Month: October 2011

Blue America welcomes Brad Miller

by digby

Insanely Weird

by tristero

In the Wall Street Journal, of course.

By the way, does one “convert” to Zen Buddhism, or does one simply practice Zen?

If anyone asks you what the Occupy protests are about, send them this:

Bill Maher on WhoSay

Hooah!

He’s running again if you’d like to send him a little token of your appreciation for setting the record straight on national television. Or for rhetorically kicking PJ O’Rourke’s pompous ass. Either way.

Transcript courtesy C&L:

Grayson: Let me tell what they’re talking about. They’re complaining about the fact the Wall Street wrecked the economy three years ago and nobody’s held responsible for that. Not a single person has been indicted or convicted for destroying twenty percent of our national net worth accumulated over two centuries. They’re upset about the fact that they have iron control over economic policies of this country and that one party is a wholly owned subsidiary of wall street and the other party caters to them as well, that’s the truth of the matter as you said before. And…

O’Rourke: Get the man a bongo drum, they’ve found their spokesman!

Grayson: If I…

O’Rourke: Get your shoes off, get a bongo drum, forget where to go to the bathroom and it’s yours.

Grayson: If I am the spokesman for all the people who think we should not have twenty four million people in this country who can’t find a full time job. Who should not have fifty million people who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick. That we shouldn’t have forty seven million people of this country who need government help to feed themselves. We shouldn’t have fifteen million families who owe more on their mortgage than the value of home, OK, I’ll be that spokesman.

Empathy and the 99 percent
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

The media has spent a lot of time asking about the specific grievances of the protesters in the “Occupy” movement. Rather than ask people camped out at one of the protests, they need look no further than at the heart-wrenching reminders of what life is really like in the United States at We Are the 99 Percent. The site is filled with photos of real Americans and their brief stories. Stories like this:

My name is Allison, I’m a 13 year old 8th grader. I only get a few hours of sleep at night, but I don’t tell my parents because they don’t need to know that I need sleeping pills. I’ve been showing symptoms of Schizophrenia but we can’t afford for me to go see a doctor about it. My parents get really scared when they have to pay the morage because it really cuts down on our money. I’ve stopped eating alot so there’s more food for everyone else.

My parents don’t know that I know we’re the 99%.

And this:

Today my sociology professor asked a class of 35-40 hard-working students at a respected, if public, university how many of us expected to get a job after graduation… No one raised their hand. Then she asked how many of us had over $10,000 in student loans… Almost every hand in the classroom, including mine, shot up.

WE ARE THE 99%.

And this:

As a single mom, I put myself through college and grad school so I would have resources for my old age, and so I could help my kids get established in life. I had a good job, then a chronic illness gradually dismantled my life. I lost my job, most of my savings, and ended up living with friends and family for years because I could not take care of myself. I got lucky: I found a dr who could help me get some of my function back, worked part-time for a while, and I used the rest of my savings to buy a small house of my own. But it was too late: the “recession” kept me from resurrecting my career— I was competing with too many other people who did not have my gap in employment. My resources are gone, I can’t sell my house in this market so I can share housing with a friend. I live month to month on SS and a small pension, and can’t afford dental care or eyeglasses. I worry about my children, now grown, who are all struggling in one way or another, living also month to month, and my grandchildren, who may not have much of a future.

WE ARE THE THE 99%.

There are now over 60 pages worth of these stories, each with photos of the real people who have submitted them, and many more coming each day.

Reading them is a constant reminder of how perilous is the line between good fortune and the threat of homelessness. I personally am one of the very lucky ones. At 30 years old, I make a modest five-figure income (well below what is necessary to live simply for a family of four in my area.) I run a small business which has managed to remain moderately successful for over six years even as many of my friends and acquaintances in my profession have abandoned the field. I have some decent savings and no debt. I went to a good university on full-ride academic scholarship and thus had no need to take on student loans. I was lucky enough to realize that the housing market was wildly overinflated, and chose not to purchase property even though my parents and many of my friends did; I have a month-to-month lease on a nice apartment. I have decent health insurance through the individual market, and have only had a six-month gap in my life without health insurance.

