pouring in. People had also offered up their showers for activists participating in the occupation to use. While I was at the station someone asked for sleeping supplies for an older man, and Antonio disappeared into the Comfort Station piles and returned with an armful of blankets and a pillow.
“I’m here so I can have a better life, and so my kids can have a better life when they get older,” he said about his reasons for participating in the occupation. Everything at the station had been running smoothly, Antonio explained. “Everybody works together, and it’s very organized. We’ll be here as long as it takes.”
Adeline Benker, a 17-year-old student at Marlboro College in Vermont who was holding a sign that said, “Got Debt? You are the 99%,” told me that for her – like many other young students participating in the occupation in New York and elsewhere – it was all about debt. “I will be $100,000 in debt after I graduate from college, and I don’t think I should have the pay that for the rest of my life just to get an education in four years.” Benker said this was her very first protest, and her first time in New York City. When I spoke to her, she had been at the occupation for a few days, and would be returning the following week.
Down the sidewalk was activist Tirsa Costinianos with a sign that said, “We Are the 99%”. Costinianos said, “I want the big banks and the corporations to return our tax money from the bailout.” Costinianos had been at the occupation on Wall Street every weekend since it started on September 17th. “I love this and I’m glad we’re doing this. All of the 99% of the people should join us – then we could stop the stealing and the corruption going on here on Wall Street.”
Ibraheem Awadallah, another protester holding a sign that said “Wall Street Occupies Our Government: Occupy Wall Street”, told me, “The problem is this system in which the corporations have the biggest influence in politics in our country.”
These types of encounters and activities were happening constantly in the ongoing bustle of the park, and underscore the fact that this occupation, now nearly into its third week, is as much of a community and example of participatory democracy as it is a rapidly spreading protest.
As the late historian Howard Zinn said, it is important to “organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create the kind of human relationship that should exist in future society.” That is being developed now within this movement, from the leaderless, consensus-based assemblies, to the communal organization of the various food, media and medical services organized at the occupation.
Similarly, movements across Latin America, from farmer unions in the Paraguayan countryside to neighborhood councils in El Alto, Bolivia, mirror the type of society they would like to see in their everyday actions and movement-building.
As Adeline Benker, the 17-year-old student at the Wall Street occupation said, echoing the struggles from Argentina to the Andes and beyond, “We need to create a change outside of this system because the system is failing us.”
Benjamin Dangl’s new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press) is on contemporary Latin American social movements and their relationships with the region’s new leftist governments. He is editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America. Email BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com.
From Argentina to Wall Street
by BENJAMIN DANGL
Massive buildings tower over Wall Street, making the sidewalks feel like valleys in an urban mountain range. The incense, drum beats and chants of Occupy Wall Street echo down New York City’s financial district from Liberty Plaza, where thousands of activists have converged to protest economic injustice and fight for a better world.
As unemployment and poverty in the US reaches record levels, the protest is catching on, with hundreds of parallel occupations sprouting up across the country. It was a similar disparity in economic and political power that led people to the streets in the Arab Spring, and in Wisconsin, Greece, Spain and London. Occupy Wall Street is part of this global revolt. This new movement in the US also shares much in common with uprisings in another part of the world: Latin America.
This report from Liberty Plaza connects tactics and philosophies surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement with similar movements in Latin America, from the popular assemblies and occupation of factories during Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001-2002, to grassroots struggles for land in Brazil.
Latin America: Economic Crisis and Grassroots Responses
Almost overnight in late 2001, Argentina went from having one of the strongest economies in South America to one of the weakest. During this economic crash, the financial system collapsed like a house of cards and banks shut their doors. Faced with such immediate economic strife and unemployment, many Argentines banded together to create a new society out of the wreckage of the old. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment were countered with barter systems, factory occupations, communally-run kitchens, and alternative currency. Neighborhood assemblies provided solidarity, support and vital spaces for discussion incommunities across the country. Ongoing protests kicked out five presidents in two weeks, and the movements that emerged from this period transformed the social and political fabric of Argentina.
These activities reflect those taking place at Occupy Wall Street and in other actions around the US right now. Such events in Argentina and the US are marked by dissatisfaction with the political and economic system in the face of crisis, and involve people working together for solutions on a grassroots level. For many people in Argentina and the US, desperation pushed them toward taking matters into their own hands.
“We didn’t have any choice,” Manuel Rojas explained to me about the occupation of the ceramics factory he worked at outside the city of Mendoza, Argentina during the country’s crash. “If we didn’t take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action.” This was one of hundreds of businesses that were taken over by workers facing unemployment during the Argentine crisis. After occupying these factories and businesses, many workers then ran them as cooperatives. They did so under the slogan, “Occupy, Resist, Produce,” a phrase borrowed from Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), which has settled hundreds of thousands of families on millions of acres of land through direct action.
In 2008 in Chicago, when hundreds of workers were laid off from the Republic Windows and Doors factory, they embraced similar direct action tactics used by their Argentine counterparts; they occupied the factory to demand the severance and vacation pay owed to them – and it worked. Mark Meinster, the international representative for United Electrical Workers, the union of the Republic workers, told me that the strategies applied by the workers specifically drew from Argentina. In deciding on labor tactics, “We drew on the Argentine factory occupations to the extent that they show that during an economic crisis, workers’ movements are afforded a wider array of tactical options,” Meinster said.
Many groups and movements based in the US have drawn from activists in the South. Besides the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta reflected strategies and struggles in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where in 2000, popular protests rejected the multinational company Bechtel’s water privatization plan and put the water back into public hands. The Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirrors the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil. Participatory budgeting in Brazil, which provides citizens with direct input on how city budgets are distributed, is now being implemented by communities across the US.
These are just a handful of movements and grassroots initiatives that provide helpful models (in both their victories and failures) for decentralizing political and economic power, and putting decision making into the hands of the people. In the face of corrupt banks, corporate greed and inept politicians, those occupying Wall Street and other spaces around the US have a lot on common with similar movements in Latin America. Besides sharing the same enemies within global banks, international lending institutions and multinational corporations, these movements have worked to make revolution a part of everyday life. And that is one of the most striking aspects of about what’s happening with the Occupy Wall Street movement right now.
Occupying Wall Street
The organization and activities filling Liberty Plaza in New York are part of a working community where everyone is taking care of each other and making decisions collectively. During a recent visit, a kitchen area in the center of the park was full of people preparing food for dinner with donated cooking supplies. Other spaces were designated for medical support, massage therapy, sign-making and meditation. One area was for the organization of recycling and garbage; people regularly walked around the park sweeping up debris and collecting garbage.
A massive People’s Library contained hundreds of books along the side of the park. As with the cooking, sign-making and medical supplies, the movement had received donated materials and support to keep these operations thriving. Occupy Wall Street also has its own newspaper, the Occupy Wall Street Journal, copies of which were being handed out in English and Spanish editions on nearly every corner of the park. A media center where various people sat around computers and cameras provided ongoing coverage of the occupation.
Within this community were pockets of areas with blue tarps and blankets where people were resting and sleeping, having meetings or simply holding home made signs on display. Singing, drumming, chanting, guitar and accordion playing were also going on in a wide array of places.
Ongoing meetings and assemblies, with hundreds to thousands of participants, dealt with issues ranging from how to organize space in the park and manage donated supplies, to discussions of march plans and demands. Police outlawed the use of megaphones, so people at the park have just been relaying what others say during these assemblies by repeating it through the layers of the crowd, creating an echo so everyone can hear what is said.
At the Comfort Station, where well-organized piles of clothes, blankets, pillows and coats were stacked, I spoke with Antonio Comfort, from New Jersey, who was working the station at the time. Antonio, who had his hat on backwards and spoke with me in between helping out other people, said that the donations of clothes and sleeping materials had been pouring in. People had also offered up their showers for activists participating in the occupation to use. While I was at the station someone asked for sleeping supplies for an older man, and Antonio disappeared into the Comfort Station piles and returned with an armful of blankets and a pillow.
“I’m here so I can have a better life, and so my kids can have a better life when they get older,” he said about his reasons for participating in the occupation. Everything at the station had been running smoothly, Antonio explained. “Everybody works together, and it’s very organized. We’ll be here as long as it takes.”
Adeline Benker, a 17-year-old student at Marlboro College in Vermont who was holding a sign that said, “Got Debt? You are the 99%,” told me that for her – like many other young students participating in the occupation in New York and elsewhere – it was all about debt. “I will be $100,000 in debt after I graduate from college, and I don’t think I should have the pay that for the rest of my life just to get an education in four years.” Benker said this was her very first protest, and her first time in New York City. When I spoke to her, she had been at the occupation for a few days, and would be returning the following week.
Down the sidewalk was activist Tirsa Costinianos with a sign that said, “We Are the 99%”. Costinianos said, “I want the big banks and the corporations to return our tax money from the bailout.” Costinianos had been at the occupation on Wall Street every weekend since it started on September 17th. “I love this and I’m glad we’re doing this. All of the 99% of the people should join us – then we could stop the stealing and the corruption going on here on Wall Street.”
Ibraheem Awadallah, another protester holding a sign that said “Wall Street Occupies Our Government: Occupy Wall Street”, told me, “The problem is this system in which the corporations have the biggest influence in politics in our country.”
