Tag: Opinion

Lauded by the Washington press corps for his “courage” and “honesty” in confronting federal deficits and the national debt, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., wrote a budget that almost sank the Republican Party-and may still damage its prospects-because he proposed to dismantle Medicare. Yet his party still relies upon Ryan to speak on behalf of its most important constituency, now known in America and across the world as “the 1 percent.”

Addressing the right-wing Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, Ryan sought to discredit Elizabeth Warren-the Massachusetts Democratic senatorial candidate, Harvard faculty member, creator of the Consumer Finance Protection Agency and enemy No. 1 of Wall Street cheaters-for daring to utter an obvious truth.

Robert C. Koehler: Iraq Syndrome

This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees – over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries – will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.

But there’s little doubt we lost this war – by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.

George Zornick: House Democrats Upset With Supercommittee Negotiations

As we’ve been reporting, Democrats on the supercommittee-led by Senator Max Baucus-are pursuing a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction, which would include tax increases, spending cuts, a new round of economic stimulus and steep cuts to both Medicare and Social Security. Republicans have rejected the deal in favor of their own, which basically includes all of the cuts and does not include tax increases nor stimulus spending.

But several Democratic members of the House are increasingly upset with how supercommittee Democrats are carrying out the negotiations, and are threatening to vote against a package that includes deep cuts to the safety net. Some are even planning an attempt to get rid of the supercommittee altogether.

Chip Ward: Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick: Nature Is the 99 Percent, Too

If your child has asthma and it’s getting worse, then news about the White House’s recent retreat on ozone (that is, smog) standards for the air over your city wasn’t exactly cause for cheering. Thank our environmental president for that, but mainly of course the Republicans, who have been out to kneecap the Environmental Protection Agency since the 2010 election results came in.  We may be heading for an anything-blows environmental future, even though it couldn’t be more logical to assume that whatever is allowed into the air will sooner or later end up in us.

With a helping hand from that invaluable website Environmental Health News, here’s a little ladleful of examples from the chemical soup that could be not just your air, soil, or water, but you.  It’s only a few days’ worth of news reports on what’s in our environment and so, for better or mostly worse, in us: In Dallas-Ft. Worth, there’s lead in the blood of children, thanks to leaded gasoline, banned decades ago, but still in the soil.  In New York’s Hudson River, “one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history” (for PCBs in river sediments) is ongoing.  Researchers now suspect that those chemicals, already linked to low birth weight, thyroid disease, and learning, memory, and immune system disorders,” are also associated with to high blood pressure.  Then there’s mercury, that “potent neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to the developing brains of fetuses and children.” If allowed, it will enter the environment via a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine to be built in Alaska near “one of the world’s premier salmon fisheries.”

David Sirota: TV That Finally Lifts Journalism Back ‘Up’

Waking up at 4 a.m. is rarely enjoyable, and arising at that unspeakable hour to appear on a cable news show is particularly painful. In such situations, you feel as if you’re dragging yourself out of bed only to be treated like a canine in a dogfight, with the typical show pitting you in a contrived death match against another guest who is your equally angry, equally mangy opposite. That, or you’re simply asked to play the yes-man-the Ed McMahon to the host’s Johnny Carson.

Needless to say, I’m not a fan of most cable news because I find this format mind-numbing, uninformative and tedious (and cable news’ declining ratings over the last year prove I’m not alone). So when I was asked to appear on MSNBC last Saturday morning, my initial thought was, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

But then I realized it was a new show hosted by Chris Hayes, a journalist whose work I’ve long admired. So I said yes. And crack-of-dawn fatigue aside, I’m glad I did, because to my surprise, I ended up getting the chance to participate in one of the best television programs on the air.

Yesterday, super-committee Democrats proposed a massive deficit reduction plan consisting of $300 billion in economic stimulus, discretionary spending cuts and increased tax revenue, and an alarming $575 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, at least $200 billion of which would come directly from benefits. (See my story here).  After I published, reports came out that not only were Democrats proposing draconian Medicare cuts, but also floated the idea of adjusting the Consumer Price Index used to calculate Social Security benefits-in other words, they were willing to cut that program, too.

Nicholas D. Kristof: Crony Capitalism Comes Home

Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.

