If Only

While true he ignores the actual fact that for everyone in power the you and me is 1% of the total population:

One Other Other Thing

I first stumbled on Sterling Hayden in Asphalt Jungle and ran across him in some book or another on naming names. Recently I watched some god awful movie in which he rescues a damsel from Colonel Klink. I got his autobiography from the library and, to be blunt, the man whose acting was all twitches and muttered intimations of unknowable violence, he writes like Kerouac or better yet like Cassady's First Third; his Wandering is work of unusual genius and provides page after page of unexpected pleasure. Plus also even too and in addition , the man was a certified war hero who regretted with every ounce of his being his failure to stand up to the bullying bastards led by the unAmerican nutcase McCarthy. For at least a week he is my hero. 

To Tell The Truth Or Parsing the 99%

Jacques Brel, who we have discussed before, was a wildly popular singer/song writer. In this song he, I think, makes a point about the constant grinding misery of being an unwilling pawn of a bunch of rich bastards who, like Mitt Romney, despise those of born to poor parents while also articulating the single most heartfelt desire of the rest of who squirm under their unfeeling thumbs and boot heels: to no longer be victims while refusing to be executioners.



And yes, if you are interested, I think there is  a link between Camus, and the Jansenists, notion of Deus absconditus and Brel's work, which is to the extent a better world awaits it awaits on some collective action that I, like Sterling Hayden, doubt will or can succeed.

Game Changer?

The Trayvon Martin story is horrific. The number of Floridians "legally" murdered because of its insane gun laws is horrific. Its economic condition is horrific.  All of these horrific events and conditions result from some neoliberal reform or another.

The Martin story alone ought to be enough to put an end once and for all to the idea that racism, institution if not personal, is dead. The unnecessary gun deaths ought to put an end to the idea that an armed society is a polite society. The economic misery ought to put an end to the neoliberal fantasies.

Any decent society would denounce the Florida syndrome without hesitation. Anybody is actually interested in our common good and collective future would denounce the Florida syndrome.  Anybody who actually cares about the current crises in America would not be running around wringing their hands about contraception and abortion but would rather denounce the Florida syndrome.

Will we? Will they? Will this be the moment when we finally start to get our country back from the small-minded theocratic thugs, the empty-headed political and tv grifters, the lying cultural warriors, the plutocrats and their academic shills?

God, I hope so. But don't hold your breath.

Where'd All The Money Go?

For Sam Stone's kids it was a hole in daddy's arm. For the 99% in the current jobless recovery, it's the hyper rich:

And yet somehow or another Obama is a socialist marxist scum.

Privilege

John Cassidy exposes the fundamental nature of privilege among the 1%. In a stupid and pointless exercise he offers various candidates for the presidency of the World Bank and the reasons why they would be or not be the next. When writing about Timothy Geitner, the presumptive favorite, Cassidy "argues" that

[h]aving already said he is leaving the Obama Administration after the election, he needs a new job. His father worked for the Ford Foundation in Asia, so he is familiar with foreign countries and development issues.

What better reasons could you ask for? He needs a job and his father was  a big deal. News flash, knowledge is not inheritable and Geitner doesn't need a job. There is no understanding here that the WB pursues a narrow neoliberal agenda that has hamstrung economic recovery and the possibility of living a decent life. No understanding that the conventional ideas shared by the vast horde of neoliberal technocrats not only led to the current mess but that it is curtailing meaningful reform and, oddly enough, restraining any attempt to get the old version of winner take all capitalism wheezing its way forward.

This is the kind of thing that makes reasonable people despair of our future. 

Parsing the 99%

Matt Taibbi argues that "[w]hat makes people furious" with the oligarchs "is that they have stopped being citizens." This is true.

But what motivates the petty-minded woe-is-us claptrap of the oligarchs? Neoliberalism,. In the course of   the neoliberals' long march through the institutions included and includes the notion that the oligarchs ought not be citizens of any state and that their, and really the only real, allegiance is to the market. This claim has been amplified by dimwits and useful idiots until it is now sacredly true. When, for example, Kevin Drum, a moderate neoliberal,writes of how the current economic collapse "radicalized" him, his response is a list of tepid moderate neoliberal responses that will do nothing to make the systemic changes necessary if we are going to created a just society.

