Thank you, Jesus. De nada.

(1)  Manifesto of the Appalled Economists: Hat-tip to David Barkin for the link to the English translation (which has apparently been around for over a year already) for this document, originally out of France, subtitled CRISIS AND DEBT IN EUROPE: 10 PSEUDO “OBVIOUS FACTS”, 22 MEASURES TO DRIVE THE DEBATE OUT OF THE DEAD END.  A good read alongside our current lead article, Why the United States Is Not Greece, our take on the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, courtesy of John Miller and Katherine Sciacchitano.

 

(2) Davidson on Wolff and Other Purveyors of Doom: Adam Davidson, the annoying and right-wing co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money, mentions frequent D&S author Rick Wolff in his piece in yesterday’s New York Times, It Is Safe to Resume Ignoring the Prophets of Doom, Right? I’m tempted to answer, “No, but it is now safe to ignore the prophets of dumb (like Davidson).” Rick’s attitude toward the article was more mature:  “probably another step in re-integrating Marxian perspectives into US public discourse and thus it is a good thing despite snide author’s comments.”  The comments section is pretty good, though I wish people would call Davidson on his snideness and his dumbness.

(3) The Student Loan Debt Bubble: An article at Global Research by Alan Nassar and Kelly Norman.  Simultaneously, I got an invite to a conference call about a report to be released tomorrow about an uptick in student-loan defaults:

THE NEXT MORTGAGE-STYLE CRISIS FOR U.S.?  SURVEY TO SHOW DISTURBING JUMP IN STUDENT LOAN DEFAULTS

Parallels Seen to Run-Up in Home Mortgage Foreclosures; Emerging Crisis Worsened by Lack of Discharge Options & Poor Economy; Parental Co-Signers Often Feel the Pinch in Retirement Years.

WASHINGTON, D.C.///NEWS ADVISORY//Will the fast-rising crisis in student loan defaults soon rival the mortgage foreclosure debacle in the United States?

A new survey of more than 850 U.S. bankruptcy attorneys by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) to … will show a major increase in private and public college students unable to repay their student loans.

(4) Lifting the Veil: A video on how the Democrats function as a release valve for social protest (or function to absorb and blunt social protest–pick your metaphor):  http://vimeo.com/20355767.

(5) Michelle Rhee Connection Map: Did I post this already?   We will be running an article soon (May/June or July/August) about neoliberalism and public education.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

Punk Mum, by Banksy

 

I resolve to try, in 2012, to do more posts with fewer items. But here’s a link dump of stuff that’s been accumulating on my browsers:

(1) Susan George on “The Davos Class”: The Transnational Institute has a great report called The State of Corporate Power 2012: Exposing the Davos Class.  The lead article is an excerpt from Susan George’s book Whose Crisis, Whose Future?. Here’s a tidbit:

‘“All for ourselves and nothing for other people” seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,’i wrote Adam Smith in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, universally considered the first comprehensive inquiry into the nature and practice of capitalism.

The masters of mankind are still with us:  I call them the Davos class because, like the people who meet each January in the Swiss mountain resort, they are nomadic, powerful and interchangeable. Some have economic power and usually a considerable personal fortune. Others have administrative and political power, mostly exercised on behalf of those with economic power, who reward them in their own way. Contradictions among its members can most certainly exist – the CEO of an industrial company does not always have exactly the same interests as his bankers – but generally speaking,  when it comes to societal choices, they will agree.

I’m not impugning anybody’s individual morality here – there are surely plenty of kind-hearted bankers, generous traders and socially responsible CEOs. I am simply saying that, as a class, they can be counted on to behave in certain ways if only because they serve a single system. The Davos class, despite its members’ nice manners and well-tailored clothes, is predatory. These people cannot be expected to act logically because they are not thinking about longer-term interests, usually not even their own, but about eating, right now.

You can find the Davos class in every country – its members do not belong to a conspiracy and its modus operandi can be readily observed and identified.  Why bother with conspiracies when the study of power and interests will do the job? The Davos class is always extremely small relative to the society and its members naturally have money – sometimes inherited, sometimes self-made.  More importantly,  they have their own social institutions – clubs, top schools for their kids, neighbourhoods, corporate and charity boards, holiday destinations, membership organizations, exclusive fashionable social events, and so on – all of which help to buttress social cohesion and collective power. They run our major institutions, including the media, know exactly what they want and are much more united and better organized than we are.

But this dominant class has weaknesses too; one is that it has an ideology but virtually no ideas and no imagination.  Their programme since the 1970s, usually called ‘neoliberalism’, is based on freedom for financial innovation, no matter where it may lead, on privatization, deregulation, and unlimited growth; on the supposedly free, self-regulating market and free trade that gave birth to the casino economy.  This economy has failed spectacularly and is now thoroughly discredited, at least in the public mind.

Read the rest of the excerpt.  The TNI report has lots of great infographics, including this one:

 

Planet Earth: A Corporate World

There’s also a Spanish version of the report.

 

(2) Greenway Conservancy Scandal: I’ve been enjoying an emerging scandal surrounding the Greenway Conservancy, the 501(c)3 nonprofit that manages the Rose Kennedy Greenway, one parcel of which (Dewey Square) Occupy Boston took over for a couple of months.  It was the Conservancy that asked the city of Boston to evict Occupy Boston (see item 3 in this post, and item 2 in this post for more details).

Last week Nancy Brenner, executive director of the Conservancy, tripped up when a reporter from the Boston Herald, our right-leaning newspaper, asked her to disclose her salary.  She sent an email to her PR consultant asking which of several ways of avoiding answering the question she should opt for–but she sent it to the Herald reporter by accident.  Find the original cover article after that gaffe here. Since then, Transportation Secretary Richard Davey asked the Conservancy to release records (which it did, reluctantly) and he has since said that they should “begin to wean itself off government support” (see here).

We’ll be covering this story as it unfolds.  Besides the Occupy Boston connection, there are multiple other ironies (e.g. millions of dollars going from the Transportation Department to the Greenway even as the MBTA threatens fare hikes and service cuts, while the MBTA is saddled with debt from the “Big Dig”–the Artery Tunnel Project that serves the city’s automobiles and created the Greenway).

(3) Romney’s taxes: I haven’t seen this item from the LA Times referred to elsewhere:  Romney tax returns detail funds not reported in ethics forms.

(4) Two items on Summers:

• From CJR:  Summers: “Inside Job Had Essentially All Its Facts Wrong.”
• From the New Yorker:  Summer memo from Obama transition released.

(5) India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President: From Forbes.

That’s it–saving some juicy items for later.

–Chris Sturr

 

Occupy the Stairs--by a kid in Lansing, W.Va.

(Hat-tip to Jenny B. for today’s potentially irrelevant image.)

(1) New Issue! Our Jan/Feb 2012 issue is finally at the printers.  Print subscribers should get their magazines in a week to ten days; e-subscribers should get their full-color pdfs in about twenty minutes. Not a subscriber? Please subscribe right now, here.

I have posted two articles from the new issue to the website:  Jeannette Wicks-Lim’s The Great Recession in Black Wealth, and John Miller and Katherine Sciacchitano’s Why the United States Is Not Greece.

(2)  Various Occupy-Related Links have been occupying my browser tabs, which I’d like to clean up.  (Are we going to get tired of playful deployments of the “occupy” metaphor? Are we already tired?)

Here they are:

(a) David Graeber on Giant Puppets: On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets, and why cops hate them more than they hate the black bloc.  Look for a review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in our March/April issue.

(b) Vanity Fair Oral History of OWS: Revolution Number 99.  This is good despite quoting the annoying Jeffrey Sachs.  They quote David Graeber, which is cool.

(c) Jo Freeman 2nd-Wave Document: I must have known about this before, but forgotten.  Newly salient.  The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

(d) Oakland Police Backpedaling on Crime During General Strike: I try not to link to Daily Kos, given its Dem-friendliness, but here’s a good piece: No Surprise, Oakland Police Chief Lied to Discredit Occupy Oakland. More on this from KTVU.

(e) Solidarity Economy Briefs from the Solidarity Economy Network: Briefs for Occupy from SEN:  Occupy the Economy!

(f) Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police. I can’t remember if I have already posted this from the Portland Occupier.

(g) By Yours Truly in the Boston Occupier: Bursting the Economists’ Bubble. I already posted the text of this here. It is now in print–15,000 copies are being distributed at T-stops across Boston and beyond.

(3) Keystone link: I don’t think we should believe that the Keystone Pipeline won’t be built because Obama has backed off from it for now.  To remember how important it is that it not be built, check out this piece by James Hansen: Silence is Deadly.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

"I Was Wrong"

(1) ASSA/AEA Protests: I apologize for the delay posting–I was in Chicago for the annual meetings of the Allied Social Sciences Association, a/k/a the American Economic Association and its marginalized poor cousins.  My last post mentioned the protests that were planned. Here is an article I whipped out for the Boston Occupier (the print newspaper of Occupy Boston) on the protests, which were a blast:

Occupy the AEA!

The movement takes on free-market economists at their annual meetings in Chicago.

By Chris Sturr

In January 2009, as economists gathered in San Francisco for the annual meetings of the American Economic Association (AEA), the economy was in a shambles as a result of the financial crisis and recession. The crisis took mainstream economists by surprise, perhaps because of the free-market orthodoxy that pervades their discipline. The profession could hardly ignore the crisis; heretofore proponents of laissez-faire policies suddenly embraced fiscal stimulus and other government intervention in the economy. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously told a congressional committee that he was “shocked” that free-market models had turned out to be flawed. “I was wrong,” the “maestro” admitted.

But the 2009 meetings of the AEA showed a profession remarkably unperturbed by economic collapse. Patricia Cohen of the New York Times reported that conference attendees and the discipline as a whole appeared “unshaken” by the financial crisis. “Free market theory, mathematical models and hostility to government regulation still reign in most economics departments at colleges and universities around the country.” What would it take for the profession to change? Cohen quotes David Card, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley: “If unemployment is still high three years from now, then you might start to see a paradigm shift, Mr. Card said; economists will ‘have to say that the market isn’t supposed to work this way.’”

Three years hence, with unemployment still high, no paradigm change was in evidence at the 2012 AEA meetings, which were held in Chicago, ground zero of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of free-market economics, January 6-8. But there was one key difference: now we have the Occupy movement.

A coalition of groups including Occupy Chicago, StandUp! Chicago, the Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education (CACHE), Jobs with Justice, the Chicago Political Economy Group (CPEG), and the Union for Radical Political Economists (URPE) staged a series of events and demonstrations targeting the AEA and its role in the economic crisis. From the flyer promoting the actions dubbed “Occupy the AEA”:

“The American Economic Association (AEA) has for years fostered a narrow, free-market orthodoxy in the economics profession. Mainstream economists of both parties move fluidly between academia and government, not only spinning out the most narrow-minded free-market theory, but attempting to construct the economy in the image of this theory. In so doing, they lend a helping hand to the interests of the 1%, providing a scientific aura for deregulation, low tax rates for the wealthy and corporations, slashing necessary programs and privatization. Tell the AEA: ‘The show’s over.’ The 99% are onto their machinations and manipulations. Call them out! Join labor, community, and ethical economists’ groups in two days of outrage, and challenge the AEA to serve the people, not the rich and powerful.”