The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.

To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.

Dean Baker: The Military Spending Fairy

Faced with the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department’s budget, the defense industry is pushing the story of the military spending fairy on members of Congress. They are telling them that these cuts will lead to the loss of more than 1 million jobs over the next decade.

Believers in the military spending fairy say things like “the government can’t create jobs,” but also think that military spending creates jobs. Under the military spending fairy story, if the government spends $1 billion dollars paying people to do research or to build items related to the civilian economy it is just a drag on the private economy; however if the same spending goes to military related purposes, then it creates jobs.

Kieran Manjarrez: Half a Percent for Ninety Nine Percent!

In the news today, it was reported that President Obama once again used his executive authority to implement a legislative change — this time, to ease the debt burden on student loans.

According to reports, the executive order moves up the effective date of a previoulsy enacted law which reduced maximum required repayments from 15 to 10 percent of annual discretionary income. Under Obama’s order, the law will take effect in 2012 instead of 2014. Obama’s executive action will also allow student-borrowers to consolidate their loans into a single government debt, carrying an interest rate that is half a percent lower than at present.

Obama’s move is such patent financial demagoguery it is hard not to laugh. Obama is obviously feeling the heat of his own betrayal of the 99 percent. His answer? Shave off half a percent!

Tom Engelhardt: Obama Keeps His Campaign Pledge …Because a Better Option Wasn’t Available

What if, last Friday, President Obama had stepped to the podium at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and begun his remarks this way: “Good afternoon, everybody.  As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end — for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world.  After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011.  Today, I’m here to tell you that I’m breaking that pledge.  It will not happen.  Instead, I’m leaving 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in that country indefinitely.”

Of course, the president made no such claim (nor, if things had turned out differently in Iraq, would he have done so).  Nonetheless, according to news reports, such an outcome — thousands of American troops in Iraq, possibly for years — was the administration’s first choice, while military commanders were evidently eager to leave tens of thousands of troops behind.  It was the outcome that Washington had been negotiating for and lobbying Iraqi politicians about all year.

In a hospital in Nicaragua, after a total ban on abortion was passed, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy was allowed to languish, waiting for her fallopian tube to rupture before a doctor agreed to perform the procedure necessary to save her life and future fertility. Even though there was no doubt regarding the outcome of her pregnancy, the doctor refused to operate until the fetus was certifiably dead, and with no ultrasound available in that rural hospital, there was only one way to make sure.  

This is the world that Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) would like to bring to America with the passage of H.R. 358, the so-called “Protect Life Act,” a bill that would deny pregnant women access to emergency treatment, insurance coverage for abortion services and even information about how she could pay for an abortion. It’s bad enough that one member of Congress would be willing to put women’s lives at risk this way; that a majority of the House of Representatives voted for it is appalling.

While in the United States we may treat abortion restrictions as a political issue, elsewhere around the world, advocates and experts understand such restrictions to be public health and human rights issues. And in the United States this year, we have seen law after law passed that clearly violates international human rights standards.

Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis: The Only ‘Success’ in Iraq is that U.S. Troops Are Leaving

Contrary to what you’re likely to hear from the political and media establishment, the only thing worth celebrating is this war’s end, not what it accomplished.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is reportedly set to come to an end, with most of the roughly 40,000 soldiers currently stationed there set to be removed by year’s end. But let’s make no mistake: contrary to what you’re likely to hear from the political and media establishment, the only thing worth celebrating is this war’s end, not what it accomplished.

On October 21, President Obama announced that, “After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” By the end of 2011, he said, “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their head held high, proud over their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops.”

While the words may be intended to soothe – no one likes to know they have fought for an ignoble cause – the truth of the matter is that there is no “success” for any American to be gloating over. And though the president and his surrogates are selling the announcement as the fulfillment of an oft-repeated promise made on the campaign trail, the fact is it’s a promise the Obama administration made every effort to break.

Linda McQuaig: How to Make Inequality Obsolete

Only a couple of centuries ago, owning another person – slavery, that is – was considered a normal thing to do.

But, starting in the late 18th century, slavery was abolished throughout Europe and the Americas (in 1793 in Upper Canada) after the rise of an abolition movement based on Enlightenment ideas about human rights and freedoms.