These types of encounters and activities were happening constantly in the ongoing bustle of the park, and underscore the fact that this occupation, now nearly into its third week, is as much of a community and example of participatory democracy as it is a rapidly spreading protest.
As the late historian Howard Zinn said, it is important to “organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create the kind of human relationship that should exist in future society.” That is being developed now within this movement, from the leaderless, consensus-based assemblies, to the communal organization of the various food, media and medical services organized at the occupation.
Similarly, movements across Latin America, from farmer unions in the Paraguayan countryside to neighborhood councils in El Alto, Bolivia, mirror the type of society they would like to see in their everyday actions and movement-building.
As Adeline Benker, the 17-year-old student at the Wall Street occupation said, echoing the struggles from Argentina to the Andes and beyond, “We need to create a change outside of this system because the system is failing us.”
Benjamin Dangl’s new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press) is on contemporary Latin American social movements and their relationships with the region’s new leftist governments. He is editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America. Email BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com.
Is Mitt Romney Ready for the World? The Romney Doctrine by LAWRENCE S. WITTNER
If current polls are correct, Mitt Romney seems likely to become the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and the next president of the United States. Therefore, we should carefully examine his first major foreign and military policy address—delivered on October 7 at the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina—and ponder the question: Is Mitt Romney ready for the world?
Romney began his speech with a heavy dose of fear. Iran, he warned, could well become “a fully activated nuclear weapons state, threatening its neighbors, [and] dominating the world’s oil supply.” Indeed, “Iran’s suicidal fanatics could blackmail the world.” In Afghanistan, the Taliban might well “find a path back to power,” with the country sinking “back into the medieval terrors of fundamentalist rule.” Pakistan’s instability could end up placing nuclear weapons “in the hands of Islamic jihadists,” while “the malign socialism” of Venezuela and Cuba could “undermine the prospects of democracy” in Latin America. Then, of course, there are the heavy dancers. China’s leaders could well take that nation down “a darker path, intimidating their neighbors, brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific, and building a global alliance of authoritarian states.” And Russia might well “bludgeon the countries of the former Soviet Union into submission, and intimidate Europe with the levers of its energy resources.” Nor should people forget “Islamic fundamentalism, with which we have been at war since Sept. 11, 2001.”
Fortunately, though, there is help for a beleaguered world on the horizon. “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers,” Romney explained. “America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers.” Instead, “the United States should always retain military supremacy.” As president, he would not “wave the white flag of surrender” but, rather, “devote” himself to building “an American century.” As he explained: “The twenty-first century can and must be an American century.” He would “not surrender America’s role in the world. . . . If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on earth, I am not your president.”
And how, exactly, would this American century be achieved? To provide the major pillar for the new order, Romney would “reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts.” (The fact that there were no defense cuts during the Obama years—indeed, that Obama took office with an annual Defense Department budget of $513 billion and, as of September 30 of this year, had an annual Defense Department budget of $530 billion, plus increased spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—seems not to have thrown Romney off stride.) In the production of new U.S. warships alone, Romney promised to increase the annual number from nine to fifteen. He would also dramatically upgrade the (still unworkable) national missile defense system. “In an American century,” he argued, America needed “the strongest military in the world.”
Of course, this military behemoth (currently costing almost as much as the military forces of all other nations combined) would have lots of work to do. In Afghanistan, for example, Romney would call a halt to plans for U.S. military withdrawal. Meanwhile, he would “speak with our generals in the field, and receive the best recommendation of our military commanders” as to “the force level necessary to secure our gains and complete our mission successfully.” That might require a lot of troops, a lot of money, and a lot of time.
Throughout his address, Romney never acknowledged that, at least on occasion, U.S. foreign policy might have been plagued by faulty judgments or methods. Naturally, then, he did not mention the unnecessary Iraq war, the past U.S. support of Osama bin Laden, or other embarrassing ventures. This assumption that the U.S. officials can never err—with the notable exception, of course, of the evil Barack Obama—is implicit in Romney’s promise that he would “never, ever apologize for America.”
Despite this nationalist emphasis, Romney did not entirely omit reference to the United Nations and other international institutions. But he discussed them in a very demeaning way. “Too often,” he declared “these bodies prize the act of negotiating over the outcome to be reached. And shamefully, they can become forums for the tantrums of tyrants. . . . The United States must fight to return these bodies to their proper role.” Nor did he see any reason to obey them—or the international law they represented—when it did not suit the U.S. government. He observed: “While America should work with other nations, we always reserve the right to act alone to protect our vital national interests.”
Romney’s speech was also noteworthy for the international issues he did not address. They included nuclear arms control and disarmament, global climate change, world health (such as the AIDS epidemic), and the tottering global economy. Presumably he did not consider these important—or at least capable of being dealt with through the instrumentalities of a massive military buildup and an American century.
One wonders what citizens and statesmen of other nations think of this potential world leader who argues that his country is confronted everywhere by malignant enemies, must forever be militarily supreme, is exempt from following international law, can do no wrong, has been created by God, and must dominate the planet for the rest of this century. Perhaps, in addition to questioning whether Romney is ready for the world, we should ask: Is the world ready for Romney?
Lawrence S. Wittner is emeritus professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).
Letter to NAMI - the myths of mental illness (in truth - t'ain't no such thang)
I regret to inform you that my mother, Anne Ganzer, died on 31, July, 2011. Please remove her from your mailing list, and also from any financial solicitation lists. Please DO NOT SOLICIT my father for money for your worthy organization. The expenses of the funeral and celebration service and brunch, the loss of her social security income (my father is a retired state of Illinois teacher, and they did not pay into social security, and as a result get nothing out of it for their teachers' salaries).
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
====================================
Anne did get a lot from her affiliation with NAMI - although so much of what you have to offer is predicated on the unfounded hypothesis that there exists a classification of diseases known as "mental illnesses." Nonetheless, there powerful dynamics and bonds can be developed when people who have shared experiences come together specifically to speak of those experiences, engage honestly in dialogue, and to let their true emotions out, to share one another's common burden, thereby making the load far more easy to carry.
That said, it mist be noted that a reading of the DSM IV will lead the reader to the most obvious and basic of all conclusions: that (almost all) of those conditions classified as "mental illness" have no etiology - there is no way to predict the path the alleged "disease" will follow from one individual to the next, nor even to make generalizations accurate enough to have predictive utility, save for this:
A "mentally ill-labeled" human being {MILHB} will ALWAYS seek to go off their medications, and once they stop, they will almost invariably eventually (and rather sooner than later) return to a depressed state (although up the initial cessation of the meds, the MILHB will do some things which appear, most assuredly based on more recent and depressed (even severely depressed) behaviors to be quite out of character {OOCB}.
But the OOCB, the unbounded joy, optimism, enthusiasm, etc, etc, etc, can be perfectly and logically explained and understand by this analysis:
After an extended duration of depressed feelings, where the depression is palatable, when the human body's own healing mechanisms {HBOHM} begin to reach a point where they can quell the depression and reverse it, ridding itself of the things (thoughts, ideations, dreams) forming the root cause(s) of the depression (invariably different degrees of loss, which may be psychic or more tangible, depending on the individual. There are a wide varieties of responses to loss - ranging from rage to grief, to denial, to acceptance, with a couple of others tossed in between.
Furthermore, it is quite unlikely, given that since most of the mental health "experts" {MHE} who have known the have known the MILHB only in a depressed state (only here is one normally willing to voluntarily surrender his will to taking anti-depressants; a person experiencing a so called "manic episode" {ASCME} only when depressed, as any of you can attest), will never voluntarily surrender the joy and celebration of that moment in time when the depression has been eradicated while the body's attempt at achieving homeostasis through electro-magnetic-bio-chemical changes, has overshot the mark, that the MHE has sufficient knowledge of the "normal" range of emotions and behaviors of the so-called (and entirely mis-labeled) "mentally ill" client.
And too, especially in the case of the parents of a child who has left "the nest," gone out on their own, established themselves in their career, the social circles, their spiritual circles, their various communities, have a CLUE about what that child has become to the other people with whom he (the universal "he" intended to include all human being - male, female, trans-gendered) have the foggiest or faintest clue about what the child has become; about how that child has blossomed; about what that child has morphed into. And parents being flawed to the extent that they are not perfect, and most of them falling short by omission (things not done for) rather than commission (things done to), are typically NOT ready to even want to know what their child has become (unless the adult child is typically getting many accolades; an accoladed child's honors somehow or another rub off on its parents).
One trained in the scientific method would logically draw these following conclusion, which could then be tested experimentally:
(1) Major depressive episodes are hellish for every one involved.
(2) Medications for MILHB merely mask symptoms; they do not get to root causes.
(3) Until the root causes are fully understood, dealt with, and explored, and options
for coping with the root causes are emplaced, the MILHB will exhibit "classic"
symptoms of bipolar
illness, either being "too sad" or "too glad," in the eyes of those legally
empowered to make such judgments.
(4) The human body is a miraculous creation, and at all times attempts to keep itself
in a state
of balance (homeostasis). When body functions become severely compromised, what is
required of the body to reverse the effects invariably will "over shoot" the mark,
and the
results will be a "relapse" into the previous state.
(5) The most effective therapy to lead a MILHB out of the wilderness of one extreme or
the other is a combination of medication, talk therapy, diet, exercise, choosing to
be around mentally healthy people.