When Dean Baker writes a book sternly taking liberals and progressives to task for their failure to take the system seriously and, consequently, blames them for allowing the oligarchs to seize control, he engages in the same kind of tepid reformism that is going to get us exactly nowhere in the short or long run.

Paul Krugman cites a Joe Nocera column in which the latter exposes hard core neoliberal lies about the economic wreck wrought by the neoliberal consensus. Krugman gives himself and Nocera props for being brave truth tellers in these dark times. True as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Keynesism papers over the structural inequality built into market capitalism.

Why, one wonders, is it that exactly at that moment when reality exposes the fundamental idiocy of "market" capitalism that everyone on the "left" responds with reform ideas that range from lukewarm to ice cold?  It is a case of 1848 all over again. The centrists won't make common cause with radicals because? No idea.

What is to be done? If I had a vote it would be for market socialism.

Fascist or Authoritarian? Who Cares.

Mike Bloomberg great American fascist or authoritarian crows that

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world  I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.

 Having made a bunch of money doing god knows what, the little twit has overturned constitutional amendments design to make his dominance of NYC politics impossible, he now trumpets his control over the police who, recent events have shown, he can use to end the peaceable exercise of the First Amendment rights to assemble for the purpose of redressing grievances.

UC Davis and How It Got That Way

From the LRB Blog:

Like most US universities, Davis maintains its own police force, employing (as of 2009) 101 people (including administrators), far more than the largest academic departments. The officer wielding the spray is on record as earning $110,000 in 2010, more than all but the better paid full professors. The idea of a campus police force, established across the UC system in 1947, came about to reflect jurisdiction over university property and, perhaps, to apply somewhat more tolerant standards to minor student misdemeanours than might be expected from the public force.

So now those who protect and serve, much like the athletic departments, are bigger and wealthier than the schools of which they are supposed to be a part.

It's not just the brutality and stupidity; it's the venality and cupidity of the both these campus cops and all athletic departments. The primary mission of any university or college is the creation and dissemination of knowledge and skills for creating new knowledge and assessing the validity of arguments and evidence. How is it, exactly, that the primary mission is now seen as silencing students when they act as citizens and pandering to the socially constructed desire to root, root, root for the home team?

Can you imagine if politically active students chanted EAT SHIT; FUCK YOU as do the those at Camp Randall? Would the administration's response be a sternly worded email? Or a hastily administered tasering? Or what about the semi-perminant K-town at Duke? How is that students camping on university land is somehow cute when it's associated with sport but a disaster in the making when the student as citizen engages in political activity?

The world remains a horrid place; although most of its inhabitants are pleasant bunch.

Indeed

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It does capture the nonchalance with which those paid to protect and serve behave toward the innocuous. From the comments in the above link, a tumblr dedicated to the visual. If the pen were, in fact, mightier than the sword, the 99% would own the world.

Mistakes Were Made

This police chief is either a clueless fool or a sociopath:



This chancellor is beneath contempt and the student prove that by treating as someone beneath contempt:

What Are They Afraid Of?

So we have all seen this:



And probably read this letter from a UC Davis professor demanding the chancellor's resignation. Ideally we've read the chancellor's inane letter on the police brutality seen in the video.

What I don't get is the end of the video. The cops look like they are surrounded by armed bandits when really it's just a bunch of kids chanting shame on you. What did they think was going to happen? Greeting with flowers and candy?

Policing the Police

Here's a video of the NYPD arresting a retired Philly police captain at Zucoti Park:



It seems he held a sign asking the NYPD not to mercenaries for wall street and engage in other such filthy hippy stuff. Serves him right and the 25 of so journalist who were arrested. How dare he dare to assemble and demand redress and they to cover it. It's not like this is supposed to be a democracy.

Church of Latter Day Saints

Over to the NYRB there is a nice and detailed discussion of the recent authoritarian crackdown of the rights of Americans to assemble and demand redress of their grievances; this bit struck me as especially interesting:

According to Ellick, 1,400 “faith-based leaders in and around New York” were throwing their support behind Occupy Wall Street. When I asked him what defined a “leader,” he answered, “anyone with a constituency.” But what did support mean? For Ellick and John Merz, an Episcopal priest at Ascension Church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it meant opening church kitchens and giving protesters a place to shower and sleep “even though we’re not a shelter.” It would involve public support as well, talking to the press and urging parishioners to join the protesters in their various anti-corporate actions.