Once considered acceptable, slavery came to be seen as repugnant. As U.S. political scientist John Mueller puts it: “Slavery became controversial, then peculiar and then obsolete.”

The power of social movements to sweep away ideas solidly embraced by the established order seems to be intuitively grasped by the Occupy Wall Street crowd, even if it’s lost on commentators who dismiss the movement as leaderless, unfocused and short on perfect sound bites.

Already, the occupiers have made an economic system that has dominated for the past 30 years – based on unbridled greed at the top and indifference to the well-being of the bottom 99 per cent – suddenly the focus of attention.

Anne Landman: “Horror Hotel”: The New Frontier of Junk Food Marketing to Kids

Today’s teenagers are probably the most savvy generation yet when it comes to filtering out advertising, but that is no worry for junk food and drink companies who steadily deploy stealthier and more sophisticated interactive promotions that specifically target teens and exploit their emotional and developmental vulnerabilities. The newest generation of internet-based junk food promotions uses cutting edge marketing techniques with names like “augmented reality,” “virtual environments” and “neuromarketing” — the use of scientifically-devised digital marketing techniques that trigger teens’ subconscious emotional arousal.

While few were looking, PepsiCo subsidiary Doritos quietly shifted its target audience from parents to teens. The chip maker now offers a teen-targeted website, “Doritos Late Night Augmented Reality,” that gives kids the ability to design a concert experience with a popular band just for themselves. The site lets teens control and manipulate the stage, camera angles and lighting, for example.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

t’s one of the strangest things in our politics: The only “big” ideas Republicans and conservatives seem to offer these days revolve around novel and sometimes bizarre ways of cutting taxes on rich people.

Given all the attention that Herman Cain’s nonsensical and regressive 9-9-9 tax plan has received, the Republican debates should have as their soundtrack that old Beatles song that droned on about the number nine.

Now, Texas Gov. Rick Perry hopes to pump up his campaign with a supposedly bold proposal to institute a flat tax, which would also deliver more money to the well-off. Perry plans to outline his proposal this week, but he has already touted it as a sure-fire way of “scrapping the 3 million words of the current tax code.”

Robert Kuttner: Europe on the Brink

The deepening European financial crisis is the direct result of the failure of Western leaders to fix the banking system during the first crisis that began in 2007. Barring a miracle of statesmanship, we are in for Financial Crisis II, and it will look more like a depression than a recession.

The Greek crisis, and the inadequate official response to it, is only a symptom. The flight of banks and other private creditors from Greek government bonds has left European leaders and the IMF to fashion a series of piecemeal rescue plans lest a Greek default trigger a broader global financial collapse.

But each rescue has been behind the curve. Over the weekend, European leaders fashioned yet another patch, in the hope of buying more time. The details are still to be worked out at a follow-up meeting later this week. But the problem with the tactic of “kicking the can down the road,” as the dean of financial writers, Martin Wolf, noted at a recent Financial Times conference, is that “the can is filled with gasoline.”

Richard (RJ) Eskow: A Fire Sale for Arsonists: The “Revised” Bank Mortgage Settlement Still Stinks

Imagine that a group of arsonists was terrorizing your town. First they’d buy insurance on a stranger’s home, then they’d show up with a blowtorch and a tanker truck filled with gasoline and burn the place down. Imagine that they’ve burned down a thousand homes this way, ruining the lives of the homeowners — and everyone else’s, too, as real estate values plunged and the local economy collapsed.

Now let’s imagine that the Mayor, the DA, and the Chief of Police said they’ve come up with a great “settlement”: The arsonists will pay a small fine, and they’ll never be prosecuted for arson. Plus, if they’re asked very nicely, they’ll also agree to provide a little help to 27 out of the 1,000 families they made homeless — although they’d control the ‘help’ process and the town might wind up footing the bill anyway.

And one more thing: They get to keep the gasoline truck and the blowtorch.

Substitute “country” for “town” and “banker” for “arsonist,” and that pretty much sums up the mortgage fraud settlement that the administration and some attorneys general keep trying to impose on the nation

Robert Reich: Why We Shouldn’t be Selling the Right to Live in America

America is having a fire sale. Why not sell wealthy foreigners the right to live here, too?