An image on the flyer, created by Hope Asya of the Occupy Chicago Arts Committee, depicted Occupy as a hand holding a pin, pricking a bubble surrounding the AEA’s official seal. This image captured not only the role of free-market, deregulatory economics in creating speculative bubbles, but also the way in which mainstream economists operate in a bubble that insulates them from the real-world struggles of the 99%.

One example of that bubble: the AEA and the economics discipline as a whole, unlike most any other discipline, had no code of ethics. Other professions—from physicians to physicists, and from sociologists to statisticians—have codes requiring (among other things) disclosure of potential conflicts of interest, but economists have been free to sit on corporate boards while expounding on policy that affects those corporations. In the wake of the financial crisis, and with public attention directed toward the profession’s shabby ethical practices (most prominently in Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job), more than 300 AEA members signed a petition asking the organization to adopt a code of ethics, which it did, finally, on the Thursday before this year’s convention.

Friday’s events began with political theater in which the “1% economists” were invited to have lunch with members of the 99%. Occupy activists set up a table and chairs on the corner of Michigan and Wacker Avenues, outside the main conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, and served “RAHMen noodles,” in mock tribute to Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emmanuel. Sitting at the table to represent the 99% were Lourdes Guerrero, a laid-off art teacher, and 85-year-old activist Ruth Long, who spoke about how cuts in education and social services have affected them. Simultaneously, members of Occupy Chicago dropped a banner from a bridge over the Chicago River with the famed Wrigley Building in the background. The banner depicted an AEA economist, looking like the rich guy from Monopoly, urinating on the 99%, under the title “Trickledown Economics.”

After the luncheon, activists marched down Michigan Avenue by Millennium Park and Grant Park with radical economists from URPE and CPEG, and an escort of Chicago Police Department officers riding bicycles. The small band of marchers was undeterred by the arrest of one of the main organizers of the protests from Occupy Chicago, whose only offense seems to have been insufficient deference to the police. After spending a few hours in jail, he was cited for “failure to obey an order to disperse,” an order which none of the participants in the march seem to have heard.
There were also “The People’s Economic Conference”—two days of teach-ins at Roosevelt University led by radical economists, including Nancy Folbre of UMass-Amherst, Chris Tilly of UCLA, Stephen Marglin of Harvard (who teaches the heterodox alternative to Greg Mankiw’s introductory economics course), George DeMartino of the University of Denver, and Steve Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute. “I was excited to learn about URPE and that there are economists who are critical to the failed economic, academic theories of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan,” said Marty Donakowski, a graduate student and member of CACHE. “It is inspiring and elating that there are active economic theorists who advocate on behalf of the common good, especially in the face of the current recession.”

On Saturday, CACHE held a mock award ceremony for the economists most responsible for the financial crisis and recession. For the record: the BP Toxic Waste of Space Award went to Larry Summers of Harvard and to the Obama Administration; the Martha Stewart Award for Most Conflicted Economist went to Columbia Business School’s R. Glenn Hubbard; while the Glenn Beck Award for Excellence in Indoctrination and Propaganda went Harvard University’s N. Gregory Mankiw. (In early November, 70 of Mankiw’s students—some of them Occupy Harvard activists—protested his teaching in their own way, by staging a walkout from his introductory economics lecture; see “Walking Out On Mainstream Economics,” Boston Occupier Issue 3.)
The CACHE demonstration also focused on problems in economics education. CACHE activist Ben Schacht explained why he joined the protests: “I’m here to protest the way that economics curricula have become just a vehicle for very narrow theories of self-interest and rationality which basically legitimate the system of economic organization that works for very few people, and hurts the vast majority of people—99% of people.”

Though the protests and teach-ins were not large—the largest rally peaked at about a hundred fifty people—they were loud and spirited. They also brought together a wide range of people and groups; in addition to the already-named groups, members of Ocupemos el Barrio, Occupy the South Side, and Iraq Veterans Against the War were in attendance during the events.

“In the actions and especially in the teach-ins, it really felt like activists, citizens, and economists were together taking economics back for the people, for the 99%,” said UCLA economist Chris Tilly, who is director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Unemployment. “It was exciting and prefigurative in some of the same ways that the entire Occupy movement has been.” Now that there’s an Occupy movement, there’s a better chance that mainstream economists will escape their bubble, and generate fewer bubbles. Maybe some of them will even join in the struggle to build an economy that works for the 99%.

The image at the top is of someone from Occupy Chicago with an Alan Greenspan sign.  Here’s a video of the  “RAHMen noodle” street theater, featuring Lourdes Guerrero and Ruth Long (eventually the police told us we couldn’t have the table on the corner, so it had to be carried around, which of course made for better theater):

 

And here’s the video from which I got the Ben Schacht quote:

 

 

Arthur MacEwan’s Critique of the AEA in 1969: Our columnist and co-founder, Arthur MacEwan, stopped by the office the other day. When he heard about our protests in Chicago, he wanted to give me the text of a scathing critique he delivered to the AEA business meeting in 1969. Here it is:

Statement at the Annual Business Meeting of the American Economic Association, December 29, 1969, read by Arthur MacEwan:

We have come to denounce the American Economic Association, and to denounce the dominant economics for which the A.E.A. provides the organizational support.

Economists in the United States work as a group and work contrary to the interests of the masses of people. The affluence and the power of the economists derive from their support of the elite, the elite which controls the institutional structure and the sources of power that perpetrate and reproduce the oppression of millions—the economists are the sycophants of inequality, alienation, destruction of environment, imperialism, racism, and the subjugation of women.

Economists are the priests and prophets of an unjust society. They preach the gospel of rational efficiency, justifying the reduction of man and nature to marketable commodities; they treat human beings as capital and tell us the poor are poor because they lack “productive skills”; all they tell us about the war in Vietnam is how to fight it more efficiently; they apply mathematical models that “prove” that foreign investment helps the development of poor countries; they tell us that racism is the result of “personal preference”; they tell us that private property and wage differentials present a system of personal material incentives “necessary” for “growth.”

But the economists do not merely praise the system; they also supply the tools—indeed, they are the tools—instrumental to the elite’s attainment of its unjust ends. They show how to manipulate people so that the system’s binges are smoothly oiled. Economists are minimizers of just discontent: in the face of police riots in cities, it is the economists who develop “people appeasement” programs to prevent rebellion; when a reactionary government controls a poor count r y, economists are sent to “rationalize” and “stabilize” its economy; when students rebel on campuses, it is the industrial relations economists and game theorists, the rational arm of the police, who provide the program for repression.

The American Economic Association must be denounced as the organization through which these economists operate. But further, the A.E.A. plays directly destructive roles in our society. It serves to insure the perpetuation of professionalism, elitism, and petty irrelevance. It serves to inhibit the development of new ideas, ideas which are reflective of social reality.

Our conflict with the A.E.A, is not simply an intellectual debate. The A.E.A. cannot lessen our condemnation by their willingness to partake in debate, or by their willingness to provide a room to radical economists at this meeting. Our conflict is a basic conflict of interests. The economists have chosen to serve the status quo. We have chosen to fight it.

Plus ça change…

(3) Repubs Critique Vulture Capitalism: Have you noticed that the Republicans (or at least Romney’s opponents in the primaries) have suddenly become harsh critics of predatory capitalism? Here’s a link to the film by Newt’s SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, that Newt has been excerpting in his anti-Romney ads: When Mitt Romney Came to Town. It’s a hoot. Hat-tip to John Miller.

(4) Critique of Adam Davidson: Hat-tip to Bryan Snyder for pointing out Alternet’s excellent critique of economist Adam Davidson, who is behind NPR’s Planet Money: Mr. Davidson’s Planet.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

(1) D17: Big protests in NYC and elsewhere to commemorate the third month of #OWS.  Click on the image above for info about NYC events; visit your local Occupy’s website for info about protests near you.  I know some places are having rallies in support of Bradley Manning whose birthday is tomorrow and who is finally getting a pre-trial hearing, after more than 500 days incarcerated.

(2) #OccupyBoston evicted: Since my last post was about the imminent eviction of #OccupyBoston from Dewey Square in the Rose Kennedy Greenway, you may have figured out that that happened.  I think it went down about as smoothly as could have been hoped, and the Occupation continues post-eviction; two General Assemblies have been held indoors, after at least a couple were held in the Boston Common; the one I went to on Tuesday had around 200 people I would say, and Working Group meetings, rallies, and other events have been continuing apace.

I haven’t gathered the best material on the eviction, but here are two items: a nice piece that underscores how stupid it is that the Greenway Conservancy was behind the eviction, given that #OB is the best use to which the Greenway was ever put (it is usually empty of people, especially this time of year, and perhaps especially Dewey Square):  Rescued from Real People, Boston’s De-Occupied Dewey Park Now Re-Landscaped for Passing Motorists.  And there was a ridiculous piece in the Boston Business Journal saying that the clean-up/restoration of Dewey would cost $40K-$60K.  (They moved in with new soil and leveling and landscapers the very day of the eviction, indicating that it was long planned.)  The Conservancy is swimming in money and is non-transparent and non-accountable and undemocratic.  Look for #OB to make public statements denouncing them as serving the 1%.  (The Boston Business Journal piece was in their real estate section.)  Related: nice piece from the LA Review of Books on post-eviction OccupyLA and the corruption of the Democratic mayors who so enthusiastically evicted.

(3) Gar Alperovitz is everywhere: Did you catch that Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism, whose new edition D&S just co-published, had the lead op-ed in the NYT yesterday? He was also on Democracy Now!.

(4) Eurozone: We’re working on a great piece on the eurozone crisis by Katherine Sciacchitano for our January/February issue.  In the meantime, hat-tip to John Miller for two good pieces:  one is Alan Blinder’s WSJ op-ed, which, as John puts it “is pretty clear on how countries in the euro zone had just one option – deficit spending — for counteracting a downturn in their economy instead of the three usual options (deficit spending, increasing the money supply, and devaluing their currency).”  And a take on the crisis that is actually radical vs. just being clear, by German left economist Heiner Flassbeck, in this video from the Real News Network.

(5) Bits ‘n’ Pieces:

–Nice interview with David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist who has been heavily involved in Occupy (in NYC) and whose book on debt we’ll review in our March/April issue;

–Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which we’re covering in our Jan/Feb issue;

–The Massachusetts legislature met yesterday to discuss whether to have a public option or single-payer health care (my impression was that they were going to pick one or the other).  Frequent D&S author Jerry Friedman testified; I may post his testimony soon, which was great and witty. Here’s the Globe piece in advance of the session.

–Great piece on what happened when a board of ed member too the standardized tests they force on kids. Very thoughtful commentary: WashPo story. We’ll be covering neoliberal reforms in education in our March/April or May/June issues.

–Interesting data from Pew about public opinion about Occupy.  Upshot: lots of people share the movement’s views, but some of those who do do not agree with the movement’s methods. (I’d chalk this up to the way crackdowns get blamed on the protesters.)

–Surge in free lunches at schools, according to the NYT.  Hat-tip to Shirley K.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

 

(Find more great Occupy art here.)