(6) If "mental illnesses" really were medically based, then one could be cured of their
mental illness. Such is NOT the case of the MILHB, for that person can NEVER
RECOVER FROM THE INITIAL MISDIAGNOSIS.
(7) The diagnostic tools for classifying any of the so-called mental illnesses come
from a laundry list of about 20 behaviors. For a specific "illness," between nine
and twelve laundry list behoviors are selected, and a MILHB who exhibits three or
more of these is deemed "to have it!"
(8) Enough is known about the history of DSM-series and the classification of mental
illness to further support that "mental illnesses" are not illnesses at all, but
merely a labels used to classify a MILHB and prescribe a treatment program
(typically by injecting potentially lethal drugs to counteract the MILHB's bio-
rhythms). Because a canon of literature exists, it is virtually impossible to sue
a mental health professional for malpractice in the event a MILHB's proscribed
medication management program cause serious damage, even including loss of life.
(9) Further evidence that the DSM-series defines not a family of illnesses, but serves
only to assist the reader of said series to label a MILHB is suggested by what were
formerly included as "mental illnesses," e.g:
Excessive masturbation
Homosexuality
Chain smoking
and by recalling that in the earlier days of classification, the hall mark
distinction between a so-called "manic depressive" and a "schizophrenic" was
social-economic class: the upper classes were labeled "manic depressive" and had
available rather nice rehabilitation hospitals, while the "schizophrenics' " lot
was rather far more bleak.
And thus we arrive at where we are today, with four cohorts permanently vested with propagating the belief that there exists such a thing as a group of illness which are called "mental illnesses:"
The pharmaceutical companies who spend a fortune advertising anti-depressants
on TV so that the patients can tell the doctor what they need to prescribe!
The psychiatric community at large, including the teaching colleges and
universities.
The legal profession which uses "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdicts to let
perfectly guilty well off white people get out of paying for their crimes and
having to be left to live amongst the "savages - frequently of darker hue" in the
lower 99.
Since "mental illness" is not a classification of disease, but rather a describer of behaviors, the American Psychiatric Association, The American Medical Association, and all the teaching hospitals which have programs dedicated to behvior modification, have been committing medical malpractice for the duration; they have kidnapped human beings (involuntary commitments), poisoned human beings (injection of potehtially lethal drugs against the patient's will), and slandered and libeled human beings because, while one might be cured of cancer, one can never be cured of the various mental illness labels.
What NAMI provides is talk therapy, for the family and loved ones of the MILHB, and possibly for the MILHB too (if they are willing attend meetings, which, I suspect, usually they are not). You share your experiences in a non-judgmental environment where everybody has experienced pretty much the same thing. That is comforting, and reassuring, and by voicing one's feelings, one releases them from the grave in which they were buried alive; one has an opportunity to be healed and made well again.
However, for as long as programs of treatment focus only on the symptoms, and not at getting to understanding the root cause of the loss which triggered the depression, the roller coaster ride is but one word, or one triggering event away from taking off again.
Your organization is worthy. It can BE better and DO better.
Thank you for your attention to these matters,
Sincerely,
MARK RAYMOND GANZER, who has had the following labels placed on me at various times:
Bi-polar
Manic-depressive, axis II, hypomanic state
Schizophrenic
Paranoid schizophrenic
Alcoholic
Manipulative Personality Disorder
Fractitious syndrome (also called Ganser's syndrome; how ironic)
Borderline personality disorder
Obsessive compulsive disorder
In other words, one real sick mother fucker.
What a crock of fucking bull shit; one from which I refuse any more to eat. You can be cured of the label by moving to where you are given a fresh start, a chance to prove (or disprove) your worthiness and value to community; where your past matters not, only your present, only your future. You must bury your past and treat as dead all those who love you, but believe you to be sick, all the while refusing to investigate their own pathologies.
Peace and blessings upon you, your family, your loved ones, your home, your organization, and your community,
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
====================================
Anne did get a lot from her affiliation with NAMI - although so much of what you have to offer is predicated on the unfounded hypothesis that there exists a classification of diseases known as "mental illnesses." Nonetheless, there powerful dynamics and bonds can be developed when people who have shared experiences come together specifically to speak of those experiences, engage honestly in dialogue, and to let their true emotions out, to share one another's common burden, thereby making the load far more easy to carry.
That said, it mist be noted that a reading of the DSM IV will lead the reader to the most obvious and basic of all conclusions: that (almost all) of those conditions classified as "mental illness" have no etiology - there is no way to predict the path the alleged "disease" will follow from one individual to the next, nor even to make generalizations accurate enough to have predictive utility, save for this:
A "mentally ill-labeled" human being {MILHB} will ALWAYS seek to go off their medications, and once they stop, they will almost invariably eventually (and rather sooner than later) return to a depressed state (although up the initial cessation of the meds, the MILHB will do some things which appear, most assuredly based on more recent and depressed (even severely depressed) behaviors to be quite out of character {OOCB}.
But the OOCB, the unbounded joy, optimism, enthusiasm, etc, etc, etc, can be perfectly and logically explained and understand by this analysis:
After an extended duration of depressed feelings, where the depression is palatable, when the human body's own healing mechanisms {HBOHM} begin to reach a point where they can quell the depression and reverse it, ridding itself of the things (thoughts, ideations, dreams) forming the root cause(s) of the depression (invariably different degrees of loss, which may be psychic or more tangible, depending on the individual. There are a wide varieties of responses to loss - ranging from rage to grief, to denial, to acceptance, with a couple of others tossed in between.
Furthermore, it is quite unlikely, given that since most of the mental health "experts" {MHE} who have known the have known the MILHB only in a depressed state (only here is one normally willing to voluntarily surrender his will to taking anti-depressants; a person experiencing a so called "manic episode" {ASCME} only when depressed, as any of you can attest), will never voluntarily surrender the joy and celebration of that moment in time when the depression has been eradicated while the body's attempt at achieving homeostasis through electro-magnetic-bio-chemical changes, has overshot the mark, that the MHE has sufficient knowledge of the "normal" range of emotions and behaviors of the so-called (and entirely mis-labeled) "mentally ill" client.
And too, especially in the case of the parents of a child who has left "the nest," gone out on their own, established themselves in their career, the social circles, their spiritual circles, their various communities, have a CLUE about what that child has become to the other people with whom he (the universal "he" intended to include all human being - male, female, trans-gendered) have the foggiest or faintest clue about what the child has become; about how that child has blossomed; about what that child has morphed into. And parents being flawed to the extent that they are not perfect, and most of them falling short by omission (things not done for) rather than commission (things done to), are typically NOT ready to even want to know what their child has become (unless the adult child is typically getting many accolades; an accoladed child's honors somehow or another rub off on its parents).
One trained in the scientific method would logically draw these following conclusion, which could then be tested experimentally:
(1) Major depressive episodes are hellish for every one involved.
(2) Medications for MILHB merely mask symptoms; they do not get to root causes.
(3) Until the root causes are fully understood, dealt with, and explored, and options
for coping with the root causes are emplaced, the MILHB will exhibit "classic"
symptoms of bipolar
illness, either being "too sad" or "too glad," in the eyes of those legally
empowered to make such judgments.
(4) The human body is a miraculous creation, and at all times attempts to keep itself
in a state
of balance (homeostasis). When body functions become severely compromised, what is
required of the body to reverse the effects invariably will "over shoot" the mark,
and the
results will be a "relapse" into the previous state.
(5) The most effective therapy to lead a MILHB out of the wilderness of one extreme or
the other is a combination of medication, talk therapy, diet, exercise, choosing to
be around mentally healthy people.
(6) If "mental illnesses" really were medically based, then one could be cured of their
mental illness. Such is NOT the case of the MILHB, for that person can NEVER
RECOVER FROM THE INITIAL MISDIAGNOSIS.
(7) The diagnostic tools for classifying any of the so-called mental illnesses come
from a laundry list of about 20 behaviors. For a specific "illness," between nine
and twelve laundry list behoviors are selected, and a MILHB who exhibits three or
more of these is deemed "to have it!"
(8) Enough is known about the history of DSM-series and the classification of mental
illness to further support that "mental illnesses" are not illnesses at all, but
merely a labels used to classify a MILHB and prescribe a treatment program
(typically by injecting potentially lethal drugs to counteract the MILHB's bio-
rhythms). Because a canon of literature exists, it is virtually impossible to sue
a mental health professional for malpractice in the event a MILHB's proscribed
medication management program cause serious damage, even including loss of life.
(9) Further evidence that the DSM-series defines not a family of illnesses, but serves
only to assist the reader of said series to label a MILHB is suggested by what were
formerly included as "mental illnesses," e.g:
Excessive masturbation
Homosexuality
Chain smoking
and by recalling that in the earlier days of classification, the hall mark
distinction between a so-called "manic depressive" and a "schizophrenic" was
social-economic class: the upper classes were labeled "manic depressive" and had
available rather nice rehabilitation hospitals, while the "schizophrenics' " lot
was rather far more bleak.
And thus we arrive at where we are today, with four cohorts permanently vested with propagating the belief that there exists such a thing as a group of illness which are called "mental illnesses:"
The pharmaceutical companies who spend a fortune advertising anti-depressants
on TV so that the patients can tell the doctor what they need to prescribe!
The psychiatric community at large, including the teaching colleges and
universities.