That’s the notion behind a bill introduced last week by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democrat Senator Charles Schumer of New York: Stoke demand for American homes by allowing foreign nationals to buy them. In return, give foreigners the right to live here (although not work here).

The price? At least $500,000 cash. It could be one piece of real estate costing $500,000 or more, or several, of one would have to be worth at least $250,000.

Presumably, this would help homeowners by boosting demand. “This is a way to create more demand without costing the federal government a nickel,” Schumer told the Wall Street Journal.

And it would help the Street. Rather than have the big banks carry all those non-performing mortgage loans on their books or be forced to write them down, we’ll just goose the housing market by selling off the right to live in America.

The New York Times used an article on Rhode Island’s pension system to denounce “the nation’s profligate ways,” which it warns will catch up with us. Newspapers are supposed to leave such editorializing to the opinion pages.

In fact there is good reason to believe that the nation’s obsession with frugality is now catching up with us. The country lost close to $1.4 trillion in annual demand due to the collapse of the housing bubble. In the short term this can only be replaced by larger government deficits. However, because politicians in Washington do not want larger deficits, the economy is operating at close 6 percent below its potential GDP and millions of workers are needlessly unemployed or underemployed. Since there is very limited support for the unemployed in the United States, this situation is a disaster for the millions of people facing it.

The article also gets some of the facts on state and local pensions wrong.

Ray McGovern: The Military Industrial Complex at 50: Activism

You are herecontent / Ray McGovern on Activism and the Military Industrial Complex

Ray McGovern on Activism and the Military Industrial Complex

By davidswanson – Posted on 24 October 2011

The Military Industrial Complex at 50: Activism

By Ray McGovern, for MIC50.org

The past 50 years have shown that President Eisenhower was spot on, as we would say today, about the Military Industrial Complex and what to expect if Americans were not vigilant, which, of course, we have not been – until maybe now.

An endless train of outrages and indignities can be traced to the inordinate influence of the MIC.  And a truly formidable challenge awaits those of us determined not to let our democracy be taken away from us by the greed of a small minority.

So here we are, cooped up, by choice, indoors, talking about these dismal matters on a glorious late-summer afternoon.  Don’t know about you, but I found myself sorely tempted to channel today’s activism into a brisk swim in that beautiful little lake just outside.

Joe Conason: What Romney’s Religion Reveals About His Politics

Recent expressions of political and religious prejudice against Mormons and the Church of Latter-day Saints have offered Mitt Romney a chance to play the bullied underdog-and to explain, as he did with clarity and dignity during the Vegas debate, the meaning of the constitutional prohibition against any religious test for public office.

That won’t discourage Baptist conservatives or atheist entertainers like Bill Maher from making fun of Mormons and their faith, whose history and tenets certainly sound strange to outsiders.

But is there any real reason to be troubled by Romney’s religion? What does the career of the former Massachusetts governor tell us about the ideology of the LDS church-and what his personal beliefs may portend if he becomes the first Mormon in the Oval Office?

John Nichols: Big Money, Bad Media, Secret Agendas: Welcome to America’s Wildest School Board Race

School board elections are supposed to be quintessential America contests. Moms and Main Street small-business owners and retired teachers campaign by knocking on doors, writing letters to the editor and debating at elementary schools. Then friends and neighbors troop to the polls and make their choices.

But what happens when all the pathologies of national politics-over-the-top spending by wealthy elites and corporate interests, partisan consultants jetting in to shape big-lie messaging, media outlets that cover spin rather than substance-are visited on a local school board contest?

Politicians pushing right-wing positions assume they can say anything about economics with little scrutiny.

Politicians pushing right-wing positions in public debate now operate with the assumption that they can get away with saying anything without getting serious scrutiny from the media. That is why right-wing politicians repeatedly blame government regulation for the failure of the economy to generate jobs. Even though there is no truth whatsoever to the claim, right-wing politicians know that the media will treat their nonsense respectfully in news coverage.

If political reporters did their job, they would make an effo to determine the validity of the regulation-killing-jobs story and expose the politicians making the claim as either ignorant or dishonest, just as if a politician was going around claiming that September 11th was an inside job. However, today’s reporters are either too lazy or incompetent to do their homework. What follows is a bit of a how-to manual to make reporters’ jobs easier.