(1) Restraining Order Protecting #OccupyBoston Lifted: The judge who had imposed a restraining order against the city of Boston and the Boston Police Department against evicting #OccupyBoston from Dewey Square has lifted that order.  An emergency General Assembly has been called for 7pm tonight.  Here’s a statement from the Mass ACLU:

Statement of the ACLU of Massachusetts on decision re Occupy BostonDecember 7, 2011The following statement may be attributed to Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts:
We are disappointed with today’s decision and are reviewing the decision with our clients to determine all their options.The Occupy Boston community is making a significant contribution to national discussion of important issues–not merely through what protestors are saying, but their modeling of an alternative to what they see as imbalances and injustices in our society.Just because the court ruled today that the city can shut down the encampment at Dewey Square does not mean that it should.  As city officials have repeatedly–and recently–stated, there is no immediate need to remove Occupy Boston from Dewey Square.  If city officials decide, nonetheless, to do so, how they go about it also sends an important message.  Occupy Boston has always been a peaceful political protest, aimed at drawing attention to the growing inequalities in our society.  At a minimum, Boston city officials and the police must exercise restraint and respect with regard to the Occupy Movement and the concerned citizens it represents.  Although we don’t agree with the ultimate holding, the Judge recognized that Occupy Boston activities–its model of daily life–were intended to send a message that was communicated and understood, noting:“There can be no doubt that at this writing in Boston, and perhaps throughout the country, an enclave of tents and in a public park connotes the Occupy movement and their 99%/1% view.  Matters of finance and the present economic situation are of intense concern to many people.  There is considerable media attention devoted to Occupy sites, and most articles, per journalistic custom, restate the Occupy position.  The media has clearly understood the plaintiffs’ contribution to the national conversation.”With the exception of the heavy-handed removal of demonstrators from the Rose Kennedy Greenway early in the morning on Oct. 11, Boston has already become a model of respect for freedom of speech to other cities around the country, where Occupy encampments have been broken up with levels of force that have even shocked people who were not involved in the Occupy movement or sympathetic to its aims.Boston, as part of the long New England tradition of town meeting and grassroots democracy, has an important role to play again in how it responds to today’s decision. We believe that Boston can–and must–set an example for the entire nation in protecting the rights of Occupy Boston participants.

For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts’ work on behalf of Occupy Boston, go to:
http://aclum.org/occupy (2) Book Launch for Gar Alperovitz: D&S co-sponsored a book launch for Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism at Encuentro 5  in Boston’s Chinatown on Saturday. It was a huge success!  There were about 80 people in attendance, and Gar gave a great and engaging talk. The discussion/question session afterwards was at a very high level.  There was also a small-group discussion after the whole event with members of the Boston Area Solidarity Economy Network (BASEN) and other folks interested in bringing a “Cleveland Model”-style network of co-ops to Boston.

I encourage everyone to watch the videos of Gar’s talk–here’s the first of three:

 

Here are parts two and three:
Gar Alperovitz “America Beyond Capitalism”: Video 2 of 3

Gar Alperovitz “America Beyond Capitalism”: Video 3 of 3

(3) Forbes Piece on Obamacare and Single-Payer Hat-tip to Marilyn F. for sending along an interesting piece from Forbes: The Bomb Buried in Obamacare Explodes Today–Hallelujah!. The author, who refreshingly (for Forbes) favors single-payer, argues that the health-reform law’s provision that “that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit” will cause lots of companies to go under, paving the way for single-payer. Sounds great! But is it true? I asked Jerry Friedman, UMass-Amherst economist and author of our July/August 2011 cover story on single-payer. Here’s what he said, alas:

Yes, the PPACA requires medical loss ratios of 80% (85% for large insurers). No this will not be an end to private insurance in the US anymore than it has been for private insurance in Massachusetts where it has been the law since 2006. First, these are very attainable ratios for decently managed companies. (The average MLR in Massachusetts is over 90%.) Second, because these ratios are very squishy and easy to manipulate. This is a good provision in the PPACA but Unger is going way overboard.

So unless the situation is somehow different elsewhere than in Massachusetts, it looks like the author is off base, unfortunately.

(By the way, I just posted Jerry Friedman’s excellent article on the assault on public-sector workers from the Nov/Dec 2011 issue.)

(4) Bahrain and Israel Train U.S. Cops to Crush #OWS? My last post reported that the guy behind the “Miami model” of policing that has brought all the pepper spray into protesters’ eyes recently has been hired by the government of Bahrain so they can deal with their protesters with methods short of torture. Now Max Blumenthal has an article in The Exiled claiming that Alameda Co. Sheriff Dept. staff, who used excessive force against #OccupyCal and #OccupyOakland, trained alongside Israeli Border Police and the Bahraini military in a program called Urban Shield 2011. Creepy.

(5) Mel King on Occupy: There was a nice and sympathetic piece in the Boston Globe about comments by veteran Boston-area activist Mel King on the Occupy movement.  He’s not so sure it’s worth it to defend Dewey Square–something to think about now that the restraining order has been lifted.

(6) Rick Wolff in Brooklyn on Dec. 11th: Rick Wolff will be speaking at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture this Sunday, Dec. 11th, from 11 to 12:30.  More info here.

(7) California Unions Back Bad Brown Tax Plan: Not a huge surprise in the case of SEIU, but disappointing nonetheless:  here’s the report from BeyondChron.

(8) Julio Huato on CELAC and EU: Nice blog post by Julio Huato of St. Francis College and URPE, on the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, comparing it to the EU.

(9) Audio of the WGBH Piece Interviewing Me about #OccupyHarvard: Here’s the link to the text version;  you can click on the “pl;ay” button right below the picture to hear the audio.  Pretty snappy quotes; nice piece on the whole.

That’s all for now.

–Chris Sturr

Disorder Control Unit memo

(1) Timoney and Bahrain: (Note today’s possibly irrelevant image–can’t remember where I downloaded it, but it was apparently found in a police van in lower Manhattan recently.) The other day I linked to an article from the Atlantic that gave a useful account of the recent history of police tactics with respect to large protests.  We are now in the era of the “Miami model,” which involves “strategic incapacitation.” From that article:

9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.

And here’s a table comparing the successive policing models:

Now from the Miami Herald and the AP, word that the police chief who developed the Miami model, John Timoney, has been tapped by the government of Bahrain to train its police.

Yet another connection between the protests here and the Arab Spring: we are contending with similar police tactics (though the Miami Model is a step up from the “torture and excessive force” that an independent commission found had been used against pro-reform protesters.  Nice to see the U.S. policing community helping undemocratic governments repress more gently. Timoney’s family must be proud.  Maybe he can hire Lt. John Pike to help with the training.

(2) Europe: We are cooking up a good account of the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone for our January issue.  In the meantime, Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog has been great about taking mainstream media outlets to task for claiming that the crisis is about “profligate spending.”  Only Greece had serious deficits before the financial crisis; Spain, Italy, and the other countries now in trouble had only small deficits or even surpluses.  See also Krugman on this point.

(3) Walker to Charge Protesters to Be Pepper-sprayed: This is not from The Onion–it’s true: Walker Intends to Charge Citizens Fee to Protest.

(4) Frank Luntz “Frightened to Death” of OWS: The Republican Party’s version of “framing” guru George Lakoff–in charge of micromanaging the party’s “messaging”–told the Republican Governors’ Association:

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Let’s hope he’s right.  Check the article out.  He’s advising the GOP to avoid the terms “capitalism” and “middle class” and “tax the rich” in favor of “free market system,” “hardworking taxpayers,” and “take from the rich.”  Let me test drive those:  “We need to take from the rich because the free-market system is screwing hardworking taxpayers (and the rest of the 99%).”  I think it still works.

(4) Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants: An excellent piece from the America’s Program.

(5) NYT Piece on the Power of the 99% Slogan: In case you missed it, here it is.

(6) Rich Homosexuals Reward Cuomo for Being “Progressive”: My former student, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is mentioned (and his fiancé is quoted) in this NYT article about how big money is coming in for NY governor Andrew Cuomo because of his support for gay marriage in NYS:

Mr. Cuomo’s recent fund-raising tied to same-sex marriage began in April, when he was the beneficiary of an event at the SoHo loft of Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, and his fiancé, Sean Eldridge, a senior adviser at Freedom to Marry. The couple said they planned to wed at their home in Garrison, N.Y., in June.

“The governor has earned a place in history as someone who has led on this issue in a remarkable way,” Mr. Eldridge said in a telephone interview. “I certainly think that the L.G.B.T. community, and the broader progressive community, won’t forget it.”

Does the “broader progressive community” include the unions that Cuomo is busting and the public-sector workers he is screwing? Jerry Friedman points out in the current issue of D&S:

Republicans have been the face of the attack on public employees but Democrats, even liberals, have been right there with them. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, Massachusetts’s Deval Patrick and California’s Jerry Brown have all found political advantage in attacking public employee unions. Indeed, in his 2011 state of the state address, Christie found support for his anti-worker stance in the words of Cuomo and Brown, whose calls for austerity and wage cuts, Christie declared, were inspired by New Jersey’s example. By lending credibility to reactionaries like Christie, liberals like Brown and Cuomo provide political cover for attacks on public-sector workers.

 

I guess if you are a gay or lesbian teacher who gets laid off, at least you can get married. And maybe you’ll get invited to one of Chris and Sean’s homes for a soirée.

(7) Speaking of Teachers–Bloomberg’s Latest: Here’s the latest outrage from the billionaires who mouth off about education:  Bloomberg: If I Had My Way I’d Dump Half of NY Teachers. According to the mayor, a kid is better off in a class that’s twice as big with a better teacher (contrary to all research about how important small classes are). Plus he takes a slanderous swipe at teachers by saying that they are mostly from the bottom 20% of their classes, and from not very good schools.  The 1% is on a rampage. #OWS needs to hound this guy until he can’t make a public appearance out side of Bermuda (which would probably suit him just fine).

–Chris Sturr

(1) Are John Pike’s 15 Minutes Up Yet? I have read one good piece sympathetic toward the “casually pepper-spraying cop”:  Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike, at The Atlantic.  The point is that it’s structural, and there’s a nice review of changes in police tactics to deal with civil unrest: pre-70s (“escalated force”), up to the 90s (“negotiated management”), and essentially post-”Battle of Seattle” to today (“strategic incapacitation”).  Anyhow, he had me from the moment he quoted James Baldwin.  A nice piece, well worth reading.

In the hopes that Lt. John Pike’s 15 minutes are over, here’s my own crude contribution to the meme (after which everyone can just stop it, ok?):

One last related item:  hat-tip to Portside for this great blog post from Scientific American about the science and history of pepper-spray.

(2) A Bunch of Links About Sports:

• The NYTimes reports a tentative deal to end the NBA lockout. For background check out Dave Zirin’s excellent piece NBA Players: Welcome to the 99%.
• Katha Pollitt has a good piece about patriarchy and college sports, Penn State’s Patriarchal Pastimes. Read it along Taylor Branch’s truly eye-opening  Atlantic article The Shame of College Sports.
• Dave Zirin connects the Penn State scandal with the UC Davis events:  Two Scandals, One Connection.  The president of Penn State and the chancellor of UC Davis were both on the “the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which ‘promotes discussion and outreach between research universities and the FBI.’”  Creepy.

(3) Leftover Item to Post: Last week I posted a great first-hand account of the actual eviction of #OWS from Zuccotti Park;  since then I found a great first-hand account of the attempted eviction a few weeks before–when Bloomberg had to back down because thousands or more flocked to the park to protect the encampment.  $5 Chess Game, Best of Three, Zuccotti Park, by David Hill, at McSweeney’s.  A really really nice piece, especially the way he deploys the concept of Zugzwang (really).

–Chris Sturr

Vanity Ballroom, Detroit

(This post’s “possibly irrelevant image” is from a heartbreaking group of photos by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit.)