The legal profession which uses "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdicts to let
perfectly guilty well off white people get out of paying for their crimes and
having to be left to live amongst the "savages - frequently of darker hue" in the
lower 99.
Since "mental illness" is not a classification of disease, but rather a describer of behaviors, the American Psychiatric Association, The American Medical Association, and all the teaching hospitals which have programs dedicated to behvior modification, have been committing medical malpractice for the duration; they have kidnapped human beings (involuntary commitments), poisoned human beings (injection of potehtially lethal drugs against the patient's will), and slandered and libeled human beings because, while one might be cured of cancer, one can never be cured of the various mental illness labels.
What NAMI provides is talk therapy, for the family and loved ones of the MILHB, and possibly for the MILHB too (if they are willing attend meetings, which, I suspect, usually they are not). You share your experiences in a non-judgmental environment where everybody has experienced pretty much the same thing. That is comforting, and reassuring, and by voicing one's feelings, one releases them from the grave in which they were buried alive; one has an opportunity to be healed and made well again.
However, for as long as programs of treatment focus only on the symptoms, and not at getting to understanding the root cause of the loss which triggered the depression, the roller coaster ride is but one word, or one triggering event away from taking off again.
Your organization is worthy. It can BE better and DO better.
Thank you for your attention to these matters,
Sincerely,
MARK RAYMOND GANZER, who has had the following labels placed on me at various times:
Bi-polar
Manic-depressive, axis II, hypomanic state
Schizophrenic
Paranoid schizophrenic
Alcoholic
Manipulative Personality Disorder
Fractitious syndrome (also called Ganser's syndrome; how ironic)
Borderline personality disorder
Obsessive compulsive disorder
In other words, one real sick mother fucker.
What a crock of fucking bull shit; one from which I refuse any more to eat. You can be cured of the label by moving to where you are given a fresh start, a chance to prove (or disprove) your worthiness and value to community; where your past matters not, only your present, only your future. You must bury your past and treat as dead all those who love you, but believe you to be sick, all the while refusing to investigate their own pathologies.
Peace and blessings upon you, your family, your loved ones, your home, your organization, and your community,
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Democratic Senator’s Ads May Break New Ground
October 12, 2011
Democratic Senator’s Ads May Break New Ground
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — A new series of political advertisements on behalf of an embattled Nebraska senator could open the door to a flood of similar ads financed by outside groups and even businesses working directly with political candidates — a sharp departure from past practice.
The ads are innocuous enough on their face: Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat up for re-election next year, is featured on television and radio commercials discussing Social Security, the national debt, war veterans and other hot-button issues. What is remarkable, campaign finance lawyers and political operatives say, is that the ads were produced and paid for by Democratic Party officials in Nebraska and Washington — with the senator’s close involvement as their star.
Federal campaign rules restrict politicians from “coordinating” their advertisements with outside groups except under certain circumstances. Politicians — worried about tripping over the legal restrictions — have usually shied away from working directly with outside groups on ads. Instead, “issue” ads paid for by outside groups will typically hit on broad themes without focusing so squarely on a single lawmaker.
The Nebraska ads, which have cost Democrats more than $600,000 to run so far, could change that practice in a way that has wide implications for the 2012 elections, when 33 Senate seats and all 435 House seats will be up for grabs.
Indeed, American Crossroads — the powerful and well-financed Republican group formed with the help of the former White House aide Karl Rove — filed a request on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission asking for a formal ruling on whether it could “adopt the tactics” of Mr. Nelson in coordinating footage of politicians up for re-election.
American Crossroads said in its request that it “may wish to produce and distribute similar television and radio advertisements” featuring incumbents in the 2012 campaigns. The group said that because it was “especially sensitive” about rules banning improper coordination with a candidate, it wanted to check with the F.E.C. first to make sure such ads would be legal.
American Crossroads ran into “headaches” in 2010 when it ran ads supporting Rob Portman, then a Senate candidate from Ohio, said Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for the group. To avoid charges of improperly working with Mr. Portman, the group used only publicly available footage of the candidate — yet Democrats still filed a complaint asserting that the advertisements crossed the line.
If the F.E.C. now says outside groups can film candidates and work with them to produce ads — as Mr. Nelson’s do — “that would open up a whole new avenue in advertising and advocacy that previously has not existed for us,” Mr. Collegio said.
The maneuver may ultimately haunt Democrats, Mr. Collegio added. “By trying to be clever in helping Nelson,” he said, “they may be opening up a can of worms they may not have wanted to open up.”
Even though the ads were underwritten by Democratic organizations, in this instance the parties are considered to be operating as independent organizations engaged in issue advocacy rather than promoting the candidate himself. Under campaign rules, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would be allowed to spend $240,000 in coordination with Mr. Nelson’s campaign.
Paul Johnson, campaign manager for Mr. Nelson, said in an interview that the Nebraska Democratic Party had spent $600,000 to $700,000 so far on the ads, which began running this summer. A “vast majority” of the money has come from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington, he said.
In one ad, the senator stares straight at the camera and portrays himself as a Washington outsider — different from Beltway politicians who “don’t get it” and value politics over all else.
“Obviously, we got to consult on it,” Mr. Johnson said of the ads, “but it was driven by the party. They were the big dogs on this.”
Mr. Johnson said he was confident the ads complied with F.E.C. rules limiting coordination between a candidate and outside groups, and he noted that party officials financed similar ads for Mr. Nelson in 2006.
He and other Democrats said the ads do not run afoul of the rules in part because they do not come within 90 days of next year’s election — a blackout period for coordinating efforts — and they deal with “issues” without expressly urging Nebraskans to vote for Mr. Nelson.
But some Republicans disagree.
Even as American Crossroads seeks to follow Mr. Nelson’s lead, the Republican Party in Nebraska has filed a complaint with the F.E.C. charging that state Democrats and the senator had gone on a “massive spending spree” that violated campaign rules.
The state Republicans argue that Mr. Nelson’s “issue” ads are really veiled campaign messages meant to get him re-elected, and that state Democrats have far exceeded the $240,000 limit they are allowed to spend in coordinating such political work.
Campaign finance watchdogs said they were particularly troubled by the prospect of groups like American Crossroads, or Democratic counterparts like Priorities USA, using hidden, unlimited donations from private corporations to finance ads in conjunction with the candidates themselves. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Citizens United case allowed companies to donate money to outside groups for “independent” political expenditures — but not to the candidates themselves.
“That’s really the problem here — the whole notion of corporations spending unlimited funds,” said Donald Simon, counsel for Democracy 21, a nonpartisan group favoring greater campaign restrictions.
“The door has been opened,” he said, “and the only question is how many corporate spenders are going to walk in.”
Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the Nebraska ads reflect the inability of the F.E.C. — hobbled in recent years by political gridlock — to put in place and police campaign finance rules.
In examining the Nebraska ads, Professor Hasen said, “I think the practice stinks like a skunk, but at first blush it doesn’t appear to be illegal under the F.E.C.’s precedent.”
“We’re in this brave new world of campaign finance, so we’re seeing all sorts of things we never saw before,” he said. “Nelson does this, and if he’s successful, then you’ll see others going this route. People push the envelope, and no one pushes back.”
But for conservatives like Brad Smith, a law professor and former F.E.C. commissioner who favors deregulating campaign laws, the move toward a more direct political role for outside groups is welcome.
“Are they pushing the envelope?” he asked. “Well, we haven’t seen much like this, and we might start to see more of it. They’re at the forefront — the cutting edge, if you will.”
Democratic Senator’s Ads May Break New Ground
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
This is a very dumb headline, for which the reporter cannot be blamed. "May Break New Ground?" Are you kidding me, it either will or it won't. If it's DIFFERENT in tone and/or content from the countless attack ads we've become so inured to then it PROBABLY will break new ground. Let us read on to see what's what?
WASHINGTON — A new series of political advertisements on behalf of an embattled Nebraska senator could open the door to a flood of similar ads financed by outside groups and even businesses working directly with political candidates — a sharp departure from past practice.
The ads are innocuous enough on their face: Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat up for re-election next year, is featured on television and radio commercials discussing Social Security, the national debt, war veterans and other hot-button issues. What is remarkable, campaign finance lawyers and political operatives say, is that the ads were produced and paid for by Democratic Party officials in Nebraska and Washington — with the senator’s close involvement as their star.
What the fuck is remarkable about THIS? That he actually addresses real ISSUES, to my mind, is the remarkable thing. If ads are being produced and the politician is NOT involved, well, how the fuck can you expect the ads to work? The pol is the "boots on the ground" who knows when he's sinking like a stone and when he's got the crowd's interest and support.
Federal campaign rules restrict politicians from “coordinating” their advertisements with outside groups except under certain circumstances. Politicians — worried about tripping over the legal restrictions — have usually shied away from working directly with outside groups on ads. Instead, “issue” ads paid for by outside groups will typically hit on broad themes without focusing so squarely on a single lawmaker.
Holy fucking shit. What kind of federal campaign rules are THESE? Who the fuck invented them? Who voted for them. THIS IS THE REAL FUCKING STORY, WHICH IS QUITE LIKELY TO BE MISSED BY THE REPORTER! Enquiring minds will read on.
The Nebraska ads, which have cost Democrats more than $600,000 to run so far, could change that practice in a way that has wide implications for the 2012 elections, when 33 Senate seats and all 435 House seats will be up for grabs.