Paul Krugman: Greenspan Blames the Victims of Europe’s Woes

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has written another deeply misleading, destructive op-ed. Also, the sun rose in the east.

In a commentary article for The Financial Times headlined “Europe’s Crisis Is All About the North-South Split,” published on Oct. 6, Mr. Greenspan writes: “Northern Europe in effect has been subsidizing southern European consumption from the onset of the euro on January 1, 1999. It is not a recent phenomenon.”

Mr. Greenspan is quickly establishing himself as the worst ex-Fed chairman of all time. But since he has introduced a brand new fallacy into the debate, it’s worth taking on.

Robert Reich: The Flat-Tax Fraud, and the Necessity of a Truly Progressive Tax

Herman Cain’s bizarre 9-9-9 plan would replace much of the current tax code with a 9 percent individual income tax and a 9 percent sales tax. He calls it a “flat tax.”

Next week Rick Perry is set to announce his own version of a flat tax. Former House majority leader Dick Armey — now chairman of Freedom Works, a major backer of the Tea Party funded by the Koch Brothers and other portly felines (I didn’t say “fat cats”) — predicts this will give Perry “a big boost.” Steve Forbes, one of America’s richest billionaires, who’s on the board of the Freedom Works foundation, is delighted. He’s been pushing the flat tax for years.

The flat tax is a fraud. It raises taxes on the poor and lowers them on the rich.

The day I became a citizen of these United States, June 17, 2009, in the old Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, I raised my right hand and swore that I “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

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The sovereignty I was abjuring was the Republic of Ireland, itself not so far from shifting its allegiance from the Irish Constitution to the dictates of European bankers. Since questions about the Bill of Rights were likely to come up in those final interviews, many people in the theater had a pretty clear notion that along with allegiance came certain important protections, such as guarantees of due process and the right to a public trial by jury. There’s no doubt that for many, with vivid memories of summary seizure and arbitrary imprisonment in their biographies, these guarantees had great significance.

But as it turns out, it was all a fraud. The Uzbek down the row from me, who had fled Karimov’s regime, probably had no need to anticipate being boiled alive — a specialite de la maison in Tashkent. But being roasted alive by a Hellfire missile, doomed by the executive order of President Obama, without due process in any court of law, for reasons of state forever secret, could theoretically lie in his future. If presidential death warrants beyond the reach of scrutiny and review by courts or juries are the mark of a banana republic, then we were all waving the flag of just such an entity.

Matthew Rothschild: Qaddafi’s Death: Barbarism and Hypocrisy

I never mourn the death of a dictator.

Good riddance to Muammar Qaddafi, who terrorized his people for 42 years.

But neither do I cheer summary executions of anyone, no matter how brutal.

Just as the United States was wrong to rub out an unarmed Osama bin Laden, so, too, the Libyan rebels were wrong to murder the captured Qaddafi.

You can see the rebels parading Qaddafi around still alive.

You can see them bouncing his head up and down after he’s apparently dead.

The answer to barbarism is not more barbarism.

Amnesty International is right to ask for an investigation into Qaddafi’s death.

Nor do I applaud President Obama’s triumphalism.

Eugene Robinson: At a Loss for a World View

The demise of Moammar Gadhafi is big news around the world. Note to the Republican presidential candidates: This will come as a shock, but there are lots of other countries out there, and what happens in some of them is really important. Anyone who wants to serve as commander in chief should be paying attention.

This advice is aimed most urgently at Herman Cain, who wears his ignorance of international affairs as a badge of honor. “When they ask me who is the president of Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know,” he boasted recently. “And then I’m going to say, ‘How’s that going to create one job?'” For the record, Uzbekistan is a strategically important Central Asian nation whose president is named Islam Karimov.

Funny, he doesn’t look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are “bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege.

Perhaps his contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.

Michelle Chen: It’s NAFTA x3 as Free Trade Deals Sweep Through Congress

One day in September, Isidro Rivera Barrera, a contract worker and labor organizer who was campaigning at an Ecopetrol refining facility in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, was reportedly gunned down outside his home. His death was met with the usual silence-just business as usual in a country with one of the world’s worst human rights records for attacks on trade unionists. But now, the hushed suffering of Colombian workers reverberates in the U.S. Capitol, which has just passed a deal to bring even more business-as-usual to Colombia.