What if the last of MLK's ideas for America's moral and material improvement is in the process of being realized?

Bright Young Things Are so Often Wrong

Matthew Yglesias and Dana Goldstein are two of the bright young things of our new media. Each in their own way fail to understand what the 99% versus the 1% means. It isn't about income as such. 

Yglesias' claim that NBA players are rich and therefore members of the 1% misses the point that your average NBA player isn't trying to create an oligarchical system. The Kochs, Bloomburg, and the Republican party's war on voting are. These folks are less interested in money then  they are in power. For them money is a means to an end and that end is creating a world in which the few dominate the many.  The 99% movement isn't some attempt to simply redistribute wealth but rather to end the creation of a market state in which the wealthy oppress the poor through a combination of the laws of supply and demand, which insists that markets follow the money, and the manipulation of the political system through the creation of a system in which the state functions solely as enforcers.

Goldstein makes a similar mistake in pooh poohing the linkage between the 1% and neoliberal educational reform when she concludes that

[t]The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public.

One suspects that she knows this as in a later post, she links to an article on the danger of the 1%ers drive to privatize and virtualize k-12. Privatizing education, much like the privatization of prisons, takes one of societies most important functions out its hands and gives it to corporations, whose ability to do anything right is of limited. The creation of public, as opposed to religious, education is one of the hallmarks of modernity; granting corporations and rich folks the right to "reform" and run our educational systems spell the end of critical thought and beginning of education as vocational training or, even worse, no education and no vocational training for the mass of humanity.

When people talk about a market state what they really mean is democracy's demise at the hands of technocrats.

Redress and Assemble

According to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights:

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

How is a forcible destruction of a peaceable assembly of citizens demanding the redress of their grievance not a violation of their right to assemble and demand redress?

Zwickau Prophets

The gradual unraveling of the neo-Nazi criminals in Germany and the likely complicity of those in high office, particularly the police, serves to remind us that way back in the bad old days of Bader Meinhof, the right was more active in terrorizing Europe than was the left. Even today it is difficult to look at the face of terror

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in Europe and not fear the right. All of which is along way round of saying that kicking peaceful protesters out of semi-public and public parks through violence and militarized police force is a sign of missing the point. The problems we confront right now are the result of too little democracy not too much. The dangers confronting the continuation of democratic societies isn't the 99% trying to raise the issues of inequality, economic mismanagement in the public and private sectors while insisting on human dignity. It's the right and the reactionaries who never liked modernity to begin with.

Oh For God's Sake, He's Dumb

David Brooks on why nobody thinks child rape is wrong:

MR. BROOKS: I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.

 Yes and if you let the gays marry next stop man on dog town. It's not just that this is wrong but that Brooks' position has to arise from a nearly complete subjective state, which is to say he is a moral monster. Unlike, let's say, 99.9% of the population, he thinks that being permissive about sexual mores and abiding by the notion that the less interference into private lives the better includes the notion of rape and, explicitly, child rape. Who thinks that way? And a better question might be: why on earth would anyone employ someone who "thinks" that way?

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Who Will Denounce

Penn State students riot, rock throwing, van tipping, etc, because Paterno was fired. Bets on Conservatives denouncing this behavior as violent lawlessness? Imagine, for a moment, if any of the Occupy occupiers had done anything like this, how loud would be the denunciations and demands for denunciations by the forces of order? Today, I predict, the forces of order will blame political correctness for Paterno's sacking and, consequently, they will approve, or at least excuse, the riot.

I also predict that when all is said and done and the bottom of the disgraceful episode is gotten to, Paterno's supporters will recant. In addition, it seems to me that if a major football program with a university attached covered up a serial child rapist that other less horrific events, theft, battery, etc, are swept under the rugs of if not all then nearly all programs. Coaches are paid millions, athletic directors are paid millions, student-athletes are exploited, the NCAA gets rich, and other corrupt practices abound. It is time to end college sports.

UPDATE:
Over to the NRO David French denounces the rioters as louts for all the right reasons.

And There You Have It

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