Note how we find out how much the ads cost, but nothing about why the friggin' law is so fucked up to begin with!
Indeed, American Crossroads — the powerful and well-financed Republican group formed with the help of the former White House aide Karl Rove — filed a request on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission asking for a formal ruling on whether it could “adopt the tactics” of Mr. Nelson in coordinating footage of politicians up for re-election.
Okay, I think I'm starting to get it. The laws were passed by democrats (surprising that Karl Rove asks permissionfor anything. He never needed to when His Excellency "W" was king (under the Presidency of Dickhead Chay-Knee)
American Crossroads said in its request that it “may wish to produce and distribute similar television and radio advertisements” featuring incumbents in the 2012 campaigns. The group said that because it was “especially sensitive” about rules banning improper coordination with a candidate, it wanted to check with the F.E.C. first to make sure such ads would be legal.
Okay. Smooth Rovian play - bringing to the attention of the FEC the possible breach of the rules while simultaneously trying to get the okay to go ahead with a nuclear option (which basically will allow outside interests to toss more money into the election campaign than federal laws otherwise permit.
American Crossroads ran into “headaches” in 2010 when it ran ads supporting Rob Portman, then a Senate candidate from Ohio, said Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for the group. To avoid charges of improperly working with Mr. Portman, the group used only publicly available footage of the candidate — yet Democrats still filed a complaint asserting that the advertisements crossed the line.
But we never see Democrats fight for a recount in a Presidential election! Fucking feckless surrender monkeys!
If the F.E.C. now says outside groups can film candidates and work with them to produce ads — as Mr. Nelson’s do — “that would open up a whole new avenue in advertising and advocacy that previously has not existed for us,” Mr. Collegio said.
The maneuver may ultimately haunt Democrats, Mr. Collegio added. “By trying to be clever in helping Nelson,” he said, “they may be opening up a can of worms they may not have wanted to open up.”
Sounds like the Republicrats believe their image -making propaganda artist campaign folk can do better than those retained by the dems. Possibly, but, the Republicrats need viable candidates, and they don't really have many of them.
Even though the ads were underwritten by Democratic organizations, in this instance the parties are considered to be operating as independent organizations engaged in issue advocacy rather than promoting the candidate himself. Under campaign rules, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would be allowed to spend $240,000 in coordination with Mr. Nelson’s campaign.
Paul Johnson, campaign manager for Mr. Nelson, said in an interview that the Nebraska Democratic Party had spent $600,000 to $700,000 so far on the ads, which began running this summer. A “vast majority” of the money has come from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington, he said.
In one ad, the senator stares straight at the camera and portrays himself as a Washington outsider — different from Beltway politicians who “don’t get it” and value politics over all else.
Yeah, sure, politicians are FOREVER running as Washington DC outsiders, and they jump on the gravy train the moment they get erections ... er .... elected.
“Obviously, we got to consult on it,” Mr. Johnson said of the ads, “but it was driven by the party. They were the big dogs on this.”
Mr. Johnson said he was confident the ads complied with F.E.C. rules limiting coordination between a candidate and outside groups, and he noted that party officials financed similar ads for Mr. Nelson in 2006.
He and other Democrats said the ads do not run afoul of the rules in part because they do not come within 90 days of next year’s election — a blackout period for coordinating efforts — and they deal with “issues” without expressly urging Nebraskans to vote for Mr. Nelson.
But some Republicans disagree.
Here we are in serious danger of actually getting some NEWS!
Even as American Crossroads seeks to follow Mr. Nelson’s lead, the Republican Party in Nebraska has filed a complaint with the F.E.C. charging that state Democrats and the senator had gone on a “massive spending spree” that violated campaign rules.
The state Republicans argue that Mr. Nelson’s “issue” ads are really veiled campaign messages meant to get him re-elected, and that state Democrats have far exceeded the $240,000 limit they are allowed to spend in coordinating such political work.
Well, DUH!
Campaign finance watchdogs said they were particularly troubled by the prospect of groups like American Crossroads, or Democratic counterparts like Priorities USA, using hidden, unlimited donations from private corporations to finance ads in conjunction with the candidates themselves. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Citizens United case allowed companies to donate money to outside groups for “independent” political expenditures — but not to the candidates themselves.
Whatever THAT means!
“That’s really the problem here — the whole notion of corporations spending unlimited funds,” said Donald Simon, counsel for Democracy 21, a nonpartisan group favoring greater campaign restrictions.
“The door has been opened,” he said, “and the only question is how many corporate spenders are going to walk in.”
ANSWER: Each and every fucking one of them!
Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said the Nebraska ads reflect the inability of the F.E.C. — hobbled in recent years by political gridlock — to put in place and police campaign finance rules.
In examining the Nebraska ads, Professor Hasen said, “I think the practice stinks like a skunk, but at first blush it doesn’t appear to be illegal under the F.E.C.’s precedent.”
“We’re in this brave new world of campaign finance, so we’re seeing all sorts of things we never saw before,” he said. “Nelson does this, and if he’s successful, then you’ll see others going this route. People push the envelope, and no one pushes back.”
Brave new world of campaign finance? HELL, haven't campaigns been financed since th 2nd election?
But for conservatives like Brad Smith, a law professor and former F.E.C. commissioner who favors deregulating campaign laws, the move toward a more direct political role for outside groups is welcome.
It's welcome for me too, probably for different reasons than any Brad Smith might have to say.
“Are they pushing the envelope?” he asked. “Well, we haven’t seen much like this, and we might start to see more of it. They’re at the forefront — the cutting edge, if you will.”
Gail Collins is a hack; a witless hack, and probably a lezzie too (her and MoDo settin' in a tree - cat cat cat bitchin 1,2,3
October 12, 2011
The Gift of Glib
By GAIL COLLINS
Right now you’re probably asking yourself, how did Rick Perry do in the big Republican debate in New Hampshire this week?
He did great! It turns out that Governor Perry has a big energy plan, known as “The Plan I’m Going to Be Laying Out.” When he does, it’s going to be the answer to almost everything. We know that because no matter what Perry was asked, he talked about the plan. Which will involve “the American entrepreneurship that’s out there.” And a whole lot more. When he’s ready to tell you.
For the rest of the time, Perry pretty much sat there like a large boulder with good hair, while the remaining members of the gang attacked Herman Cain, the former fast-food chain president turned Republican front-runner, about his economic plan.
This is what we’ve come to. A presidential debate about the 9-9-9 plan.
9-9-9 is the sine qua non of the Cain candidacy. It would scrap the tax code and give us 9 percent corporate, income and national sales taxes. He mentions it every 10 seconds. (Opening statement, he got it in by 5.)
I have never heard anybody discussing the 9-9-9 plan in the real world, but obviously I hang out in the wrong places.
The organizers and the candidates felt the need to really get into this, and, as a result, Tuesday night in New Hampshire will go down in history as the 9-9-9 plan debate.
(Here is how presidential primary debates go down in history. The tapes are stored in a moisture-proof vault in a civil defense cave in Indiana. If the world as we know it should come to an end, the surviving members of our species will be able to relive these deeply American contests and pass their knowledge on to their children. Soon, they will go forth and repopulate a world in which all the boys sit around looking smug like Newt Gingrich and all the girls sound like Michele Bachmann. That is what they mean by “the living will envy the dead.”)
Among the elite cadre of Americans who have been thinking about 9-9-9, a good number have determined that it won’t raise enough revenue. “The problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect,” announced Cain firmly. I do admire the way he does this. If I could convey that tone, I would win every argument in my family just by saying “The problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect.” And there would never again be a discussion of renting a limo for a family viewing of all the Cincinnati Christmas lights.
Also, Michele Bachmann pointed out that 999 turned upside down is 666, which would make Cain’s tax policy the mark of the devil. Cain seemed to find that amusing, but he looked a little peeved when Jon Huntsman suggested 999 might be the price of a box of pizza.
That, people, was the sum and substance of the wit and humor of the New Hampshire Republican debate. Jon Huntsman also tried to make a joke about gas, but we are not going there.
Cain, in an attempt to pull down his competition, asked if Romney could name all 59 points in his 160-page economic plan.
Now I strongly suspect that Mitt could name all 59 points. I bet he repeats them at night to put himself to sleep. (“lower marginal tax rates ... more free trade agreements ... mmmmzzzzzzz.”) But he didn’t fall into that trap. He whipped out the seven pillars of Romneyism, which support the 59 points and can, therefore, be packed into one 30-second response. If you ignore Charlie Rose yelling in the background.
The guy has pillars for his points. No wonder he’s winning.
There were other high points — Gingrich accused Romney of starting class warfare by advocating an end to the capital gains tax only for investors making under $200,000 a year. He also said Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be thrown in jail for their bill to reform Wall Street financial practices. Herman Cain said Alan Greenspan was the best Fed chairman in recent history. Michele Bachmann gave the fact-checkers another great night of error-correcting. It was the usual good time for all, except you do kind of wonder what the heck gives this particular crowd of people the right to be the nation’s official presidential contenders. What do they have in common? Intelligence? Appropriate experience? A large base of followers? Not so much.
What have they got? They’ve all got glib.
Except one. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Rick Perry. If he wasn’t Rick Perry.