(1) #OccupyThanksgiving! I’ve seen the suggestion go around:  many of us are having Thanksgiving with family and/or friends who may not know enough about or be involved enough in the Occupy movement.  It might help accelerate the movement if everyone pledged to talk to their family and friends about it and why you’re involved, dispel misinformation, etc.

Here’s an anecdote that makes me think this could be very important. I got a lengthy voicemail from D&S pal Larry Peterson, who contributed many useful posts to this blog in the early days of the financial crisis. He was calling from his hometown of Brockton, a working-class suburb of Boston, where he’s been spending time with his recently widowed mother.  He was calling to say that at that moment he and his mom were at an anti-foreclosure rally, in Brockton, with roughly 4o other people, most of whom looked like it was the first political rally they’d ever been to.  He and his mom (whom he has always described to me as apolitical) were chanting, he said.  People driving by were honking their horns in support.  People were holding homemade signs, including one guy whose sign said “Occupy!,” who (again) looked like he wouldn’t have anything to do with the movement.  “This is something the likes of which I never thought I’d see!” said Larry. Larry later told me that when he went to church (his mom always drags him), and people in the congregation found out he’s been involved in #OccupyBoston, they were badgering him, not because they were suspicious of the movement or its participants or goals, but because they wondered why they hadn’t sent anyone down to Brockton to organize them!

So I think one next step for the movement is for people who’ve been involved so far to reach out to others, even to people we never would have thought might get involved.  What better time than Thanksgiving?

(2) Stealing Thanksgiving: Great piece by our friend Judy Ancel on the CNN website about “Black Friday” creeping into Turkey Day:  Shop on Thanksgiving? No Thanks.

(3) Account of the Raid on Zuccotti: A compelling account of the the shutting down of the #OWS encampment at Zuccotti park, by a member of the #OWS tech group:  The Arrogance of Power.  I like his point about how he was essentially robbed by armed thugs.

(4) Retired Police Captain Arrested: A great video (just so it doesn’t seem like we’re piling onto the police) of a retired Philly police captain who was arrested on Nov. 17th:

 

More evidence that more people can be reached than we might have thought.

Happy Thanksgiving!

–Chris Sturr

(1) The Lt. John Pike (UC Davis pepper-spraying cop) meme:

See more pictures of UC Davis Lt. John Pike casually pepper-spraying innocents here and here and here.

Find a template to make your own image here.

(2) Video of Rick Wolff’s Excellent Talk at #OccupyBoston, November 17, 2011. Thanks to Doug G. of the Zinn Memorial Lecture Series for taking and posting the videos. Worth watching all the way through.

 

Find part 2 (the question period) here.

(3) The #OWS NYC 11/17 “Bat Signal”:

Would be great to have one of these in Boston to project on the Artery Tunnel vent that forms the back of the “mainstage” at the camp.

(3)Two Items on Europe: Quickly, since I have to prepare to be part of a panel discussion at Harvard’s Dudley House on the Occupy movement:

From the Independent (via Barry Ritholtz): Is Goldman Sachs the New Master of the EU?

By Marshall Auerback (who is writing a comment on the European sovereign debt crisis for our Jan/Feb issue), on Fox News, “The More You Deflate, the Bigger the Debt Problem Gets,” via Naked Capitalism and Credit Writedowns.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

(1) Police Brutality at UC Davis Watch the video for yourself. Watch to the end–there’s a happy ending!

 

Find another video of the same scene here.

Good coverage at the Davis Enterprise.

A useful primer on the legalities of pepper spray and excessive force. Here’s the money quote (this is from Vineyard v. Wilson and Stanfield, but the primer reviews several cases, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case Headwaters v. County of Humboldt):

“To balance the necessity of the use of force used against the arrestee’s constitutional rights, a court must evaluate several factors, including ‘the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.’” The court continued: “In determining if the force was reasonable, courts must examine (1) the need for the application of force, (2) the relationship between the need and the amount of force used, and (3) the extent of the injury inflicted.” Graham dictates unambiguously that the force used by a police officer in carrying out an arrest must be reasonably proportionate to the need for that force, which is measured by the severity of the crime, the danger to the officer, and the risk of flight.”

And here’s a letter from a assistant professor of English at UC Davis, calling for the chancellor’s resignation (brave for a junior faculty member):

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

18 November 2011

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

(2) Funny Video of Nov. 19th Actions in NYC: You have probably heard about the ridiculous police response to the inspiring day of actions in NYC.  Things were pretty exciting (though on a much smaller scale) in Boston.  My sister has been visiting from West Virginia, and we emerged from the South Station T exit into Dewey Square (where the #OccupyBoston encampment is) just as the solidarity march for #OWS NYC was arriving back at the square, with maybe a thousand marchers, who sang “Happy Birthday” for the two-month anniversary of the movement.  After taking a tour of the encampment, we managed to hear a great talk by left economist Rick Wolff–I’ll post the video of that talk once our comrades from the Zinn Memorial Lecture Series make it available.  Meanwhile, enjoy this funny video celebrating #OWS’s 11/17 day of action and the NYPD:

 

 

the raid on zuccotti park from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Here’s the original link.

 

(3) Greenway Board Betrays #OccupyBoston. The board of the Greenway Conservancy sent this letter to the mayor of Boston:

(Odors? Really? And the farmers market seemed to get along great with the protesters, from what I could see.) But luckily some great folks from the Legal Working Group of #OccupyBoston had the foresight to ask a court to issue an injunction preventing the city from evicting us, which they did. Here’s the Boston Globe piece about it; download a pdf of the injunction itself here.

(4) Matt Taibbi Comes Around. Here’s a great article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone that I keep forgetting to post. The main point I liked was his explanation of the idea, which we’ve discussed here, that Occupy “prefigures” a better society:

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

But read the whole thing–it’s great.

(5) Glenn Greenwald on Apparent Attempt to Co-opt #OWS for Obama. I would like to hear more about this: Glenn Greenwald on SEIU president Mary Kay Henry apparently attempting to co-opt #OWS for Obama’s re-election (SEIU has already endorsed him). (Interestingly, she was arrested in NYC on Nov. 17th, I heard.) It definitely sounds creepy and Greenwald is right that it seems likely to backfire.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

November 17th 2011 Day of Action

(1) Day of Action Tomorrow: If you are in or near New York City, try to make it to tomorrow’s Day of Action. I think it’s important to show the power of the movement after yesterday’s early morning eviction from Zuccotti Park.

(2) Mass. House to Vote on “Three-Strikes” Bill: I was shocked to hear that the Mass. State Senate voted unanimously for what sounds like it would be the harshest “three-strikes” law in the country.  Here’s the action alert I got from Lois Ahrens of the Real Cost of Prisons Project:

EMERGENCY ACTION NEEDED BY YOU NOW ON H3811:  An Act Relative to Habitual Offenders

Today the House submitted its version of the Habitual Offender Bill (see attached).

This Bill which was rushed into consideration in the House, would result in three strikes sentences in MA mandating life without parole.
H3811 is even harsher than the notorious California Three Strikes law, which permits parole after 25 years.

It will be voted on TOMORROW (Wednesday). Please call your Rep as soon as possible on Wednesday. After tomorrow, the House will be in recess.

Find them here:  www.WhereDoIVoteMA.com<http://www.wheredoivotema.com/> and enter your address.
Calling is preferable to emailing because of the time crunch.
Tell them ***your preference is for them to STAND UP TO ILL-CONCEIVED LAW-MAKING AND VOTE NO.
You can also join EPOCA which will be lobbying Reps at the Statehouse tomorrow and do this in person.

Talking points for calls:

1)This Bill has been proposed in an extremely  hurried way with no research on what these measures will cost.
2) Research has shown that 3 strikes bills do not reduce crime.
3)Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, New Jersey, New York and Michigan have all taken a thoughtful look at costs and crime rates without locking up more people or enacting tougher new laws; all have saved money and reduced crime by providing more substance abuse treatment both in the community and in prison. MA DOC only spends 2.4% of its budget on programming and by implementing effective parole practices that help parolees become tax paying, lawful citizens.

***Ask if the REP has decided how he/she will be voting and if he/she says they will vote yes, despite your protests, then you can take this next move.
Ask them then to PLEASE SUPPORT CHARLES MURPHY’S and DAVID LINSKY’S AMENDMENTS:
1) changing life without parole to: 25 years to life (to Section 2 & 3 of the bill)–Murphy
2) In Section 3,Linsky’s amendment deletes less serious crimes from the 3x portion of the bill
3) In Section 3, Murphy’s amendment requires that a prisoner sentenced to 3x must have served at least one day in a state prison

If you want to make one more call, contact  Eugene O’Flaherty, Chair of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. His number is:
617-722-2396 and email: Gene.OFlaherty@mahouse.gov

Or Brian S. Dempsey, Chair, Hosue Ways and Means Committee: 617-722-2990
And Stephen Kulik, Vice Chair-617-722-2380

Let’s get out to our State Reps IMMEDIATELY.

After you have contacted your Rep, please forward this to WIDELY!

And here’s the email I sent to my state rep:

Dear Rep. Basile,

I’m writing as an East Boston resident and one of your constituents to urge you to vote against  H3811, which would give Massachusetts the harshest “three-strikes” law in the country, harsher even than California’s notorious three-strikes law, which permits parole after 25 years, as this bill, unamended, would not.  Three strikes laws are costly and studies have shown that they do not reduce crime. Other states, including Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan have conducted thorough studies and rejected this approach. The money that would be spent with enhanced sentencing should instead be used for drug treatment and job training and other help for people when they get out of prison. These are the strategies that reduce crime and make communities safer.

I was shocked that Sen. Petrucelli voted in favor of this bill, when the general trend in this country is away from failed “tough on crime” policies in favor of “smart on crime” policies.

If you do vote for H3811, I strongly urge you to vote for the amendments advanced by Charles Murphy (changing the third strike from life without parole to 25 years to life) and by David Linsky (which deletes less serious crimes from the bill).

Finally, I know that Sen. Petrucelli voted against reducing the school-zone sentencing enhancement distance from 500 feet to 250 feet.  I am not sure whether the House has voted on this yet, but I strongly urge you to vote for the amendment reducing it to 250 feet. Studies show that it should be reduced to even less.  These geographical sentencing enhancements do not keep children safer and contribute to racial disparities in sentencing, since in urban areas, where people of color disproportionately live, many more people within 500 feet of a school. A drug crime may have nothing at all to do with schoolchildren yet someone convicted in an urban area is punished more harshly.  Unfair sentencing disparities end up splitting up families, incarcerating parents for longer, and harming neighborhoods and communities, and thereby harming children rather than helping them.  For more information on this, please see this study by the Prison Policy Initiative, of which I am a board member.

The ways Sen. Petrucelli voted on these bills and amendments are the wrong direction for East Boston and Massachusetts. Please do not vote the way the senator voted.

Sincerely,

Christopher J. Sturr

If you live in Massachusetts, please take the time to contact your state rep.
(3) New Report on Private Prisons: In the late 1990s, there was lots of talk about the growth of private prisons;  then for a few years it looked like they weren’t grown as people expected, after some scandals seemed to indicate that the cost-cutting the private-prison companies engaged in led to horrible conditions and (as I remember it) some states backed off from contracts with the companies. The early concerns about the use of prison labor also seemed to be overstated;  my understanding is that the use of prison labor didn’t take off in the way that some people predicted, partly because, as convenient as it is to have a literally captive workforce, the “custodial” needs of the prison–e.g. the need for frequent lock-downs for security reasons–tended to get in the way of production. Trends like these have led some people to question the idea of a “prison industrial complex”–as problematic as it is to have 2.3 million (!) people in prison or jail (and many more millions under surveillance by the state via probation or parole), mass incarceration isn’t driven by profit, according to this view.