Yes, I have worked hard, and yes, I have been frugal and had good predictive judgment. In theory, I could easily say that I earned my good fortune and tell these people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take their hands off my tax dollars. In theory.

But doing that would make me a delusional, self-absorbed narcissistic asshole. Because the reality is that as hard as I’ve worked, I’ve also been incredibly lucky. Lucky enough to have had educated parents who helped tutor me at home. Lucky enough to have been brought up in a middle-class lifestyle where education was valued. Lucky enough to have had parents who owned a small business themselves, where I worked for essentially room and board throughout college while learning the ropes of an industry and the basics of running a business before starting out on my own. Lucky enough to go to a good college where I met my amazing current fiancee. Yes, I’ve worked hard all my life. For two years I took a 45-minute bus ride to college in the morning in business clothes, and rode it back right after class to work late into the night, then stayed up until 2am to do homework. I didn’t have much of a social life, and I didn’t take a year trekking through Europe.

But I’ve also been blessed with remarkable good fortune–fortune that I understand could run out at any time.

No, I’m not in the top 1% of incomes. I’m not even in the top 10%. But I’m incredibly fortunate nonetheless. I realize that, and I intend to do my damnedest to help those who have been less fortunate than I.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to live in the moral vacuum inhabited by people like this:

Student loans started out as a good idea. The GI Bill got the whole thing started, by having the government create a program that provided higher education for those who would otherwise be unable to afford it. The end result was a dynamic, educated group of former military people (trained, disciplined, seasoned and responsible) who helped sweep the country to great prosperity during the 1950s and early 1960s.

What most people forget now is that the GI Bill was payment for services rendered. In that way, it differed dramatically from student loans, which are payments for . . . what? It’s questionable whether those students currently getting “educated” at America’s top propaganda institutions . . . er, colleges and universities, will contribute anything to the economy — and we know that render any services to the American people, in the cause of American freedom, in exchange for those cash handouts…

[T]he loans have created a self-entitled group of people who, rather than pay off their debt, feel that it’s totally appropriate for them to attack others’ financial livelihood, as they’re doing now when they try to interfere with our nation’s economic core.

Just as the Vietnam war protests had nothing to do with actual principles, and everything to do with a spoiled generation’s fear of the draft; so too do today’s protests in America’s financial centers have nothing to do with concerns about America’s economy, and everything to do with deadbeat kids who willingly took on an unreasonable amount of debt, and are now facing the financial consequences for their cupidity and stupidity.

There are few things more morally repulsive than people who started on third base, enjoyed the benefits that government and society provided them, and then think they hit a triple while declaring that human rights such as healthcare and education should only be available to those who can directly afford to pay for them.

Few things are more disgusting and shameful than those who have experienced good fortune themselves, and feel nothing for the people whose stories, like those at We are the 99 Percent, are all around them as reminders of what their lives could be like if just one or two breaks had gone differently.

Pearl clutchers and “bipartisan” hand wringers insist that the left and right in this country must come to some meeting of the minds. An agreement on rational, sensible policy on which we can all come to consensus.

But the truth is that there is no coming to terms with those who live in an ideological bubble that prevents from feeling basic empathy or shame. There is a real battle of ideas being waged in this country, and only one side is going to come out victorious.

It will either be those who understand what it’s like to be part of the 99 percent and realize that the system is broken. Or it will be those who believe that all of these people deserve to suffer in squalor. There can and will be no middle ground.