As things stand, the Perry camp is apparently planning to keep their guy in the background during debates and hit Romney over the head with mean commercials. That shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe they’ll include the day Mitt drove to Canada with the family dog on the car roof.
The Gift of Glib
By GAIL COLLINS
Right now you’re probably asking yourself, how did Rick Perry do in the big Republican debate in New Hampshire this week?
Um Gail, do you have a LIFE? T'ain't none-buddy out here in reality land what's gots time to even thinks 'bout what that sheet-kickin' red-dick piece of Texas crap care 'bout dem republicdumb deBACKelles.
He did great! It turns out that Governor Perry has a big energy plan, known as “The Plan I’m Going to Be Laying Out.” When he does, it’s going to be the answer to almost everything. We know that because no matter what Perry was asked, he talked about the plan. Which will involve “the American entrepreneurship that’s out there.” And a whole lot more. When he’s ready to tell you.
Tickay Dickay did the same damned thing wid his plan to get our skinny whiate (and fat black) asses outa 'Nam too - but back den in da day - t'ain't no way some REEporTAGE wuzza' gonna' go holding Trickay's Dick to the fire. (Dat would be a changin, just like duh times, as dee bo' BobbAY Zimmuhmayahn done sang his skinny ass off about.
For the rest of the time, Perry pretty much sat there like a large boulder with good hair, while the remaining members of the gang attacked Herman Cain, the former fast-food chain president turned Republican front-runner, about his economic plan.
"Good hair" duh Gay-"Y'all Colon gal dunn gots her ass off on rippin sweet, sweet Molly I's monicker for duh guv off - Sweet Sweet Moly I use ta call dee guy "Good Hair!" (And you can look it up and it still be vewy true!)
This is what we’ve come to. A presidential debate about the 9-9-9 plan.
9-9-9 is the sine qua non of the Cain candidacy. It would scrap the tax code and give us 9 percent corporate, income and national sales taxes. He mentions it every 10 seconds. (Opening statement, he got it in by 5.)
Dem COE PO' RAY SHUNS, dem bouys, dey still be findin' waze to makes deir feeuheral tax bite EQ duh ZEE ROE! Dat be what daze a'payin' dem smart tax 'ccounting fucks all dem fad big bux.
I have never heard anybody discussing the 9-9-9 plan in the real world, but obviously I hang out in the wrong places.
GAY Y'ALL, yuh LooNay Tune BEEYATCH - yo' ass do'nt be hangin' out in no real wurld, no how, no where, no weigh!
The organizers and the candidates felt the need to really get into this, and, as a result, Tuesday night in New Hampshire will go down in history as the 9-9-9 plan debate.
Sooth sayuh fo' HighYuh - the big G-String lady done goes off un makes a proposal which she'll forget about 'bout duh time MoDo be tungin' her PUSS-SAY.
(Here is how presidential primary debates go down in history. The tapes are stored in a moisture-proof vault in a civil defense cave in Indiana. If the world as we know it should come to an end, the surviving members of our species will be able to relive these deeply American contests and pass their knowledge on to their children. Soon, they will go forth and repopulate a world in which all the boys sit around looking smug like Newt Gingrich and all the girls sound like Michele Bachmann. That is what they mean by “the living will envy the dead.”)
Must give credit where it's due, here. This is the most god-damned funniest fuckin' thang that I hay-yea-have read TWO-PHUCKIN'-DAY!
Among the elite cadre of Americans who have been thinking about 9-9-9, a good number have determined that it won’t raise enough revenue. “The problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect,” announced Cain firmly. I do admire the way he does this. If I could convey that tone, I would win every argument in my family just by saying “The problem with that analysis is that it is incorrect.” And there would never again be a discussion of renting a limo for a family viewing of all the Cincinnati Christmas lights.
Also, Michele Bachmann pointed out that 999 turned upside down is 666, which would make Cain’s tax policy the mark of the devil. Cain seemed to find that amusing, but he looked a little peeved when Jon Huntsman suggested 999 might be the price of a box of pizza.
That, people, was the sum and substance of the wit and humor of the New Hampshire Republican debate. Jon Huntsman also tried to make a joke about gas, but we are not going there.
Cain, in an attempt to pull down his competition, asked if Romney could name all 59 points in his 160-page economic plan.
Now I strongly suspect that Mitt could name all 59 points. I bet he repeats them at night to put himself to sleep. (“lower marginal tax rates ... more free trade agreements ... mmmmzzzzzzz.”) But he didn’t fall into that trap. He whipped out the seven pillars of Romneyism, which support the 59 points and can, therefore, be packed into one 30-second response. If you ignore Charlie Rose yelling in the background.
The guy has pillars for his points. No wonder he’s winning.
There were other high points — Gingrich accused Romney of starting class warfare by advocating an end to the capital gains tax only for investors making under $200,000 a year. He also said Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be thrown in jail for their bill to reform Wall Street financial practices. Herman Cain said Alan Greenspan was the best Fed chairman in recent history. Michele Bachmann gave the fact-checkers another great night of error-correcting. It was the usual good time for all, except you do kind of wonder what the heck gives this particular crowd of people the right to be the nation’s official presidential contenders. What do they have in common? Intelligence? Appropriate experience? A large base of followers? Not so much.
What have they got? They’ve all got glib.
Except one. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Rick Perry. If he wasn’t Rick Perry.
As things stand, the Perry camp is apparently planning to keep their guy in the background during debates and hit Romney over the head with mean commercials. That shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe they’ll include the day Mitt drove to Canada with the family dog on the car roof.
Don'tcha just luvumms the smell of bipartinsanship in the morning?
Congress Ends 5-Year Standoff on Trade Deals in Rare Accord
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and JENNIFER STEINHAUER
WASHINGTON — Congress passed three long-awaited free trade agreements on Wednesday, ending a political standoff that has stretched across two presidencies. The move offered a rare moment of bipartisan accord at a time when Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided over the role that government ought to play in reviving the sputtering economy.
The approval of the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama is a victory for President Obama and proponents of the view that foreign trade can drive America’s economic growth in the face of rising protectionist sentiment in both political parties. They are the first trade agreements to pass Congress since Democrats broke a decade of Republican control in 2007.
All three agreements cleared both chambers with overwhelming Republican support just one day after Senate Republicans prevented action on Mr. Obama’s jobs bill.
The passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small. A federal agency estimated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “negligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent.
The House voted to pass the Colombia measure, the most controversial of the three deals because of concerns about the treatment of unions in that country, 262 to 167; the Panama measure passed 300 to 129, and the agreement concerning South Korea passed 278 to 151. The votes reflected a clear partisan divide, with many Democrats voting against the president. In the Senate, the Colombia measure passed 66 to 33, the Panama bill succeeded 77 to 22 and the South Korea measure passed 83 to 15. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, voted against all three measures.
The House also passed a measure to expand a benefits program for workers who lose jobs to foreign competition by a vote of 307 to 122. The benefits program, a must-have for labor unions, passed with strong Democratic support. The Senate previously approved the measure.
Proponents of the trade deals, including Mr. Obama, Republican leaders and centrist Democrats, predict that they will reduce prices for American consumers and increase foreign sales of American goods and services, providing a much-needed jolt to the sluggish economy.
“At long last, we are going to do something important for the country on a bipartisan basis,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.
However, Mr. Obama’s support for the measures has angered important parts of his political base, including trade unions, which fear job losses to foreign competition. Many Democrats took to the House floor Wednesday to speak in opposition to the deals.
“What I am seeing firsthand is devastation that these free trade agreements can do to our communities,” said Representative Mike Michaud, a Maine Democrat who once worked in a paper mill.
Both chambers raced to approve the deals before a joint Congressional session Thursday with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak.
The revival of support for the deals, originally negotiated by the Bush administration five years ago, comes at a paradoxical political moment, when both conservative Republicans and the Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken antitrade positions, albeit for different reasons. In a debate among Republican presidential candidates Tuesday night, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, accused China of manipulating the value of its currency to flood the United states with cheap goods, while populist sentiment on the left opposes the trade agreements because of the potential for American job losses.
Mr. Obama cited similar concerns in criticizing the agreements during the 2008 presidential campaign, but he later embraced the deals as a key part of his agenda to revive the economy. To win Democratic support, the White House reopened negotiations with the three countries to make changes demanded by industry groups and unions, and insisted that the expansion of benefits for displaced workers be tied to passage of the trade agreements.
The benefits program was expanded in 2009 to include workers in service industries as well as manufacturing. The compromise negotiated this summer between the White House, House Republicans and Senate Democrats preserves most of the funding for the program.
Increased protections for American automakers in the South Korea deal won the support of traditional opponents of trade deals, including some Midwestern Democrats and the United Automobile Workers union. But scores of Democrats opposed the deal with Colombia, because they said it did not do enough to address the murders of dozens of union organizers in that country.
“Trade agreements should not be measured solely on how many tons of goods move across the border,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat.
Economists generally predict that free trade agreements, which eliminate tariffs and other policies aimed at protecting domestic manufacturers, benefit all participating nations by creating a larger common market, increasing sales and reducing prices. But such deals also create clear losers, as workers lose well-paid jobs to foreign competition.
The White House and Republican leaders said that the three agreements would provide a big boost to the lagging American economy and put people back to work.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hailed the deals Wednesday as an important victory for American foreign policy. And she said she expected that the South Korea pact alone would create 70,000 American jobs. “By opening new markets to American exports and attracting new investments to American communities, our economic statecraft is creating jobs and spurring growth here at home,” Ms. Clinton said at a Washington event.