Congress last week approved three long-pending trade deals with Panama, South Korea and Colombia. The rationale behind each of them is dubious; there’s little evidence that the agreements will lift up the U.S. economy and plenty that they could lead to massive job loss in key sectors. But free trade deals have always been less about creating jobs than exporting neoliberal ideology to the Global South, thereby accelerating poor nations’ cascade toward low labor standards, environmental exploitation and deregulation.

Allison Kilkenny: Occupy Wall Street: Cutting Edge, Old-Fashioned Village

It seems like every day more news emerges about Occupy Wall Street’s plans to expand the movement. New chapters spring up across the country, more citizens join the cause, and now OWS even has its very own commercial.

As David Dayen reports, the commercial is set to run on national television thanks to LoudSauce, a crowd-funding group. Dayen applauds the commercial as an “innovative way to get the message out for a new kind of protest movement, one that refuses to let other people tell their story.”

David Graeber calls this a movement of “horizontals,” meaning people who don’t require traditional hierarchical structures to lead the movement, who believe in direct action and don’t rely on a messiah-like figure to guide them. Basically, OWS is the opposite of the traditional political party structure and, as such, neither political parties nor the establishment media devoted to covering those parties understand it.

John Nichols: Replace Biden? No, Embrace His Economic Populism

The 2012 presidential election is, as too many Republican debates to count have reminded us, barely a year away. And President Obama is still wrestling with some nasty poll numbers. A majority of Americans contacted for a new AP-GfK survey say the president does not deserve to be reelected, while only 46 percent favor a second term.

Sounds dismal for the president.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be, if Obama and his aides keep their wits about them and take a few more signals from the one member of the administration who seems to “get it”: Vice President Joe Biden.

Jonathan Shell: Occupy Wall Street: The Beginning Is Here

Nothing is more striking about the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in a political instant has swept through not only the United States but the world, than its origin. It seemed to come out of nowhere, like a virgin birth. There were, of course, organizations that played a critical initiating role, which is gradually being acknowledged and rightly honored (see, for example, Nathan Schneider, “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere,” October 31). But it would be wrong to assign paternity in any ordinary sense to them, and they indeed disavow such a claim. On the contrary, the core activists in Liberty Plaza founded on the spot a decentralized, nonviolent pattern of “leaderless” self-organization that made every participant, old or new to the process, a “founding father” (or mother). The movement, you could say, was father and mother to itself. To join it was, immediately, to become it.

The national memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. was dedicated last Sunday. President Barack Obama said of Dr. King, “If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there.” The dedication occurred amidst the increasingly popular and increasingly global Occupy Wall Street movement. What Obama left unsaid is that King, were he alive, would most likely be protesting Obama administration policies.

Not far from the dedication ceremony, Cornel West, preacher, professor, writer and activist, was being arrested on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. He said, before being hauled off to jail: “We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions. … We will not allow this day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial to go without somebody going to jail, because Martin King would be here right with us, willing to throw down out of deep love.”

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Lincoln’s Lessons for Obama

Can President Obama take advantage of the egalitarian sentiment let loose in the country by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations? Would doing so be consistent with the moderate, conciliatory persona he has cultivated?

The best response comes not from polls but from history. Eric Foner’s magnificent book on Abraham Lincoln’s evolving views on the slavery question, “The Fiery Trial,” offers some surprisingly relevant lessons.

Ari Berman: Occupy Wall Street Hits K Street

If you want to understand how the top 1 percent have accumulated such power in American politics, look no further than Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor. Wall Street has long been the dominant player in the capital. “The banks,” Senator Dick Durbin said in 2009, “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

The financial sector has spent more money on campaign contributions and lobbying than any other sector of the economy-$4.6 billion on lobbying since 1998 according to Open Secrets. This year, commercial banks and securities and investment firms have spent over $82 million on lobbying, employing over 1,000 lobbyists.

