“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The occupy movement can’t be sprayed away
Pepper spray can’t be washed off with water. The intense burning it causes – the stinging, the redness, the swelling, the coughing and gagging and gasping – will only subside with time, usually several hours. It can cause tissue damage and respiratory attacks. A study of its most commonly prescribed remedies found that none of them really work. It has been prohibited in war by the Chemical Weapons Convention, so our enemies don’t have to experience it on the battlefield. If only our citizens were so lucky.
Over the past several weeks police have been using pepper spray with alarming frequency in the United States against peaceful protesters. The injured include an 84-year-old woman, a pregnant woman, a priest and an Iraq war veteran. Over the weekend, we had to add to that list a group of college students, gathered nonviolently on the campus of the University of California at Davis.
For refusing to leave an occupy encampment they had set up on campus, more than a dozen students received a point-blank hosing of military-grade pepper spray by a campus police officer dressed, inexplicably, in riot gear. Then they received another one. And another. According to reports, some were punished for trying to protect their faces by having pepper spray forced down their throats. One student was reported to have been coughing up blood 45 minutes after the occurrence. Several were taken to the hospital. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the chancellor of the university defended the actions of the police. She should resign immediately.
Dapne Eviatar; Detention without end, amen
In a time of austerity, and with the planned drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, you might expect congressional proposals to reduce the military’s footprint around the world. You’d be wrong.
Instead, the defense spending bill passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and now heading for a vote in the full Senate would dramatically expand the U.S. military’s role in counterterrorism – potentially inciting more attacks on U.S. interests.
At the same time, it would very likely undermine the ability of our best-trained experts in counterterrorism to investigate, prosecute and bring to justice international terrorists from all over the world.
In addition, this defense authorization bill marks the first time since the McCarthy era that Congress has sought to create a system of military detention without charge or trial – including U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil.
The bill would do that by authorizing such military detention of anyone, captured anywhere, believed to be “part of or [who] substantially supported” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or undefined “associated forces.”
The undemocratic, appointed Joint Select committee of six Democrats and six Republicans, the “Super-Committee,” failed to reach an agreement that would have unnecessarily imposed untold hardship on the vast majority of those of us already struggling in a bad economy. If this inability to reach a terrible deal is “failure”, can you imagine what “success,” defined by this crowd would have looked like?
Here’s what success should look like, and thanks to the Super-Committee fail, we might just have the time and political space to achieve some of it:
My colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies have a newly released Report: America Is Not Broke: How to Fix the Crisis While Making the Country More Equitable, Green, and Secure.
The report asserts that the current economic crisis presents us all with the opportunity and challenge to use our nation’s vast wealth to create a sustainable economy which functions well for all of us.
Amy Goodman: Pulling Accounts From the Unaccountable
Less than a month after Occupy Wall Street began, a group was gathered in New York’s historical Washington Square Park, in the heart of Greenwich Village. This was a moment of critical growth for the movement, with increasing participation from the thousands of students attending the cluster of colleges and universities there. A decision was made to march on local branches of the too-big-to-fail banks, so participants could close their accounts, and others could hold “teach-ins” to discuss the problems created by these unaccountable institutions.
Heather Carpenter, according to the federal lawsuit filed this week in New York, is studying to be a certified nursing assistant, working to pay for school as a counselor for mentally disabled people at a group home on Long Island. Her fiance, Julio Jose Jimenez-Artunduaga, is a Colombian immigrant, pursuing the American Dream, working part time as a bartender. They marched from Washington Square Park to a nearby Citibank branch, where she went to the teller to close her account, explaining her frustration with the bank’s new monthly $17 fee for accounts with balances below $6,000.
Jane Mayer: The Pipeline Protests: Taking It to the Streets
Last spring, months before Wall Street was Occupied, civil disobedience of the kind sweeping the Arab world was hard to imagine happening here. But at Middlebury College, in Vermont, Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence, was leading a class discussion about Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr., and he began to wonder if the tactics that had won the civil-rights battle could work in this country again. McKibben, who is an author and an environmental activist (and a former New Yorker staff writer), had been alarmed by a conversation he had had about the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline with James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and one of the country’s foremost climate scientists. If the pipeline was built, it would hasten the extraction of exceptionally dirty crude oil, using huge amounts of water and heat, from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, which would then be piped across the United States, where it would be refined and burned as fuel, releasing a vast new volume of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. “What would the effect be on the climate?” McKibben asked. Hansen replied, “Essentially, it’s game over for the planet.”
It seemed a moment when, literally, a line had to be drawn in the sand. Crossing it, environmentalists believed, meant entering a more perilous phase of “extreme energy.” The tar sands’ oil deposits may be a treasure trove second in value only to Saudi Arabia’s, and the pipeline, as McKibben saw it, posed a powerful test of America’s resolve to develop cleaner sources of energy, as Barack Obama had promised to do in the 2008 campaign.
Allison Kilkenny: Occupy Wall Street and the Importance of Creative Protest
Perhaps the single biggest factor that helped lead to the Occupy movement’s success in capturing the media and public’s attention has been its creativity. Novel protest strategies have served as OWS’s foundation since its first days. The very idea of occupying, and sleeping in, a park twenty-four hours a day was new and exciting.
Up until Occupy, most protests had become exercises in futility. Protesters would show up with their sad, limp carboard signs, march around for a little while-maybe press would show up, but most likely not-and then everyone would go home. Hardly effective stuff.
Even when the protests were massive, say during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, media had learned to ignore protests as being the hallmark of a bygone era of granola-munching hippies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the media helped hand protesters loss after loss, perhaps recognizing the fact that protest waged within the perimeters constructed by city officials is completely ineffective.
Rebecca Solnit: ‘You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Can’t Stop the Spring’
Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now.
Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.
Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.
Rachel Signer: Students in Debt: “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, Don’t Pay”
It seems like the right moment to initiate a nationwide campaign against the student lending industry. In a short time, Occupy Wall Street had reinvigorated the left and called the media’s attention back to the financial crisis of 2008. Young people everywhere are underemployed and struggling to repay debt, and many of these same people are now becoming inspired by the radicalism of Occupy.
It began with a teach-in. On Wednesday, October 16, New York University professor Andrew Ross led an open forum titled “Is Student Debt a Form of Indenture?” at the public atrium at 60 Wall Street, which had been transformed into an office of Occupy Wall Street. Each day, the atrium filled with activists who made their way from the park, dodging traders and tourists alike, for afternoon teach-ins and working group meetings.
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