But a new study by PICO and the Public Campaign, Unholy Alliance: How the Private Prison Industry is Corrupting Our Democracy and Promoting Mass Incarceration (hat-tip to Phineas B.) suggests that at least the private prison component of the PIC may be having a resurgence.  So maybe profits are more of a driver of mass incarceration after all.

(4) Bill Fletcher on #OWS: Occupy Together and “Mass Left Radicalism.” Bill Fletcher is great.  I like his call for new tactics, and I like that he says that the movement “offers a home to anti-capitalism.” (Again in today’s New York Times, an article about London’s #OWS-inspired encampment in front of St. Paul’s refers to “anti-capitalism protesters,” but they have yet to use the term “anti-capitalist” to describe the U.S. movement, as if this is literally unthinkable here, even when it’s obvious. It’s called “Occupy Wall Street,” why ever would anyone think it was anti-capitalist?)

(5) Iceland’s New Bank Disaster: From Naked Capitalism–I’ve been meaning to post this.  Lots of people (including me) are surprised to hear this, when we thought the good people of Iceland had beaten back the banks.

(6) #OWS/Tea Party Faceoff Infographic: Hat-tip to AW.

–Chris Sturr

In case you haven’t been following what’s been going on at UC Berkeley, where students have been attempting to start an #OccupyCal, here’s a primer (this is just one of lots of shocking videos):

The university chancellor, a Robert J. Birgeneau (creepy name, eh?), sent an email to the university community with this bit of astounding doublespeak:

We stipulated that no tents, stoves, and sleeping bags would be allowed. They could gather in Sproul for discussion, but not for sleeping … It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

“Not non-violent civil disobedience.” Come again? So implicitly, they are the ones being violent, not the cops who are dragging them by the hair, beating them with batons. And the “tradition of peaceful civil disobedience” that “we honor” is actually about obedience to authority. Hmmm… I think this is the same guy who said that they couldn’t set up an encampment because the Cal campus is “private property.” Huh?!

Here’s some great commentary: “The Grass Is Closed”: What I Have Learned About Power from the Police, Chancellor Birgeneau, and Occupy Cal.

–Chris Sturr

Troika to PIIGS: Shut Up and Take Your Medicine Economists to Shepherd Greece and Italy

Mike Epitropoulos | November 11, 2011

The mainstream press around the world is jubilantly covering the change in leadership in both Greece and Italy, as the people in those countries and the other “PIIGS” continue to have harsh austerity measures imposed upon them. In Greece, the new Prime Minister is Loukas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank (ECB), former Governor of the Bank of Greece and a participant in the Trilateral Commission. In Italy, it is economist and former European commissioner, Mario Monti, who replaces Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister.

In both cases, the Troika—the EU, the ECB and the IMF—have been putting heavy pressure on these already-conservative governments to step up the speed and severity of cuts in social spending, cuts in the public sector and wages, and of course privatizations. The EU’s history of “economics first, politics second’ is on display once again.

Democracy (of any sort) is under overt attack.

In Greece, the ball started rolling when PASOK Prime Minister, George A. Papandreou shocked the political world by calling for a national referendum on the deal that was agreed to with the Troika on October 26th that calmed international financial markets, along with a vote of confidence for his government. Some in the West were impressed by his ‘democratic’ impulse, but anyone remotely familiar with Greece knows that what we witnessed was a “treek” (trick)! The immediate questions in such instances have to be, “what are the motives for, consequences of and reactions to the referendum?”

Up until that point, all of the opposition parties in the Greek parliament were opposed to the referendum and were calling for elections. The referendum was nixed within a day. But the call for a referendum, exposed New Democracy (ND), the conservative branch of Greece’s two-party duopoly (PASOK being the other ‘democratic’ party). ND’s leader, Antonis Samaras, came out and called for a “transitional government” to approve the October 26th agreement—thereby binding Greece legally and politically to Troika austerity—and then to hold general elections.

All of this is an “end around” the people. Greeks have been in the streets consistently since May, mirroring Spain’s Indignados, and Italian protestors, as precursors to our own OWS movement.

Legendary Greek singer/songwriter, Mikis Theodorakis, wondered aloud whether the “treek” of the referendum and the vote of confidence by Papandreou was a sign that the Prime Minister had totally lost it, or whether this represented action by ‘international consultants’ whose sole aim is to disable any popular, democratic impulse in Greece and seal the deal for the banks and the Troika.
The new Greek Prime Minister, Loukas Papademos, has absolutely no popular, political base. Contrary to the glowing reports by Western and financial press, this “unity government” is not at all representative of the spirit of the Greek people, even if one would only consider mainstream political polling numbers. The Papademos government is comprised of the Greek two-party duopoly—PASOK and ND—and the far-Right nationalists of George Karatzaferis, LAOS. They all vehemently oppose any sort of popular participation in making any decisions regarding the austerity measures and the October 26th agreement and the next national budget.

The Greek media continues to present the news in the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’s notion of “There is no alternative”—T.I.N.A. As they present the new Papademos cabinet, they go to their reporters in Brussels, New York, and Washington, where they report how happy the Euro-technocrats, Wall Street investors and IMF specialists are. From Greece, they interview the presidents of the Federation of Hellenic Enterprises (SEB), the National Confederation of Greek Commerce (ESEE), and the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry (EBEA). All of this, representing the total approval of the elite—“the 1%” if you will! And at the same time, the total disregard for the people—who, for the most part, aren’t responsible for the mess they are in.

The Troika—the EU, the ECB, and the IMF—are openly employing the two-party duopoly in hijacking Greece with the neo-Nazis in what is becoming a tragedy of democracy. They are framing any and all popular opposition to their decisions, rule, and legitimacy as ‘undemocratic’ by labeling this a “time for national unity”. You are either “with them, or against them”— does that ring a bell?
The short-term aims are crystal clear: Austerity, Privatization, and Dismantling of the Greek welfare state. This is a modern version of IMF conditionality, including crackdowns on political opposition, albeit in new, finessed ways.

What is really funny is that mainstream economists and experts still say that even implementing all of these harsh measures, with the 50% haircut, won’t pull Greece out of debt for years to come.
After what we have been living through, how and why should we be mesmerized and happy to have economists, bankers and technocrats coming to power? These are precisely the architects of the current global capitalist crisis. They should be put in their proper place—many even in jail.

How will the Papademos administration handle protestors in Syntagma Square? Many friends, family, and colleagues in Greece are wondering and worried how the upcoming November 17th remembrance of the uprising against the military Junta in 1974 will be handled. Should we really expect average Greeks to suddenly embrace an essentially imposed government?

It is incumbent on us all to pay close attention to how the new banker-technocrats in Greece (Papademos) and Italy (Monti) will handle both their economic and political rule.

Clowns Arrested at Wall Street Bull

A quick bunch of links–I have been having trouble finding time to do a proper blog post, for which I apologize.

(1) Labor Victory in Ohio: NYT report; interesting piece in the New Republic (which I usually don’t have much use for).

(2) Dean Baker on Greece: In the Guardian, for TM to show to her friend.

(3) Dave Zirin on Joe Paterno: Excellent as always, in The Nation.  How to understand Penn State’s current pickle without a left analysis of big money in college sports?  Impossible. That’s why we love Zirin.

(4) Harvard Students Walk out on Mankiw’s Ec 10: About 70 students in Harvard’s intro economics course, “Ec 10,” taught by free-marketeer Greg Mankiw, walked out last week.  Left economists have been showing strong support.  Here’s Steve Keen’s great take-down of one defense of Mankiw’s textbook and course.  We will be posting more about this soon.

(5) Those Clowns: Here’s the hilarious press release from The Yes Men about the clowns (and a matador) who did an action at the Wall Street Bull:

 

Earlier today, a small group of Occupy Wall Street activists engaged in a near-successful corrida against the Wall Street Bull.

The incident began when two clowns, Hannah Morgan and Louis Jargow, scaled the steel barricades protecting the landmark. The clowns began spanking and climbing the beast, traditional ways of coaxing a bull into anger in preparation for a Castilian corrida, or bullfight.

Within seconds, police officers grabbed both clowns by their colorful shirts and wrestled one of them (Jargow) to the ground. The other (Morgan) continued to play the harmonica until an officer removed it from her mouth.

With the officers thus occupied, a matador in full traje de luces leapt onto the hood of the patrol vehicle parked in front of the bull and boldly presented his blood-red cape to the beast.

“I wondered whether I, neophyte matador, could bring down this behemoth, world-famous for charging towards profit while trampling underfoot the average worker,” said the OWS activist/torero whose first fight this was. “Come what may, I knew I must try.”

Police officers took no notice of the matador, occupied as they were with the clowns.

“This bull has ruined millions of lives!” wailed clown Jargow as he lay on the ground face-down. “Yet he and his accomplices have been rewarded with billions of our tax dollars—and we, here to put a stop to it all, are thrown to the ground. ¡Un escándalo!”

Both clowns were charged with disorderly conduct and released an hour later; they returned to Zuccotti Park to great fanfare. The Wall Street bull continues to rage.

That’s all for now.

–Chris Sturr

Everybody talks about the weather. We don't.

(1) The Weather and #OWS: The image above is from a German Socialist Students Union poster from 1968 (it was apparently a takeoff on a slogan from the national rail system, according to this site).

 

The poster headed a nice piece from Viewpoint Magazine on #OWS and the weather–super-relevant now that many inches of snow were dumped on the NYC site over the weekend (Boston only got about an inch).  Worth a read.

(2) General Strike called for Oakland Tomorrow: Here’s an announcement from the Oakland teachers union, the Oakland Education Association, whose executive committee endorsed the general strike, declaring We Are, We Teach, the 99%.

And here’s a bizarre, but apparently authentic, open letter from the Oakland Police Officers’ Union, highly critical of Mayor Jean Quan for ordering them to clear Frank Ogawa Plaza, site of the #OccupyOakland encampment, then allowing the protesters to re-occupy it (after all the hard work of clearing it!), and now encouraging city employees (EXCEPT the police) to join in on tomorrow’s general strike.  Jeez!  You almost feel sorry for the guys! They also declare themselves part of the 99%.  It really sounds like an Onion story.

And this video about tomorrow’s strike, relating it to the Oakland General Strike of 1946:

 

(3) Goldman Sachs in the News: Two items on the bank holding company we all love to hate.  First, this from the Borowitz Report:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) — The following is a letter released today by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of banking giant Goldman Sachs:

Dear Investor:

Until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the protest movement known as “Occupy Wall Street.” That does not mean, however, that it has not been very much on our minds. As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests.

And we have asked ourselves this question: How can we make money off them?

The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund, whose investment objective is to monetize the “Occupy Wall Street” protests as they spread around the world. At Goldman, we recognize that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain — but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.

The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages. Furthermore, as clashes between police and protesters turn ever more violent, we are making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.

It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say “Let them eat cake,” but at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake futures. We project that through our aggressive market manipulation, the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.

Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy this.”

We haven’t felt so good about something we’ve sold since our souls.

