What the MSM Isn’t Reporting

Posted: November 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Corporate Crime, Democratic Politics, Economy, financial institutions, Main Stream Media, poverty, The Media SUCKS, unemployment | Tags: , , | 15 Comments

If anyone had doubts that the mainstream media is deliberately fudging the details on the events surrounding the Occupy Wall St. Movement in general and the Occupy Oakland protests in particular, the following video is unlikely to dissuade you of that doubt.  Cenk Uygur was actually in Oakland on Wednesday during the general strike in Oakland—feet on the ground, eyeballs watching the events unfold.

Surprise!

The MSM had no cameras present. They had no cameras available during the Oakland police department’s original raid on protesters, The Night of Tear Gas and Batons.  That was also the night of the strange, weird coincidence when both the ABC and CBS helicopters needed refueling at precisely the same moment.

The world is being blanketed by stunning coincidence.

Fortunately, [but to the shock of many Americans] that night was recorded independently, the startling images preserved.

Cenk Uygur [The Young Turks] as some may recall had a brief 6-month stint on MSNBC, an hour-long show during which he was often critical of Barack Obama’s less than stellar record.  Uygur’s ratings were excellent but he was called in by management and asked to ‘tone it down.’  Translation?  Stop knocking POTUS and the Democratic Party’s slide to the corporate right.  Though offered more money to host a new show, Uygur politely turned MSNBC management down, and then went on the record and told his audience what had happened.  His slot was quickly filled by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who is happy as a clam to shill for the President and all things Democratic.  That would be the ‘My Party, Right or Wrong’ strategy.

For myself?  It’s the reason, I no longer watch MSNBC’s 6 pm broadcast.

The You Tube video is revealing—Uygur’s astonishment at how underreported the crowd size in Oakland truly was.  But I also found some startling photographs that belie the MSM’s attempt to undercut the groundswell of support this movement is capturing.  It’s growing despite the naysayers and critics.  It’s growing despite the MSM’s attempt to edit and minimize. It’s growing against all odds.

The Tea Party, of course, wants everyone to go home and get a job.  Which a lot of these people would probably happily do if there were jobs to get, the sort that pay a living wage—that small complication of making enough money to feed yourself and your family, pay the rent, keep the lights on.   We were told yesterday morning that unemployment ticked down a tenth of a percentile.  That would make the ‘official’ unemployment number 9 instead of 9.1%.  And there have been reports coming out suddenly to tell the country that stories of poverty and inequality are vastly exaggerated, even though the Census Bureau’s numbers show 1 in 15 Americans now categorized as the ‘poorest of the poor,’ the biggest jump recorded in 35 years.  Btw, that would be 50% or less than the official poverty level, which translates to $5,570  for an individual; $11, 157 for a family of four.

Seems to be an awful lot of sputtering, squirming and spinning going on.

Surely, it’s mere coincidence.

TGIFriday Reads

Posted: November 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Foreign Affairs, Iran, Israel, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics | Tags: , , , , , | 29 Comments

Good Morning!

Democratic Senators Udall (NM) and Bennet (CO) have proposed a bill to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United finding. I’m not sure how far it will get, but it’s something to fight for.

“As we head into another election year, we are about to see unprecedented amounts of money spent on efforts to influence the outcome of our elections,” Udall said. “With the Supreme Court striking down the sensible regulations Congress has passed, the only way to address the root cause of this problem is to give Congress clear authority to regulate the campaign finance system.”

The proposed amendment would grant Congress and the states the authority to regulate the campaign finance system, but would not dictate any specific policies or regulations.

“The Supreme Court’s reversal of its own direction in the Citizens United decision and other recent cases has had a major effect on our election system,” Bennet added.

“State legislatures and Congress now may not be allowed to approve even small regulations to our campaign finance system. This proposal would bring some badly needed stability to an area of law that has been thrown off course by the new direction the Court has taken.”

Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have co-sponsored the legislation.

“If we are going to preserve a government responsive to its citizens, we need commonsense reforms that give the American people a full voice,” said Merkley. “This Constitutional Amendment is essential for the people to be heard.”

