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

via

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

.

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.

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.

Hard Work

You know who works hard?  Everyone with a job.  You know who gets too much money for the work they do?  Rich people.

Parsing the 99% Who Support the 1%

So we all know what happened last night in Oakland, which almost assuredly another example of police rioting.  Here's a portion of the Mayor of Oakland's statement after she made the mistake of praising the police for bashing the skull of a veteran and flash-bombing those who sought to rescue the stricken citizen:

Most of us are part of the 99%, and understand the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. We are committed to honoring their free speech right.

She, it would seem, doesn't support doing anything to change the world as it is and, with minor outbreaks of police brutality to one side, she stands 100% behind the right of free speech.  Oddly enough, she doesn't mention assembly and redress of grievance; perhaps because she's forgotten they exist.

Oh yes, in this picture, from the TP link above,  you can see the bicycle remains central to social change:

Parsing the 99%

Maybe they mean  something like this from John Woolman

To consider mankind otherwise than brethren, to think favors are peculiar to one nation and to exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding.

Parsing 99%

It's becoming increasingly common to discuss the 99%/Occupy movement in terms of economics; I don't think this gets to the point of the nub's gist. Ask everyone you know and all of those you meet what they think of this:

@AnnCoulter Ann Coulter

ONE TROY DAVIS FLAME-BROILED, PLEASE - bit.ly/qPQnV7

99% of them will deplore the remark. Or send these same folks to the 99% tumblr and then have them read this:

99% will find the implied "they are all a bunch of liars" appalling.

Or take this, Obama sends 100 soldiers to battle or train to battle troops against the Lord's Resistance Army. Right or wrong, 99% of the people, who know what and who the LRA is, will find this from Rush Limbough appalling:

"So that's a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda," Limbaugh said. "No, I'm not kidding." 

Or the stories of stock brokers, jobbers, and related con men who see a reduction of their salaries from 500k to 300k as "demoralizing." Again 99% of the world would be appalled.

The 99% aren't protesting economic  policies per se, they, we, want a world that reflects the values, desires, and needs of 99% of society instead of the 1% of profound dickheads who either have more money than sense and the sociopaths who support them.

Mayor Blumberg Beclowns Himself

So he called off the eviction of the OWS 99% folks but, just to remind us all that he is a billionaire on

his radio show this morning, Bloomberg was clearly trying to strike an equitable and impartial note. “The protestors, in all fairness, have been very peaceful there,” he said. But he then went on to cite the concerns of the people living in the neighborhood of Zuccotti Park, adding, “The longer this goes on, the worse it is for our economy.”

Yes, it those peacefully protesting Johnnies who are causing the 25% effective un and underemployment in these United States, long may laughter be its best medicine.

I Know He Is Trying to be Funny; but, He's Right.

Over to the NRO Victor David Hanson, of all people, halfway understands the Occupy/99% guys and dolls. He needs, obviously, to include all the malefactors from his "side" of the ledger. But babysteps and all that. The comments on the post, on the other hand, are straight out of John Birch. Why it's almost as if Hanson is trying to be ironical, which can't be the case, can it?