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Plutocrat of the day

Suffer the little children

by digby

Ugh:

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, the decision of a federal judge last week to allow Alabama’s harshest-in-the-nation immigration law to go into effect has had heartbreaking consequences. Hispanic families have been fleeing Alabama in droves and thousands of children have been too terrorized to show up for school. The law allows police to racially profile and pull over anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally, and blatantly violates children’s constitutional right to an education by forcing schools to check students’ immigration status before they can be enrolled.But Republican lawmakers who supported the measure have been remarkably short on compassion for immigrant families that have been torn apart and other residents who have been deeply affected by their exodus. During an interview on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) said Hispanic children being too afraid to go to school is merely the just consequence of immigrants’ unlawful decision to live in the state:

INGRAHAM: Do you think it’s bad all these Hispanic kids have disappeared from the schools? Do you think that’s a bad thing?SESSIONS: All I would just say to you is that it’s a sad thing that we’ve allowed a situation to occur for decades that large numbers of people are in the country illegal and it’s going to have unpleasant, unfortunate consequences.

Yes, “unpleasant”.

Sessions said he “couldn’t agree more” with Ingraham when she called this a “sob story” that simply proves that “enforcement of the law works!” It’s a good thing, Ingraham suggested, that immigrants are responding by leaving Alabama. “This is a rational response,” Sessions remarked, arguing that “one of the sad consequences of illegal immigration is families can be hurt in the process” — indicating that families brought the government’s harsh crackdown on themselves by seeking a better life here.

Of course you can count on Sessions to take up the cause of those who would oppress little children in order to make a point. He’s a guy who was so blatantly racist that he couldn’t be confirmed as a Federal judge and then went on to be elected by the (white) people of Alabama to the US Senate that rejected him. He’s an unreconstructed confederate of the worst kind.

Live by the mob, die by the mob
David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Progressives in America owe a big debt of thanks to the Tea Party. Not because of any sense of ideological solidarity, of course: right-wing so-called “populism” is just as contemptible and antithetical to real moral values as it ever was.

Rather, progressives owe the Tea Party a huge debt of thanks because it normalized the politics of protest. There is a reason that the Occupy Wall Street protests, in spite of the condescension of jokers like Erin Burnett, are gaining traction as a real movement to be reckoned with, even though the protests against the invasion of Iraq were considered a sideshow despite being much larger in sheer numbers. The fact is that like it or not, the Tea Party has a lot to do with that.

Over the broad arc of history, the Right has stood for established power and the status quo, while the Left has stood for the rights of the downtrodden and dispossessed. Since the abolishment of monarchy and the adoption of representative democracy in most of the Western industrialized world, the great battle between Left and Right has been over the middle class. The Right has usually attempted to align the middle class emotionally and ideologically with established power, while the Left has attempted to open the eyes of the middle classes to the fact that they have much more in common with the less fortunate than they do with the most fortunate. The tools of the Right’s trade, then, have been things that could divide broad swaths of the middle class and poor against one another: race, culture, religion, and the like. Basic economics has traditionally been the province of the Left in making its own argument–which is why the Democrats’ abandonment of populist economics over the last 30 years has been so wildly damaging.

Protest has been a tool of the Left for centuries. It is a way for desperate and angry people without power in other respects to make their voices heard. If the protests are large and angry enough, protests can shake the foundations of power and hopefully change them through consciousness raising; through removal of politicians who stand in the way of change; and, if all else fails and all other options are exhausted as in the Arab Spring, through actual revolution.

The Right has traditionally minimized and marginalized protests as the province of lazy malcontents and angry mobs. The purpose of doing so is not only to reduce the likelihood of change, but to rhetorically persuade the middle class that the protesters are not “normal.” They are not like them. The middle class, in the words of Richard Nixon, are the Silent Majority for whom those smelly, long-haired dispossessed protesters do not speak. (This is why it is important, insofar as possible, for those engaged in protest to seem as outwardly “normal” as they can.)

And that has largely worked. Protests in America since the 1960s have not been viewed as a legitimate voice of the people, but rather as the outbursts of a malcontent few. And the media as an arm of the status quo has been happy to portray them that way. Protesters like myself and millions of others marched against the invasion of Iraq, for instance, to little fanfare and less effect because of this dynamic.

But then something happened. In the United States after the election of America’s first black president, the Right changed the rules of the game. Sensing demographic shifts that threatened to make them a permanent minority and feeling boxed in by Democratic control of the White House and Congress, the conservatives decided to go all in with a faux-populist hand. They were emboldened to take this approach after watching the Left largely abandon populism for a safer, more “mainstream” message.