But the United States International Trade Commission, a federal agency that analyzed the deals in 2007, reported that that economic impact would be minimal because the three countries combined represent a relatively small market for American goods and services.
The modest projected increase in demand will come mostly from South Korea, the world’s 14th-largest economy, which will join a short list of developed nations that have free trade pacts with the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, Israel and Singapore.
The commission predicted that American farmers would benefit most, because of increased demand for dairy products and beef, pork and poultry. Conversely, it predicted that the pacts would eliminate some manufacturing jobs, particularly in the textile industry.
Opponents, including textile companies, said that the deals would harm the economy by undermining the nation’s industrial base. They argued that South Korean companies would benefit much more than American companies because they were gaining access to a much larger market.
These are the first deals to pass Congress since the approval of an agreement with Peru in 2007. The Bush administration had won approval for trade agreements with 14 countries before the Democrats regained Congress in 2008, but it was then unable to gain traction.
“It’s been five years in the making, but we are finally here,” said Representative Lynn Jenkins, a Kansas Republican, in a speech urging passage of the agreements.
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and JENNIFER STEINHAUER
WASHINGTON — Congress passed three long-awaited free trade agreements on Wednesday, ending a political standoff that has stretched across two presidencies. The move offered a rare moment of bipartisan accord at a time when Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided over the role that government ought to play in reviving the sputtering economy.
The approval of the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama is a victory for President Obama and proponents of the view that foreign trade can drive America’s economic growth in the face of rising protectionist sentiment in both political parties. They are the first trade agreements to pass Congress since Democrats broke a decade of Republican control in 2007.
All three agreements cleared both chambers with overwhelming Republican support just one day after Senate Republicans prevented action on Mr. Obama’s jobs bill.
The passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small. A federal agency estimated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “negligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent.
The House voted to pass the Colombia measure, the most controversial of the three deals because of concerns about the treatment of unions in that country, 262 to 167; the Panama measure passed 300 to 129, and the agreement concerning South Korea passed 278 to 151. The votes reflected a clear partisan divide, with many Democrats voting against the president. In the Senate, the Colombia measure passed 66 to 33, the Panama bill succeeded 77 to 22 and the South Korea measure passed 83 to 15. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, voted against all three measures.
The House also passed a measure to expand a benefits program for workers who lose jobs to foreign competition by a vote of 307 to 122. The benefits program, a must-have for labor unions, passed with strong Democratic support. The Senate previously approved the measure.
Proponents of the trade deals, including Mr. Obama, Republican leaders and centrist Democrats, predict that they will reduce prices for American consumers and increase foreign sales of American goods and services, providing a much-needed jolt to the sluggish economy.
“At long last, we are going to do something important for the country on a bipartisan basis,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.
However, Mr. Obama’s support for the measures has angered important parts of his political base, including trade unions, which fear job losses to foreign competition. Many Democrats took to the House floor Wednesday to speak in opposition to the deals.
“What I am seeing firsthand is devastation that these free trade agreements can do to our communities,” said Representative Mike Michaud, a Maine Democrat who once worked in a paper mill.
Both chambers raced to approve the deals before a joint Congressional session Thursday with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak.
The revival of support for the deals, originally negotiated by the Bush administration five years ago, comes at a paradoxical political moment, when both conservative Republicans and the Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken antitrade positions, albeit for different reasons. In a debate among Republican presidential candidates Tuesday night, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, accused China of manipulating the value of its currency to flood the United states with cheap goods, while populist sentiment on the left opposes the trade agreements because of the potential for American job losses.
Mr. Obama cited similar concerns in criticizing the agreements during the 2008 presidential campaign, but he later embraced the deals as a key part of his agenda to revive the economy. To win Democratic support, the White House reopened negotiations with the three countries to make changes demanded by industry groups and unions, and insisted that the expansion of benefits for displaced workers be tied to passage of the trade agreements.
The benefits program was expanded in 2009 to include workers in service industries as well as manufacturing. The compromise negotiated this summer between the White House, House Republicans and Senate Democrats preserves most of the funding for the program.
Increased protections for American automakers in the South Korea deal won the support of traditional opponents of trade deals, including some Midwestern Democrats and the United Automobile Workers union. But scores of Democrats opposed the deal with Colombia, because they said it did not do enough to address the murders of dozens of union organizers in that country.
“Trade agreements should not be measured solely on how many tons of goods move across the border,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat.
Economists generally predict that free trade agreements, which eliminate tariffs and other policies aimed at protecting domestic manufacturers, benefit all participating nations by creating a larger common market, increasing sales and reducing prices. But such deals also create clear losers, as workers lose well-paid jobs to foreign competition.
The White House and Republican leaders said that the three agreements would provide a big boost to the lagging American economy and put people back to work.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hailed the deals Wednesday as an important victory for American foreign policy. And she said she expected that the South Korea pact alone would create 70,000 American jobs. “By opening new markets to American exports and attracting new investments to American communities, our economic statecraft is creating jobs and spurring growth here at home,” Ms. Clinton said at a Washington event.
But the United States International Trade Commission, a federal agency that analyzed the deals in 2007, reported that that economic impact would be minimal because the three countries combined represent a relatively small market for American goods and services.
The modest projected increase in demand will come mostly from South Korea, the world’s 14th-largest economy, which will join a short list of developed nations that have free trade pacts with the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, Israel and Singapore.
The commission predicted that American farmers would benefit most, because of increased demand for dairy products and beef, pork and poultry. Conversely, it predicted that the pacts would eliminate some manufacturing jobs, particularly in the textile industry.
Opponents, including textile companies, said that the deals would harm the economy by undermining the nation’s industrial base. They argued that South Korean companies would benefit much more than American companies because they were gaining access to a much larger market.
These are the first deals to pass Congress since the approval of an agreement with Peru in 2007. The Bush administration had won approval for trade agreements with 14 countries before the Democrats regained Congress in 2008, but it was then unable to gain traction.
“It’s been five years in the making, but we are finally here,” said Representative Lynn Jenkins, a Kansas Republican, in a speech urging passage of the agreements.
Rupert Murdoch Declares War On Occupy Wall Street
by ProudProgressive Posted October 10, 2011
Related Topics: Fox News, right wing, Wall Street, Drugs, War, Facebook, Case, Crash, Giant, Fighting, Crime, New York, Pot, Free, Place, parents, Food, cheese
+9
Rupert Murdoch Uses His Media Empire to Declare War On Occupy Wall Street
October 10, 2011
By Jason Easley
In what amounts to a declaration of war against Occupy Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has launched a misinformation assault on the 99% across multiple parts of his media empire.
MG: Of course, this was not unexpected - the propaganda wing of the LKBAU (Let's Keep Bidness As Usual Upper Oners would be all over this like flies over shit - an extremely apt analogy
Here is the video from Media Matters:
Steve Doocy quoted almost verbatim from a New York Post article that highlighted the crime, drug abuse and free food at Occupy Wall Street.
OH MY FUCKING GOD IN HEAVEN ABOVE - FREE FOOD - WHAT WILL THESE ANARCHISTS THINK OF NEXT?
Here are some of the parts of the article that Doocy read almost as written on the air,
Wanted for burglary, the drug-addled fugitive said some of his hard-partying pals clued him in that the protest was a good place to be fed, get wasted and crash. "I've been smoking and drinking in here for eight days now," said Dave, booze on his breath and his eyes bloodshot as he lay sprawled on a tattered sheet of cardboard. "I need to get some methadone. Every day, I wake up, and I'm f–ked up." Drugs can be easy to score — a Post reporter was offered pot for $15 and heroin for $10.
Easy now to see why SMACK has become the drug of choice of former pot-heads ... it's all about the $$$$$!
…
The free chow offered to protesters was boosting the crowd.
there oughta be a law against giving free food to protester - HELL, free food to ANYBODY (although, when a bidnessman writes off lunch with a client, that seems to me to be a whole lot like free food
"People say they are here for the cause, but the real reason is the free food," quipped Cameron, 26, of Jersey City. "On my third day, they had smoked salmon with cream cheese. You know how much smoked salmon is a pound? Sixteen dollars. I eat better here than I do with my parents!"
CAMERON - DUDE - hey mon, you're friggin' 26-years old and living with Ma and PA? You ARE a legacy baby - the lower 99er special - dumber than a rock holding turtles fucking
At one point yesterday, a speaker from Washington, DC, told protesters how to break out of zip ties and handcuffs in case they get collared.
THIS is bogus beyond beliefs - how many of you have ever been cuffed by police? #1 - they cuff your hands behind your back, so, how the fuck are you gonna break out the old ZIP TIES?
The protest vet, Ryan Clayton, 30, demonstrated how use a bobby pin to spring the cuffs open — while claiming he was "not encouraging people to break out of restraints."
News Corp owned Fox News used the quotes from the also News Corp owned Post to substantiate their claims that the people attending Occupy Wall Street are criminals, druggies, and hippies who are only there for the free food. The point of writing such stories and essentially reading them on Fox News is not only to smear Occupy Wall Street, but also to scare News Corp readers and viewers who might be having sympathetic feelings or even considering standing with the 99%.