John Nichols: King Versus the Tea Party: From the Poor People’s Campaign to Occupy

Tea Party Congressman Allen West did not approve of President Obama’s suggestion, made at the dedication of the Washington memorial honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that Dr. King would have sympathized with the “Occupy Wall Street” protests of this moment.

“If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there,” the president told the crowd at the dedication of the memorial. “Those with power and privilege will often decry any call for change as divisive. They’ll say any challenge to the existing arrangements are unwise and destabilizing. Dr. King understood that peace without justice was no peace at all.”

Those words drew strenuous objections from Florida Congressman West, who like a lot of conservative Republicans has been arguing of late that right-wing movements such as the Tea Party are virtuous and patriotic, while objecting to any positive portrayals of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests or the “99 Percent” phenomenon that has swept the country in recent weeks.

Asked about “Occupy Wall Street,” Congressman West declared this week: “Martin Luther King Jr. would not have backed these types of protesters.”

Dr. King’s history, and his own words, say otherwise.

Jim Hightower: Wall Street Is Dazed and Confused

Astonishingly, some Wall Streeters continue to be clueless about what the Occupy Wall Street movement is protesting. Yoo-hoo, Streeters: Note that the movement’s name has the term “Wall Street” in it.

While there is a plethora of particular issues being raised by the protesters — from the corrupting power of corporate money in our elections to the demise of middle-class wages — the unifying theme is that each one adds to the rising tide of economic inequality that’s enriching the most privileged few by knocking down America’s workaday majority. And, Mr. and Ms. Streeter, guess who is the most powerful perpetrators of this greed-fueled disparity: Yes, you.

Americans may not be quick-studies in the art of revolution, and yes, it did seem to take forever for unemployed and underemployed US workers, college students and white collar “professionals” to “get” that US jobs lost weren’t coming back – at least not in this corporate-owned lifetime — or that the “American Dream,” as we once understood it was effectively dead, but once we “got it,” we really did get it.

Now that we’ve caught up with the “Arab spring” and the “European summer,” the “American autumn” (notice I resisted the urge to call it the “American fall”) is undeniably and seriously under way.

Thanks in large part to the resourcefulness and intelligence of the protesters themselves, this 21st century American Revolution isn’t looking like it’s ready to go down without a fight. And when that fight comes, it threatens to rock all that is held sacred in the unholy world of corporate greed and excess.

Anne Landman: BP’s Gulf of Mexico PR, One Year Later

Finger-pointing over the Deepwater Horizon disaster resumed recently after the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard issued a joint report (pdf) which concluded all three corporate participants in the calamity — BP, Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton — were at fault. The report concluded all three companies violated federal laws and safety regulations by “failing to take necessary precautions to keep the Macondo well under control at all times.” The report also found all three companies were “jointly and severally liable for the failure to comply with all applicable regulations.” That means all three companies are mutually responsible for the accident, and each can be held singly responsible for the entire debacle. The report parsed blame among the companies for sloppy materials and workmanship, inadequate training, failure to properly assess risk and conduct proper testing, failure to abide by stop-work work policies after multiple anomalies were discovered, and so on.

Mary Elizabeth King: The Search for a Message

As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon grows, it has been expressing many truths, even while struggling to find a single over-arching message.  The search for captions, slogans, and themes that illuminate the changes sought is characteristic of civil resistance campaigns. This is not merely branding, but a way to sharpen the concrete results that can result from such a dramatic outpouring of human aspiration, emotion, energy, protest, and yearning. Some observers have grown impatient with the evolving messaging coming out of OWS, but, historically, slogans have often often changed as a campaign proceeds.

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Remembering that successful movements in East Germany, South Africa, and Serbia saw their messages evolve and diverge should prompt us to have patience with the messaging from OWS. History suggests that not having “one demand” from the outset is no reason to consider this movement uncommonly disorganized, or irrelevant. Still, messages penetrate best when lucid and simple. Messaging aids recruitment, helps to expand constituencies, and signals to sympathizers how they can help. It can pitch grievances that need regulatory reforms. It can appeal to potential defectors within targeted institutions. Those of us involved in civil resistance have as one of our most important of tasks communicating with the people that we want to reach.

Maureen Dowd: Anne Frank, a Mormon?

At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.

Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.

“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”