Now was the time, thought the Right, to take up the populist mantle once and for all. Now was the time to portray the white suburban American male as the dispossessed and downtrodden, and the oppressive force as the big, bad urban overspending government headed up by a black guy. Using all the power and money of the corporate sector and the conservative media establishment at their disposal, they created an astroturf faux-populist movement that adopted all the outward qualities of protest movements, but with little of the organic outrage of a real movement.

And the media lapped it up. They did so partly because Tea Party protests constituted a “man-bites-dog” story. It’s nothing new when mostly younger, dispossessed lefties get out into the streets with papier-mache figurines. But when older, more “normal”-looking people are in the streets advocating against the poor, that becomes a real story. The ultimate goal of the protests for conservatives was, of course, removing the “threat” of Democratic rule. It turns out that Democratic rule wasn’t really that big a threat to corporate interests after all, but the powers that be feared Democratic rule enough to give us divided government nonetheless. And in 2010, the faux populist right got what it wanted: a hyper-conservative House that stymied even the minor threat of changes to even the fringes of the status quo.

But there were unintended consequences, too. In playing the popular protest card on its own, the Right legitimized the politics of protest that they had spent decades if not centuries minimizing. After the Tea Party, it’s difficult for any members of the right-wing establishment to use their traditional dismissive rhetoric about protest movements.

So now when Eric Cantor says something like this:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took to the stage at the 2011 Voter Values Summit in Washington to do a little fear-mongering about the growing Occupy Wall Street protests.

“If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country,” he said.

Cantor appeared try and connect the protests to the cries of “class warfare” Republicans are lobbing at President Obama’s jobs bill and his Buffett Rule.

“Believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans,” Cantor said.

it comes off not as a legitimate portrayal of his worldview, but as a massively hypocritical joke. Fox News’ reaction to the Occupy movement is too easy to mock. The Republicans rode to power largely on the politics of protest. Now they have to accept the results. Democrats, meanwhile, aren’t shying away from pointing out the irony:

At the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday, Vice President Biden discussed the parallels between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“The core is the American people do not think the system is fair or on the level. That is the core of what you’re seeing on Wall Street,” he said. “There’s a lot in common with the Tea Party. The Tea Party started why? TARP. They thought it was unfair, we’re bailing out the big guys. What are the people up on the other side of the spectrum saying? The same thing.”

Of course, Joe Biden knows well that there’s little in common between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. But in conflating the two, he puts the media and the conservative establishment in an awful bind. It’s hard to minimize one protest while maximizing the other, especially when both sides each used Wall Street as a bete noire in one way or another.

In creating the Tea Party fraud, conservatives have helped make the politics of protest part of “real America” again. Now they get the suffer the consequences of that short-sighted cynical ploy. Real authentic populism is here now, and there’s politically nothing they can do about it.

Update: I hadn’t even seen this:

“I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country,” he said.

Uh, excuse me? White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in the briefing today.

“I sense a little hypocrisy unbound here–what we’re seeing on the streets of New York is a an expression of democracy,” Carney said. “I think I remember how Mr. Cantor described protests of the tea party–I can’t understand how one man’s mob is another man’s democracy.”

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More Tea Party solidarity

by digby

Here’s the latest email from Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation:

Occupy Wall Street and other places where Real Americans have jobs, is now into its third week. The clueless revolt continues and it is painfully obvious those who are showing up to “protest” do not have a job. In most cases, it is painfully obvious why they don’t have a job. To paraphrase the Jimmy Buffett song “Margaretville,” it’s your own damn fault.

Why are the protesters so funny to look at?

The most ironic moment of the “protest” came two nights ago as word Steve Jobs had died. Protesters pulled out their Iphones and Ipads to get the latest word.

They protest corporations and their profits, yet who do they revere? Steve Jobs and Apple. Apple is one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world and Steve Jobs was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

As these people scream about the evils of capitalism and how terrible it is that these corporations put “profits above people,” perhaps they should take a look around. A majority of the protestors seem to be under 30.