Sincerely,

Lloyd Blankfein
Chairman, Goldman Sachs

And apparently there will be a People’s Trial of Goldman Sachs at Zuccotti Park on Thursday, Nov. 3, from 10am-noon.  Cornell West and Chris Hedges will preside.  Hear it on WBAI.

That’s all for now.

–Chris Sturr

Condolences to the USA, by Erika Rothenberg

I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post–it will be mostly links, and in no particular order.  Here goes:

(1) Mike Davis on #OWS: Nice piece by Mike Davis in the LA Review of Books, No More Bubblegum. Today’s Possibly Irrelevant Image accompanied Davis’s piece; it’s from a series of wonderful greeting cards by Erika Rothenberg.  Her other stuff is great too. I especially liked: “Sorry Our Country Bombed Your Country … I want you to know that I was against it.” See more here.

One think I like about the Davis piece is his reference to They Live.  I used a still from They Live as the Possibly Irrelevant Image for a post back in January.  I remember going to a talk by Slavoj Zizek with D&S collective member Larry Peterson in which Zizek used the glasses in They Live as a metaphor for ideology critique.  (When you look through them you see advertisement for what it is, as in the picture I just linked to. You also see corporate yuppies for what they are–zombie aliens.)  It was in the middle of the 2008 primaries, and he would start talking about, e.g., the reception of Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and then say, in his Slovenian accent, “Let us put on our ‘They Live’ glasses,” before he’d lead us through a critique of the ideology in U.S. politics.

(2) Police Riot at #OccupyOakland: Speaking of California and #OWS, The Informant has good videos and other coverage of the crackdown at #OccupyOakland, which was surely a “police riot” (i.e., the police created the riot and were the ones being violent). And the NYT Lede blog was surprisingly good on it (especially in contrast to the rather lame article I found on my doorstep this morning).

And here are two great first-hand accounts of the events at #OccupyOakland.  The first is by Mark Ash, founder of Reader Supported News, A Witness to the Violence in Oakland:

The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response
and we will continue to provoke until they respond or
change the law. They are not in control; we are.
– Gandhi

If Gandhi was right, yesterday’s Civil Resistance Action in Oakland, California, achieved all of its aims. By day’s end a heavily-armed, fully-militarized police force was in control of Frank Ogawa Plaza, but Occupy Oakland was in control of the agenda.

Two major confrontations occurred between police and protesters in Oakland, both marked by non-violent restraint on the part of the protesters and a lack of restraint – each time leading to violence – by the police.

The day began with a fully-coordinated assault by riot police on Occupy Oakland’s encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza. The police have charged one protester with resisting arrest. What is not in dispute is that they used tear gas, beanbag shotgun rounds and rubber bullets. In all, 95 protesters were arrested, mostly charged with unlawful camping violations.

The second confrontation began with a rally at the Oakland Public Library. Occupy Oakland organizers obtained permission from the Oakland Library to meet there to discuss their options. The meeting was announced on the OccupyOakland website with a 4 pm start. By 4 pm, the area in front of the Library was packed with over 2,000 resisters determined to make a stand or, more precisely, undertake a march against the razing of the encampment that morning, and to reclaim it. The mood was passionate and upbeat, but there was a clear understanding that between the Library and the Plaza the marchers would be confronted by police … in riot gear, of course. Many, many of them.

As the march began I remained out in front of the crowd with about two dozen other independent cameramen and women. We tried to stay in position to film any potential confrontation between the police, who were everywhere, and the protesters who were on the march. The refrain of “Keep it non-violent!” was heard as often as “Our streets!”

Perhaps not surprisingly, media reports have chronically underestimated the size of the crowd.

Within three blocks the crowd had swelled to 2,500 strong and was growing as it ran into its first police blockade. It turned to avoid a confrontation – a process that would be repeated again and again as the police forced the march off course both south and east of Ogawa Plaza. Not that it would have mattered because the Plaza itself was guarded by over 100 police in full riot gear. No unarmed, non-violent protester had any chance of making it into that Plaza. Period.

For a time the marchers and the police continued to play out the drama in a fairly predictable manner. Time and again, it was the police escalating the situation. They began to basically break up the march. They relied on two main tactics: first, sever the march by blocking it off into sections; second, cut it into pieces by inserting lines of riot gear-clad officers into the column of marchers. That had the effect of chopping the march into sections. The other tactic was direct confrontation. Park a line of police in front of the march and say, “You’ll have to march through this if you want to keep going.” That worked for a while, but then the marchers decided that they were not going to take it anymore.

Armed only with a growing chant of “Our streets!” the marchers moved forward towards the line of police in riot gear. Shoulder to shoulder in non-violent defiance, the marchers tried to filter through the line of riot-armored police. The police attacked the marchers with their truncheons, mostly spearing at protesters’ midsections. It did not work.

The marchers took the blows, overwhelmed the police and kept on marching. The police, however, were not to be outdone and singled out one of the marchers for arrest, quickly throwing him to the ground and forming a circle around the conspicuous incident in the middle of the march. A melee ensued. The demonstrators encircled the police, shouting “Shame!” and “Let him go!” Again the police attacked with truncheons and the demonstrators pushed back with their hands. The crowd began to pelt the police with water bottles and paint … red and blue paint.

By this point the march had been repeatedly interrupted and was splintering. The police again blocked the path of the section of the march I was in, which was now moving towards the police station. This time they used more officers. The marchers halted and a standoff followed. An announcement was made on a megaphone, “This is an unlawful assembly! Disperse now or you will be arrested!” I began to work my way out of what was quickly becoming a kettle. I made it out, but another young woman did not. A riot-clad police officer stopped her and ordered her back into the crowd. So, clearly the crowd was told to disperse, but not allowed to do so. I maneuvered free and moved carefully around and back towards Ogawa Plaza. There I would find a “public plaza” under military siege. Entry would have been impossible. My cellphone and camera batteries were running low and so was I. I made the decision to pull out with the film I had.

Whatever meaning the Occupy Movement represents to the protesters who participate, to the Oakland Police Department, and the system they are paid to protect, it obviously represents something to be feared and repressed … violently, and even lethally, if necessary. The police that confronted the people in the streets of Oakland, California, were scared, their riot gear notwithstanding. Make no mistake about it. More importantly their corporate employers are scared, too.

Several Northern California police departments were pulled in to support the siege in Oakland. It was more than the Oakland Police Department itself could handle. The alternative to all of this insanity was to let the kids camp out in the park. That was apparently a greater threat than turning downtown Oakland into war zone.

Yesterday the police, the city fathers and the commercial media saw Oakland and made their decisions based on that. But they did not see the movement within its “world-wide” context. This is big … very big, and spreading rapidly across the United States and around the world. And there is no indication that police violence can stop it.

Marc Ash is the founder and director of Reader Supported News, as well as Truthout.

The second is Steve Martinot, via email from Bernard Ztangi.  Ztangi describes Martinot as “a former truck-driver, factory worker and radical academic (several books on Racism and Philosophy).” Here’s his statement:

It is 11 pm on Wednesday night, 10/27/2011, and I just got back from the most amazing meeting I have ever been to in my life. It was held at the scene of Monday’s carnage in Oakland where the Oakland cops crushed one of the most amazing demonstrations I have ever encountered.

For those of you who didn’t get a chance to get down to the
OccupyOakland encampment, it was astonishing. The people there had set up a village. There was a kitchen, a restaurant, a café, a library, a first aid station, and an art department, and all of this surrounded by well over 150 tents set up on the grassy area of the plaza. They had water and sanitary facilities (provided by the OEA), a calender, and many really interesting meetings. The cops attacked Monday night around 3 in the morning, and demolished it.

I won’t waste my breath trying to explain that there was no reason to do this. The attack is estimated to cost between 3 and 5 million dollars, where a couple of thousand would have maintained sanitation, and provided a few social workers to help smooth over the inevitable conflicts that occur in small spaces across class, across ideology, and across levels of sobriety, especially among people already living on the edge because of their unneutralizable marginalization at the property interests’s hands.

The meeting this evening began at 6 pm. No cops, seven helicopters in the sky, and gradually, over the next hour, the crowd swelling to more than 3000 people. It started with an open mike on the street corner of Bway and 14th, and when the crowd got too big, moved to the amphitheater in front of city hall. By 7:30, the fence erected around Ogawa Plaza had been dismantled unceremoniously, and the helicopters were gone. The meeting turned into a General Assembly that then addressed itself to how to move forward from where they were. It was wall-to-wall people from the city hall doors to the plaza grass, and from 14st to the alley that pretends to be 15th.

A committee had written a proposal for consideration. And the meeting, all 3000 people, discussed it, considered its various aspects, and voted on it. I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

The proposal was to call a general strike to shut down Oakland on Wednesday, Nov. 2. It was not to be to the exclusion of any other actions; it was not to be mandatory, only solidarist and activist in stopping the 1%; it was to be a positive expression of the people against the hobnailed boot of the 1% that came down on Oakland on Monday night and Tuesday. The call is to stop the corporations, stop the schools and their regimentation, bring the homeless, the unemployed, the blue and white color workers into conjunction, bring the city to a halt, and bring the people to a rally at city hall at 5 that afternoon. Let all unions, organizations, neighborhood associations and asemblies, and all people get involved.

There is to be a planning meeting tomorrow, Thursday, October 27, at 5 pm, Oscar Grant  Plaza (aka Ogawa) to plan the strike. All are invited.

The proposal to call this general strike was passed by a vote.
Discussion on the proposal started around 7:30. First there were
questions of clarification. Then there were statements of concern and arguments for and against. Then the 3000 broke up into smaller workshop groups of 20 or 30 to discuss the proposal. Then people lined up to speak on it to the entire meeting. By the time the vote was taken, at 9:30, the meeting had dwindled to 1500. I know that is the size because 1442 votes were cast for the proposal, 34 against, with 73 abstaining. And the crowd was about half the size it had been at 7:30 when the fence came down.

At one point it was announced that OccupyWallSt in NYC had taken to the streets that same day and marched throughout lower Manhattan in solidarity with Oakland. They chanted “Oakland, Oakland, end police brutality.” And they sent $20,000 to OccupyOakland. A message was received that the Egyptians, in their many popular organizations, sent an expression of solidarity with Oakland, and are going to have a march on Tahrir Sq. tomorrow in solidarity with Oakland. The meeting
this evening, in which 3000 people continued the creation of a new democracy for themselves, was reported on BBC.

One things we will have to understand about this is Quan’s shift. She supported the occupation encampment up until the police and some councilpeople decided last Friday that it needed to be expunged. The charges against it were about unsanitary  onditions and violence. The city could have helped with sanitation at a pittance cost (next to what the cost of bringing police in from three other jurisdictions for the raid will be). And it could have organized encounter group sessions to deal with whatever hostilities came up. The city did actually send in some social workers, but their task was very odd. Their job was to spirit the homeless away from the scene of the action preparatory to the police attack. In other words, it took something like this demonstration/encamplment, and the planning of an attack, for the city to suddenly decide it needed to pay attention to the homeless. Sanitation and violence were not the reasons for Monday’s attack.

As a friend of mine said, when you send riot police in riot gear to where there is no riot, what you have is the hobnailed boot of power, stamping out the people for itself.

Live from the Oakland Commune.