While to impute motive is simply rude, I think door #2: to scare News Corp readers and viewers who might be having sympathetic feelings or even considering standing with the 99%
News Corp is trying to portray the protests as dangerous places full of shady characters where drugs and sex are running rampant. The Post article even worked in a quote and a reference to Woodstock. The strategy is clear. News Corp is combining their resources to spread an anti-Occupy Wall Street message across multiple media properties and platforms. This is an escalation of their attack on the protesters and their message.
Murdoch is using his vast media empire to declare war on Occupy Wall Street and the 99%. News Corp is now coordinating their message and attacks. The anti-Occupy message has been appearing on several News Corp owned properties individually, but the media giant is now trying to unify the dissemination of their misinformation. News Corp has gone from mocking the protests, to denying the size of the protests, to launching an all-out coordinated misinformation campaign against Occupy Wall Street.
First they ignore us; then they mock us; finally they hire mercenaries to kill us; in the end, we prevail!
News Corp and the right wing media
Here I must complain. What the fuck do you exactly mean by "the right wing media?" Couldn't you have at LEAST named some of the usual suspects? FOX NEWS, COX MEDIA, etc, etc, etc - so that readers or viewers of those media are at least aware of the bias and might use their power as consumers of lies and misinformation to take their "help me understand what's going on" bucks and spend them on some other, hopefully less partisan news hacks.
have been trying for over a week now to slow down the growth of this movement with no success. More people are joining the existing protests, and new protests are springing up around the country. The 99% don't have a Rupert Murdoch, but they do have thousands of people taking to Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites to report the truth about these protests.
AH .. THIS is the friggin story - the POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA (which has toppled repressive governments in the middle east and Europe). WE have our means of communications, and it is INTANTATER! -- an incurable advantage in the propaganda wars.
The one percent have their media machine churning out their propaganda 24/7, but they are fighting a message war that they are destined to lose.
In the end, only the 1% will listen to their media machine, forever believing their own propaganda, and not even considering that the most dangerous creature in the universe is the salesman who has bought his own line of bull shit, hook line, and stinker!
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
This is actually one of the LAST things we need! BLOOMBERG, you friggin' fool
NYC Mayor: U.S. Needs More Foreign Tech Talent
Michael Bloomberg calls for an end to H-1B visa caps and wants automatic green cards for grad students in advanced STEM programs.
By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek
October 10, 2011
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/outsourcing/231900459
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the U.S. is committing "national suicide" by limiting the number of green cards and visas available to hi-tech talent from overseas.
"In today's global marketplace, we cannot afford to keep turning away those with skills that our country needs to grow and to succeed," said Bloomberg, at a speech sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Partnership for a New American Economy. "I've called it national suicide--and I really think it is."
Like Paul Craig Robers, I call BULLSHIT -- America graduates 100's of 1000's of high tech students from our colleges and universities each and every year and they can't find jobs (because they need experience to get that first job, dontch know?) in their field of sutdy, and thus, they end up working as bartenders and waitresses and health care service industry folk - with the bartenders and waitresses making one hell of a lot more money than the health care services industry folks - as per my own son, Adam James Ganzer, fully certified both state-wide and nationally as a phlebotomist, which was to be for him an entry into the more exciting world of health care services - EXCEPT, only by the grace of God did he get a job, with QUEST in the first place, but he was lucky to get 18-20 hours a week, which was not exactly enough to fill the tank, wash his laundry, pay his rent, etc, etc, etc, and thus, he took a job as a food server at one of the local exclusive country clubs, part time, until he realized he was ROLLING in money from the side job and decided to give up (for the time being at least) on his dream of being a high tech health care serfves industry worker.
The mobile workforce is one of the fastest growing threats to security.
Hardly. Disaster capitalism and the US corporate welfare state are the biggest threats to security, both nationally, and world wide. Wait, just WAIT, until American workers (with no jobs or seriously undereimployed, American college students with degrees and outstanding academic track records, US veterans of the military who can't find any one to hire them decide ... well, if the damned Egyptians can do it, why can't we? And take up guns. Picture this: 1,000,000 unemployed Americans armed to the teeth with 100's of rounds of ammo going to Wall Street, NYC, and firing 100 rounds each into the New York Stock Exchange. That mother fucker would tumble in a heart beat. And THEN, and likely ONLY THEN, would the US political and financial elites come to know the fear that the French government knows, with a long knowledge of history, that when the masses rise up together to take OUT the oppressing mother rapers, NO ONE IS SAFE!
Discover 7 tips to combat this threat.
Bloomberg cited a number of studies that he said showed that immigrants working in hi-tech fields help to create jobs for Americans through investments, entrepreneurship, and by helping U.S. companies become more competitive globally. "These high-skill workers will not only help create thousands of jobs, they'll also give us knowledge of foreign markets that will help U.S. businesses increase their exports."
Pure bull shit. Immigrant workers will work for 50-65% of what an American worker has every right to expect, thereby reducing wages for the American worker. The whole fucking idea is pure bullshit propaganda designed to reduce wages, increase profits, and keep the lower 99$ down, forever and ever, AMEN!
Bloomberg, who made his own fortune by developing systems that feed key financial data to Wall Street traders, said Congress should pass legislation that increases the number of green cards available to foreign born workers in fields like computer science, math, and engineering. He also called on lawmakers to pass bills that would eliminate the numerical cap on temporary, H-1B visas and that would make Ph.D students in STEM programs immediately eligible for permanent resident status upon graduation.
Unfuck Bloomberg forever that he might no longer breed (and God Willing) that he no longer breath. ASllegedly we can't find American workers to do the jobs that the Mexican and South American workers are only too eager to perform, for minimum wage, paying their full share into social security, from which they will get NADA ... not one fucking dime .... give 'em all green cards, and let the American-miseducated workers compete against somebody who has known hunger daily. Trust me, it won't be no fair fight at all. As OBUMMAH said, we 'Murcans is SOFT, FLACCID, LIMP-DICKED non-fuckers.
[ Groups that represent tech workers oppose easing visa rules. Read Microsoft IT Hiring Problems Bogus, Say Programmers. ]
"Turning these students out of the country is, to put it bluntly, about the dumbest thing we could possibly do," said Bloomberg, who delivered the speech Sept. 28 in Washington, D.C. "Other countries are bending over backwards to attract these students--and we're helping them to do it. We've become the laughing stock of the world with this policy."
ALSO, to do so is poaching the intellectual and technical resourcwes of the countries from which these students came. Quite a bit different, really, and far more devesating than poaching their natural resources. At least when we've poached their natural resources, we TEND to leave them alone.
Bloomberg said the U.S. risks losing top global talent to countries like China, India, Canada, and Chile, (by which he means top Chinese, Indian, Canadian, and Chilean talent to the countries of their birth and family origins ... we will lose them to who they are and where they came from!)
all of which have instituted programs designed to make it easier for hi-tech professionals to immigrate. His comments echo calls for immigration reform by executives at major U.S. tech firms, including Microsoft. The software maker says it has thousands of open positions it can't fill because it's unable to find workers with the right skills.
MICROS-FUCKING-SOFT -- you mean that high tech company that buys out individuals who make better software? The only thing Microsoft does consistently is to change their MSN home page annually and make it ever harder than it was before to find shit! MICROSOFT SUCKS, and there REALLY ought to be a bounty on the head of Bill Gates (metaphorically, speaking, of course, I would NEVER advocate doing harm to another human being, even one of such questionable genetic make up as Mr Gates - who wants to privatize education in 'Murikca! FRIGGING ASSHOLE GATES.
Such comments are sure to provoke controversy, as they come at a time when the nation's high-unemployment rate, in excess of 9%, SUCH a friggin crock of shit, 9% my bare ass - it's 25% under anything resembling human understanding of the term "unemployment" except that .. first the NIXON misadministration changed the definition and then the Clinton Clusterfuck Administration changed the definition of "unemployment" so that if you've been out of work too long, you are not counted, period, if you are a single working mom with two jobs and you report income you make from babysitting on the weekends, you are counted as 3 jobs and 1 wodker, leading to 300% employment ... ta fucking da ... how this number goes unremarked or unchallenged baffles me - unless the press corpse is innumerate (which it is) or unless the news elites of this nation want to perpetuate the myth that all is well in the land of the un-free and home of two million slaves (the prison population, which works for peanuts)
has helped spark protests like the Occupy Wall Street movement. On Monday, Bloomberg, in his capacity as mayor, said he would allow the protesters to occupy parts of lower Manhattan indefinitely.
As, they are legally ENTITLED TO DO!
Some groups that represent U.S.-born IT professionals say the H-1B program, which allows foreign tech workers to remain in the country for a maximum of six years, gives employers the means to replace them with cheap labor.
WHAT A PERFECT OPPORTUNITY TO REPORT SOME NEWS ... this IS the friggin' story, but note how the "reporter" (stenographer) doesn't even bother to find out if there is truth to the claim that H-1B gives employers the means to replace US workers with cheap(er) labor
Bloomberg said he doesn't buy such arguments. "As the data clearly show, immigrants don't take away jobs; they make jobs--and that is especially true for high-skilled immigrants."
As "THE DATA" okay, Mr Stenographer, did you think to fucking ask JUST WHAT IN THE FUCK DATA ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT MR BLOWS SMOKE UP MY ASS MAYOR?
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