Will this be the first in a series of moves to get influence money put up by huge corporations out of our democracy?  Here’s some more information via The Big Picture.  It even includes nifty graphs!!

I’ve been watching a developing story between Israel and Iran that’s truly disturbing.  Here’s an article at HuffPo by MJ Rosenberg that indicates there are many people that believe that Israel may launch a preemptive attack on Iran and that some are actually pushing for it.  There’s little evidence that an attack is imminent, but even in our House of Representatives there appear to be folks that are laying groundwork for US involvement.

Accordingly the House Foreign Affairs Committee hurriedly convened this week to consider a new “crippling sanctions” bill that seems less designed to deter an Iran nuclear weapon than to lay the groundwork for war.

The clearest evidence that war is the intention of the bill’s supporters comes in Section 601 which should be quoted in full. (It is so incredible that paraphrasing would invite the charge of distorting through selective quotation.)

It reads:

(c) RESTRICTION ON CONTACT. — No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that — (1) is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran; and (2) presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organizations. (d) WAIVER. — The President may waive the requirements of subsection (c) if the President determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.What does this mean?

It means that neither the president, the Secretary of State nor any U.S. diplomat or emissary may engage in negotiations or diplomacy with Iran of any kind unless the president convinces the “appropriate Congressional committees” (most significantly, the House Foreign Affairs Committee which is an AIPAC fiefdom) that not engaging with Iranian contacts would present an “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.”

To call this unprecedented is an understatement. At no time in our history has the White House or State Department been restricted from dealing with representatives of a foreign state, even in war time.

Here’s information on public debate and polls  in Israel that show about dead even support for attacking Iran. It’s scary to think that while we have been hoping to wind down US involvement in the region there are many people working to amp it up.

All week Israel has thrummed with talk of launching a military strike on Iran.  It began with published hints that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to move forward on plans to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, a pre-emptive move that he, along with his defense minister, Ehud Barak, long have been described as advocating. Word that mooted aim might be moving toward action came from Nahum Barnea, the most respected columnist in the country, whose heads-up ran across the front page of the weekend edition of Yedioth Ahronoth.

Next came solemn but elliptical remarks from members of his inner cabinet, which would have to approve an air strike on a foreign country. “This strike is complex and intricate, and it is best not to talk about how complex and intricate it is,” Eli Yishai, the interior minister and head of the religious Shas party, was quoted saying.  “This operation leaves me sleepless.”

(READ: Smart power? Not in the Middle East.)

What followed seemed to confirm that something was indeed afoot in the top levels of government: A flurry of senior ministers began shouting that these things should not be discussed in public. “Debates like this cannot be held in front of the camera,” said Dan Meridor, whose portfolio is intelligence and atomic energy.  “It’s as if we’ve lost our minds here.”  Benny Begin, another Likud member of the inner cabinet lamented “there has never been a media campaign like this. It’s a crazy free-for-all….simply disgusting.”

What’s actually happening is far from clear, and perhaps meant to be that way.  There could be actual fire – a fuse being lit by a country that, after all, sent jets to knock out nuclear installations in Iraq and Syria, albeit with no warning. Or all this could be not fire but smoke, a rustling of papers meant both to unnerve Iran and steel the resolve of global powers to enforce punishing sanctions against it.

 The Nation‘s Jackson Diehl asks “Will Israel really attack Iran?”

The discussion got started this time in a relatively dramatic way: with a banner-headlined story in one of Israel’s best-read newspapers, under the byline of one the country’s most renowned journalists. Nahum Barnea normally writes a column for the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, but last Friday he produced a bombshell story under the headline “Atomic Pressure.”

His main point: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are determined to attack Iran, and are pressuring Israel’s reluctant military and intelligence chiefs to go along.

“Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are the two Siamese twins of the Iranian issue,” Barnea wrote. “A rare phenomenon is taking place here in terms of Israeli politics: a prime minister and a defense minister who act as one body, with one goal.” Barnea’s story quickly touched off a frenzy in the Israeli media, which have followed up with several intriguing reports in recent days. Several accounts described a major Israeli air force exercise at a NATO base in Italy over the weekend, which was said to include all of the types of planes Israel would use in an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

On Wednesday, the newspaper Haaretz reported that Netanyahu was working to assemble a majority in his cabinet in favor of a strike and had recently won over his previously skeptical foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. And Iran’s own media weighed in: The state news agency quoted the defense minister as saying that the United States as well as Israel would suffer “heavy damages” in the event of an attack.