(3) Several Bill Black Appearances: D&S author and bank fraud expert Bill Black was on the Real News Network, What I’d Demand of the Fed, and then today on KBOO in Portland, on Voices from the Edge (not sure where the streaming link is–you can figure it out–but it was a great segment about BoA shifting bad derivatives to the BoA side so they’re FDIC insured).  On Tuesday he was on On Point being interviewed by the annoying Tom Ashbrook on the topic of Prosecuting Financial Titans. (Hat-tip to Paul Piwko.) Also well worth a listen–Bill does a great interview!  Something he said in both interviews:  “A trillion is a thousand billion!”  A useful reminder, actually. Speaking of prosecuting banksters:

(4) Glenn Greenwald to Speak at #OccupyBoston; also on On Point: I had a tiny part in setting up Glenn Greenwald’s appearance at #OccupyBoston, via a friend of his whom Juliet Schor put me in touch with (because I know the ropes about setting up events at #OccupyBoston–sort of!).  I maybe shouldn’t advertise my role, since we are still trying to resolve a scheduling conflict with a couple of bands–cross your fingers!  He’s supposed to speak on Saturday at 4pm.

Greenwald was also on On Point on Wednesday, on the topic of America’s Lawless Elite. This (and his #OB appearance) are part of his tour for his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some.  I liked the interview, and a lot of what he says is related to Bill Black’s line about fraud.

But when he seems to reduce what #OWS is all about to “unfairness,” Greenwald comes uncomfortably close to the kind of view that Nicholas Kristof put forward in his NYT column today, Crony Capitalism Comes Home.  Elites like Kristof have a big stake in drawing a line between #OWS and anti-capitalism.  Now there are all kinds of views among #Occupy participants and supporters, but to deny that there’s a strong anti-capitalist strain is just odd.  As I’ve pointed out before here, even the BBC’s report always seem to refer to the #Occupy protests, here and in front of St. Paul’s, as “anti-capitalist,” which is what I would say they are, on their face.  Whether Stiglitz or Kristof or Greenwald (maybe) want to suggest that reforming capitalism, e.g. by getting rid of cronyism or re-establishing the rule of law, is enough is another matter.  But to assert that the “rabble-rousers” at #OWS are “are seeking to put America’s capitalists on a more capitalist footing,” is just Kristof projecting his views onto #OWS.

(Matt Taibbi makes a similar argument in his Rolling Stone piece OWS’s Beef: Wall Street Isn’t Winning, It’s Cheating. I liked his piece a whole lot more than Kristof’s, but I still think he’s projecting his own views onto #OWS.)

I am interested to hear Greenwald speak, though, and I did enjoy his interview (again, despite the annoying Tom Ashbrook).

(5) Hedge Fund Guy Regards #OWS as “Mob Rule”: Amusing piece at the Financial Times, by hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, Risk on the Rise as Political Leaders Give in to Mob Rule.

(6) Great Piece on How #OWS Confuses and Ignores the MSM: I really like this piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate, Occupy the No-Spin Zone. (Hat-tip to TM.)  Among her great points:  there’s something ridiculous about the complaint that there’s “no message” when the whole thing is about people standing around with signs with messages written on them, and (we might add) walking around chanting messages.  The basis of the complaint is that the movement has refused to boil its message down to a sound bite that would work on Fox news (or any cable news channel–the point is not about the slant), and this has perplexed the pundits.  And the movement is also good at ignoring the pundits as they flail about trying to explain the movement.  This might be wishful thinking, but I like it:

Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible “protesters” with their oddly well-worded “signs,” the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly. Turning off mindless programming might be the best thing that ever happens to this polity. Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us.

In an earlier post, I linked to a piece on DailyKos by David Graeber that made the nice point that making demands of (e.g.) Wall Street or the government in a way legitimizes them;  #OWS is trying to prefigure the better society we wish we lived in.  Now, I think there will eventually have to be some demands, but this kind of point helps me understand the value of the current strategy.  Lithwick’s point is similarly helpful.

(7) Last but Not Least: Thad Williamson Speaks at #OccupyRichmond: D&S Associate and comrade Thad Williamson, who teaches in the Peace Studies program at the University of Richmond, sent us the text of the speech he gave at #OccupyRichmond on Sunday.  Here it is:

I am pleased to be here today in solidarity with Occupy Richmond, Occupy Wall Street, and the worldwide social movement against oligarchy and for democracy.

The Occupy movement is one of the most heartening things to happen, starting in the United States, in recent decades. What it shows is that the American people are not yet totally inert. It shows that the heartbeat of democracy is, despite the apathy, cynicism, and consumerism we see all around us, still thumping. And it shows that Americans and people worldwide are not going to take the domination of our global system lying down.

I have two goals in my talk today. The first is I want to explain why the Occupy movement is fundamentally, a just cause. The second is I want to put out some ideas for how this movement can grow and become not just a fleeting democratic movement, but part of a sustained effort to create a more just, more democratic economy and society that breaks decisively with the last thirty years of American capitalism. The economic justice, anti-oligarchy movement is and must be the civil rights movement of the 21st century. I mean that not just as a slogan, but to indicate we have a lot of work ahead of us. The civil rights struggle for African-Americans in Richmond and throughout the South and the entire country took place over decades, and it required incredible determined persistence and resilience over many years and many setbacks. In fact, that movement still has unfinished work, as anyone living in Richmond today knows. But there is a fundamental continuity between the struggle for racial justice and the struggle for economic justice, both here in Richmond and around the country. The Occupy events this fall have the potential to spark a new civil rights movement around questions of wealth, power, and ensuring we have a society that runs to the benefit of all 100%, not just the top 1%.. But we must understand that this is only the beginning of a long struggle that must be waged on a variety of fronts.

At this point many of the basic points about income and wealth inequality in the United States are well-known, but they cannot be overstressed. The top 1% has about 38% of total wealth in society, and over 20% of income—a dramatic increase since the 1970s. At the same time over that time period, the wages and incomes of ordinary families have stagnated or even gone backward. This has been the case even though year in and year out, workers have become more and productive per hour. The workers of today are much more productive than the workers of the 1970s, but wages have not proportionately gone up. Instead, the gains have been captured by the capitalist class, the corporate shareholders, and in effect by the top 1%.

No serious person denies these are what the trends are. But some people in the media claim that it’s a great mystery as to why inequality has increased. The implication they want to leave you with is that the growing inequality is a necessary byproduct of trends that are basically good, such as technological improvement or increased trade. But in fact, it’s no great mystery what has happened. Moreover, the stagnation of wages and incomes are not a necessary evil, but  are in fact the root cause of the current economic depression.

Why did inequality increase? Yes, there are a lot of factors involved. But here are the two most fundamental points. First, there was a concerted effort to hold wages down starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, by repressing labor unions, refusing to raise the minimum wage, and refusing to make full employment the basis of economic policy. Unions have been in a downward spiral since the 70s, as it’s gotten harder and harder to organize or to win a strike. I have the greatest admiration for those in the labor movement who have stuck with it, but they and we are struggling on a battlefield that has been drastically tilted against labor. Second, corporate managers, who make up about 30% of the richest 1% and 40% of the richest 0.1%, have prioritized increasing their own salaries and compensation over actually contributing value to society by productive economic activity. Incentives have been skewed so that CEOs get paid more when their share price goes up. But it’s easier to make share prices go up in a hurry on Wall Street by cutting workers and providing quick dividend returns than by overseeing firms that sustain jobs over the long term. CEOs have gotten rich, in effect, by firing workers. And CEO salaries have sky-rocketed since the 70s and 80s, which accounts for a big chunk of why the share of the top 1% has grown so much. This doesn’t have anything to do with economic efficiency or because these corporate managers are so much more brilliant than the managers of the 1960s or the managers in other countries. It’s a result of a power play by CEOs within corporations to prioritize compensation maximization over employment maximization, and the utter failure of the government to regulate these compensation packages. At numerous companies such as GE and Coca-Cola, CEO compensation exceeds the amount of taxation the company pays to the federal government. Some of those companies actually spend more money on lobbying the federal government than in paying federal taxes.

How has the trend of stagnant income and growing inequality hurt the economy? At first, American workers compensated by increasing their work hours. Women increased their working hours, and two full time jobs became the norm. That allowed household income to continue to grow even as wages remained flat for a while. Then after that trend had tapped out, in the 1990s people began to finance their consumption by borrowing, via credit cards. Wealthier household made paper profits through the Internet stock bubble, before it crashed. Later in the 2000s, many households used the housing bubble to finance spending. Instead of financing increased spending and a growing economy out of real increases in income for ordinary people, we’ve kept the economy going through mountains of debt. In 2008, the chickens came home to roost, and the economy began to collapse once it became evident that the so-called geniuses on Wall Street had placed enormous gambles on derivatives that they did not really understand.

I would like to be able to tell you that President Barack Obama then came in and saved the day. But we probably wouldn’t be here this afternoon if that were the case. The truth is Obama had a narrow opening in which he could have chartered a fundamentally different course for the economy. At times he spoke like that’s what he would do. Maybe that’s in fact what he did want to do. But the fact is the policies his economic team pursued did not hold Wall Street accountable for the mess created, nor did they take the steps required to be sure that such a crisis can never happen again. The financial sector is still dominated by huge entities that are “too big to fail,” and the line between banks and investment firms has not been re-drawn. There hasn’t even been meaningful regulation of derivatives, and the consumer protection commission has been watered down. At the same time, unemployment has remained unacceptably high.

In 2008, Barack Obama was the living embodiment of the American people’s desire to chart a different course, and I supported him then as such. Today he is in danger of becoming the living embodiment of a political system that is broken, that cannot achieve its own goals, and that is too dominated by private interests and Wall Street to solve the problems that affect everyone.

That’s why we are here today. The economy is broken, and the political system is broken, for the same reason: the excessive influence of powerful corporations and the wealthy, who are determined to turn this country into an oligarchy, a country in which no matter who is elected, the big bankers and the corporate interests remain in charge.

Now lots of people who are not here are making all kinds of claims about the Occupy movement. Some people say this is the left-wing Tea Party. Let me say a couple of things about that. First, the Tea Party might have been for about five minutes an independent populist uprising, but now it’s essentially a tool of the right-wing Republican Party. Polls show a majority of Americans reject the Tea Party, but sympathize with the Occupy movement. Second, I do credit the Tea Party true believers. They at least recognized that something is wrong. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that what’s wrong today is a direct result of the anti-tax, anti-labor agenda they espouse and that has essentially governed Washington for the last 30 years.

Another thing people say is that the movement should list a bunch of demands. Some of the people are saying that because they are genuinely baffled about what this movement is all about, or because they don’t want the movement to peter out without any concrete victories. But others are saying it because, in effect, they want all of you to go home and let the politicians take care of it. Well, what I say to you today is that you can’t go home, that none of us can go home, and that this movement cannot go away if it is going to achieve anything. There are plenty of good specific ideas out there for reform and change. In fact, the White House itself has some of them. If you’re interested in detailed, genuinely progressive proposals, follow the work Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is doing now.  But staying out here is the only thing that is going to put pressure on the people in D.C. to actually follow through on any of it.

Having the best ideas and proposals doesn’t matter if you don’t have power. This movement is fundamentally about claiming and building up the power of the 99%. This is about  the 99% asserting ourselves, saying we’re here, and say we’re not going away quietly in hopes you’ll cut a backroom deal that gets a reform or two in place. And as long as we’re here, we might as well educate ourselves, and start the conversation America so badly needs: how do we build an economy that truly solves all of us, that respects the dignity of every worker and every person, that allows all of us to live decently and to flourish?