The all have cell phones. Where do they think those came from? Here’s a hint: a profit-making corporation. What about their laptops, IPads and tablet PCs? Ditto. What about Facebook and Twitter that they are using to spread the word about the “revolution”? More of those evil profit making corporations at work.

What about the video cameras they have been using? Ditto. For those camping out, what about their nice sleeping bags and clothes? Those also came from those evil profit-making corporations.

Something else the protestors missed. You know those other people in downtown. The one’s walking past the protestors. The one’s who took a shower this morning, are called employees. Those evil profit-making corporations hire those people. But protestors cannot be bothered trivial details.

The demands of the so-called protestors are pretty funny, if not totally incoherent. They demand single payer healthcare. They have that system in the UK, where people are pulling their own teeth because it takes so long to get see a Dentist and where there is an eighteen-month wait to see a medical specialist.

The demands include debt forgiveness of every debt in the world. Literally. Wait, can I go and run up my Amex before we do this? And do you think this will also apply to Louie the loan shark?

They also demand a “living wage” whether you work or not. Hey that would be great. I’d like a wage for not working. So would they. They could then spend all day in front of the TV, playing on their Xbox, updating their Facebook status, smoking some Marijuana and heading down to McDonalds when they get the munchies.

Of course, if you get the same pay whether you work or not, who is going to work?

Oops.

This has been tried before. It did not work. Socialism never works.

The protestors are demanding we adopt socialism. The problem with socialism is the end result of socialism is always poverty, tyranny and most of the time, mass murder.

We can laugh that these protests get these 26-year-old kids off their parents couch and gives their parents a break from the sound of their kids video games and the smell of marijuana.

What we cannot laugh about is that there are people behind this push who want to bring down American society. The backers want to destroy American liberty and freedom.

That is nothing to laugh about.

Your right wing “populist” movement, ladies and gentlemen. Same as it ever was.

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Why Wall Street?

by digby

Alternet has published a very useful little primer on why Wall Street is the target for the current protests. If you are having any arguments about this, I urge you to read the whole thing, which fully expands on all the following 10 points.

The movement that’s building is somewhat amorphous, to be sure, but the target, boith in practical and symbolic terms, is common to everyone.

1. Wall Street caused the crash

2. The Wall Street crash directly caused the gravest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression

3. Wall Street profited from the bailouts and remains unaccountable

4. The super-rich are getting richer

5. The super-rich are paying lower and lower taxes

6. Financial elites pay lower taxes than their secretaries

7. None of those who caused the crash have been prosecuted

8. Wall Street is much too big and its salaries are much too high

9. Wall Street still owns the regulators

10. Financial innovation is a joke

Does Wall Street pay or do we? In the end, it comes down to a clear-cut struggle between the few and the many. (There’s that 99 percent again.) Who is going to pay for the jobs we need? Who is going to pay for the debt that was created to bail out Wall Street and prevent another Great Depression? Wall Street wants us to pay in the form of cuts in Social Security and medical coverage, reduced wages and higher taxes (for everyone but them). In fact, they want the kids to pay by working longer before they retire (if they can ever find a job), paying higher medical costs as they grow older, and turning their Social Security accounts into Wall Street playthings no one can rely on. At the same time financial elites are arguing for fewer regulations and lower taxes on themselves and their fellow millionaires and billionaires. Financial interests are hoping we’ll simply forget who caused what and instead focus on debt, more debt and still more debt. They’re hoping we’ll blame government, regulations and taxes, while they laugh all the way to the bank – their banks. Some of us may be old and tired and fatalistic about all this looting, and sour about the chances for change. Thank god the kids still have their wits about them—and a fighting spirit.

Get out there and join them. And if you’re too old to stay overnight (like me), visit often and urge your unions, churches and community groups to join the fray. A progressive populist uprising only works when it’s large, vocal and full of spunk.

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Erin Burnett’s bad week

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