A third thing people out there in the media say is that the Occupy movement consists of hypocrites. They argue that it doesn’t make any sense to criticize oligarchy, or to criticize the economic system, at the same we use cell phones, IPhones, Facebook, and all the other modern communication tools. But that argument rests on a myth and a lie. The myth is that  having a situation in which Wall Street interests dominate both the economy and the political apparatus is somehow a necessary condition for having a modern economy. In fact, the domination of Wall Street and the drive to deregulate is what has brought down the economy, not only causing the deepest and most serious recession in two generations but also blocking the kinds of responses need to recover and prevent it from happening again. The idea that banking deregulation, unregulated derivatives trading, and irresponsible and greedy behavior by the nation’s financiers led the economy into collapse and into demands for a bailout of the rich is not crazy talk. It’s the informed view not just of the Occupy movement but also of well-informed economists and insiders, including quite a few who predicted exactly what would happen years in advance. Nothing would advance the cause of economic rationality and progress more than taking back power to regulate and shape how the economy works from Wall Street.

That’s the myth. Here’s the lie. The lie is that our current communications tools, our computers and cell phones, are the result of a few brilliant innovators like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and that their brilliant innovation justifies the concentration of wealth we see in the United States today. This is a lie in two ways. First, as a point of fact, the majority of those in the top 1% of income in the U.S. are not entrepreneurial innovators in high tech. Neither are they athletes or entertainers like Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey.  Nearly half of that top 1%, and nearly 60% of the top 0.1%,  in fact consists of corporate executives or people working in the finance industry—people who have again and again re-written the rules of the economy in their own favor over the past 40 years.

Second, it’s just not true that innovation and technology is the product of individual genius or entrepreneurial vision. Al Gore did not invent the Internet, but the United States government did. The government also created the first mainframe computer in World War II, which itself built on counting machines developed by the Census Bureau. The foundational computer language BASIC was developed with a government grant. In countless ways, we the people with our tax dollars have underwritten the development of computers and internet technology—as well as numerous other crucial fields from energy to aviation to health research.

But the point I want to make is even deeper than this. The technology we see around us, the highly concentrated wealth we see around us, rests on a common human inheritance of knowledge. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs couldn’t have existed a hundred years ago. The innovations of today rest on the knowledge developed in the past—as well as on the sweat of the workers who created a society that allowed some people to specialize in developing knowledge and technology. The great technological breakthroughs of today and of tomorrow in a moral sense belong to all of us. There is nothing wrong with creating incentives to reward new innovations that benefit all of us. But it is critical that we assure that these new technologies and the wealth they generate are in fact used to the benefit of all us, and not to further concentrate the profit and power of corporations and of the super-rich. We as a public helped pay for them, and we as human beings each have a moral claim to benefit from the accumulated knowledge of our predecessors.

Spreading the wealth around, creating an economy that works for the 100% rather than the 1%, is a precondition of having a genuinely democratic society. Here’s something that may shock you. In practice, it really would not be hard to accomplish if we were serious about it. If we redistributed just one-third of the wealth held now by the top 1% of the wealthy, we’d be able to assure that every household in the United States had at least $100,000. That would be a dramatic change, and if the Occupy movement ever settles on a long-term demand or goal, that would be my vote.

But we have a lot of work to do to get to that point. So I want to close by talking about some more immediate steps that can be taken to build a democratic economy, from the bottom up.

To create a more equitable economy, there are really two ways to go. The first is try to redistribute. I support that, but it’s difficult to achieve. The second is to create new forms of wealth and new forms of economic organization that are democratic and equitable from the beginning.  But how can we do that? Here are five specific things to do.

–First, let’s move our own money from corporate bank accounts to credit unions or truly local banks, and move our spending away from big chains to local businesses, especially those that treat workers fairly.

–Second, let’s get involved in support of local workers here in Richmond in organizing struggles for better wages and conditions.

–Third, we must realize that waiting on corporations to come in create a bunch of good jobs to improve things here in Richmond is not a good development strategy. We need to be more creative than that. We need a creative community development strategy that creates  long-term stable jobs that employ Richmond residents. This can be done by creating worker cooperatives, nonprofit corporations, and genuinely local small businesses. Cleveland, Ohio has developed a terrific model for creating new cooperatives focused on cutting-edge green technology.

–Fourth, while direct action to create new alternatives is always welcome and has never been more needed, at the end of the day we cannot avoid engaging with politics and the political process. It’s the political process that sets the rules we all live by. And I would suggest in particular here in Richmond we cannot avoid engaging that other, less democratic General Assembly over at the state capitol. This city does not get its fair share of funding for schools, and this system of metropolitan segregation we live under can only be changed by the General Assembly, and the practices that hurt labor can in this state can only be changed by the General Assembly.  We need to take this struggle to the statewide arena. The corporate lobby in this state thinks they own the General Assembly, and more often than not, they are right. Until we challenge that, we in Richmond are going to be left to fight with one another over scraps.

–Finally, and maybe most important, we need to continue engage this educational process, and especially the process of learning about alternatives from around the country and the world. All around the world there are amazing initiatives and experiments in genuine economic democracy through worker-owned firms, community land trusts, community-based social enterprises, genuine community-based banks, and municipal businesses and loan funds. There also amazing initiatives and experiments in genuine political democracy, such as the idea of participatory budgeting—that is, letting ordinary people to do the work of setting budget priorities so as to meet local needs. We need to study these alternatives and bring as many as are feasible to Richmond. There are a lot of people in this town we will never convince with theoretical arguments, but you can convince them if you show them a model that works and makes sense. These are desperate times and anything that works to create jobs and uplift dignity is going to be welcomed.

My closing thought, then, is that in this movement what we do ourselves will be as important, if not more so, than what we demand of others. Our challenge is to build a movement that both demands social justice and democracy and finds creative ways to practice it.  Thank you to all of you who have brought this movement to Richmond, let’s work together to show that another, better world is as possible as it is necessary.

That’s all for now.

–Chris Sturr

 

A quick report from DC:

On Thursday around lunch time I visited the other #OccupyDC encampment, at Freedom Plaza.  It was about at sleepy as the one at Macpherson Square (which I visited, and blogged about, on Wednesday), and the space is wide open and inhospitable, across the street from the massive Ronald Reagan building. Here is one view:

#OccupyDC, Freedom Plaza, October 20, 2011

But I had a nice chat with a woman from California wearing a Veterans for Peace shirt who was camping out there. See below–she’s on the right.

#OccupyDC, Freedom Plaza, October 20, 2011

She told me there had just been a temporary occupation at a Citibank branch nearby (a friend emailed me about that action the next day, so it apparently got some press;  there were also two articles about #ODC in the WashPo the next morning).

 

I went off to look for the bank, and ended up walking around the back side of the White House (which is looking quite militarized these days!) and then wandering up K St. toward Macpherson Square.  There were lots of people in the streets on their lunch hour. I heard chanting and a loud drum, and there was a parade of about 20 to 30 people marching (it turned out) toward a Bank of America branch for another action. Rather than an occupation it was a “move your money” action–one of the activists was closing his account, and the group rallied in front of the bank branch for about 45 minutes. Here’s what the action looked like:

#OccupyDC BoA branch action, October 20, 2011

It was a pretty small affair.  But two moments stood out for me.  One was when I was waiting to cross the street to get over to where the action was; I was at this intersection:

#OccupyDC, BoA branch action, October 20, 2011

(It doesn’t look like much, but they were loud, and there were almost as many cops as there were activists, so it was pretty impressive to passers by.) I looked at the well-dressed older woman next to me and said, referring to the protesters, “These people are heroes.”  She looked back at me and said, “It’s about time.”

Later, after I’d spent some time at the action and then moved away from it, the parade of activists circled back to go back to Macpherson Square.  There were still only 20 or 30 people, and the lunchtime street crowd was gawking at them but not otherwise reacting to the procession.  So I started whooping and cheering, and only when I did so did several (three or four) other bystanders start cheering.
One lesson for me is that it doesn’t take many people to create public visibility.  Even in DC where the two encampments aren’t as large as those in NYC or Boston they can have effective public actions to remind people that there is resistance.  Also, there may be much more support than there seems to be at first.  This is important to keep in mind as we move toward the winter months.  We can keep the public visibility of the movement with relatively few people.  I am envisioning the winter being spent doing lots of organizing and study groups, but with periodic–even daily–public actions like this to keep it in the public eye and keep generating support.

I also had a great discussion of #OccupyWallStreet and lots of other things over dinner with frequent D&S author Katherine Sciacchitano (author of our current cover story–read it now if you haven’t done so yet; it becomes more timely every day), and Lisa Donner and Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform, both old friends of mine, both doing incredibly important work.

I have also gotten word that the postponed teach-in by D&S columnist Arthur MacEwan at #OccupyBoston on Friday had a great crowd–over a hundred people, many of whom may have been waiting to hear Bill McKibbon, but who I’m sure were lucky to get to hear Arthur.  And Noam Chomsky’s postponed talk was supposed to take place this afternoon at #OccupyBoston.  And Glen Greenwald is scheduled to speak there on the 29th.

Last but not least:  Heike Schotten sent me this announcement for two upcoming talks at #OccupyBoston:

Mon, Oct 24, 5:30 p.m. – Professor Tom Ferguson on “Money and Politics”

Tom Ferguson teaches Political Science at UMass Boston and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.  His books include Golden Rule and Right Turn. Most of his research focuses on how economics and politics affect institutions and vice versa. He is a longtime Contributing Editor to The Nation and writes frequently for the Huffington Post and other blogs.
Thurs, Oct 27, 5:00 p.m. – Prof. Luis Jimenez on “The Perils of American Democracy:  The Institutional Basis Behind our ‘Broken Politics’“
Prof. Jiminez teaches Political Science at UMass Boston.  His work looks at the political impact that migrants have in their country of origin.

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr

Soggy Mcpherson Square #OccupyDC encampment, Oct. 19, 2011

(1) Quick Visit to #OccupyDC: I stopped by one of the two #OccupyDC encampments last night.  The Mcpherson Square encampment (known as “#OccupyKSt”) was quite soggy last night when I walked through at about 6:45pm.  There was the usual info tent, food tent, lots of tents (more pictures below), but not the kind of interaction with passers-by that you see at #OB and #OWS (though that might be because of the weather).  Today is sunny–I may stop by again to see it in nicer weather.  I also plan to stop by the encampment at Freedom Plaza, which was apparently planned long before the #Occupy movement, and has more of an antiwar theme.

(2) America Beyond Capitalism: I had a great dinner meeting with Gar Alberovitz and John Duda of the Democracy Collaborative;  Dollars & Sense will be co-publishing the new edition of Gar’s book America Beyond Capitalism, which will be available very soon.  An excerpt from the new introduction will be the cover story of our November/December issue.  I’ll have a sneak peek at the new edition’s cover soon.

It’s a terrific book–even more timely now than when its first edition came out in 2005, given the financial crisis and recession, and yet more timely now than when Gar decided to do a second edition, given #OccupyWallStreet.

(3) More Great Charts from BusinessInsider!: 7 More Charts That Show the Average American Has Been Getting Screwed for Decades.  Hat-tip to Randy Albelda. The comments section is very odd–facts alone can’t convince people, evidently.  Hard to see how anyone could see these charts and draw the weird conclusions the BI readers draw (unions haven’t been fighting hard enough for their members?! It’s all Clinton’s fault?–ok, partly, but all?).

More pictures of #OccupyKSt:

That’s it for now.

–Chris Sturr