So why is this coming up now? Could an Israeli attack really be imminent? Iran, after all, has not shown any sign of launching a breakout to produce a bomb; even if it did, most experts in Israel as well as the West have said it would take the regime a year or more to complete a bomb.

Haaretz reported that Netanyahu and Barak were focused on an upcoming report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, due on Nov. 8, that is expected to offer new information about Iran’s attempts to develop designs for warheads and delivery systems. Other Israeli reports have speculated that any attack by Israel must occur before the winter months, when cloudy skies might complicate strikes from the air. Iran’s recent steps toward opening a new underground facility for uranium enrichment that is buried under a mountain, and possibly immune to air strikes, could also be a factor.

In reality, Israel is unlikely to launch any attack without the support of the United States, which could easily be drawn into the regional conflict an air strike would trigger. Like the Israeli military establishment, the Pentagon opposes any such venture — and it’s hard to imagine President Obama signing on. If he acts in the coming weeks or months, Netanyahu would risk a rupture in the alliance that is the ultimate guarantor of Israeli security.

I’m hoping this analysis is right.

Herman Cain obviously knows nothing about running in major elections where your past behavior will get dug up by some one.  His campaign is considering suing Politico.  It’s fun to watch all this intraRepublican antics.  Politico is well known to have Republican sympathies and it gave the campaign adequate time for damage control.  He better get ready to stuck a fork in his own buns cause they look way done and this looks like an act of major desperation.  Just wait until some of the women start telling their side to this.

A Herman Cain aide said Thursday that the Cain campaign is considering its legal options over the original Politico story, which revealed that the former head of the National Restaurant Association was accused of sexually harassing at least two women during his tenure in the 1990s.

“This is likely not over with Politico from a legal perspective,” a campaign official told the Post, stopping short of explaining what exactly he meant by taking legal action against the publication.

Politico’s Executive Editor, Jim VandeHei said in a statement:

“We have heard nothing from the Cain campaign. We stand confidently behind every story Politico reporters have written on the topic.”

A number of press outlets have confirmed the settlements, allegations, and behavior concerning Cain’s tenure at the National Restaurant Association. It seems to me that some folks just don’t get the idea that women would like to work in environment free of coercion and tensions.  There’s been a number of Republicans–including operatives familiar with the situation–that seem to get this.  Two settlements and numerous rumors and accusations show that this story is more than just a he-said she-said story.  I’m still surprised that the Cain campaign seems offput by the entire situation. If he thought it was significant enough to tell his wife and campaign staff during a senate run, he should’ve seen this coming a mile away and prepared for it months ago.  This continual reversion to the story is suspicious too.   This isn’t going away until a lot more stuff sees the late of day.  Here’s Politico with even more details about one of the cases.  One woman felt her job was at risk if she didn’t go along with his behavior and requests.

The new details—which come from multiple sources independently familiar with the incident at a hotel during a restaurant association event in the late 1990s—put the woman’s account even more sharply at odds with Cain’s emphatic insistence in news media interviews this week that nothing inappropriate happened between the two.

In recent days sources—including associates of the woman and people familiar with operations of the restaurant association—have offered new details of the incident.

The woman in question, roughly 30 years old at the time and working in the National Restaurant Association’s government affairs division, told two people directly at the time that Cain made a sexual overture to her at one of the group’s events, according to the sources familiar with the incident. She was livid and lodged a verbal complaint with an NRA board member that same night, these sources said.

The woman told one of the sources Cain made a suggestion that she felt was overtly sexual in nature and that “she perceived that her job was at risk if she didn’t do it.”

“She is a pretty confident individual, and she was pretty upset,” the source, an acquaintance of the woman, said of her demeanor after the encounter with Cain. “Not crying, but angry.”

She described it as an “unwanted sexual advance” to the other source. The woman took the matter immediately and directly to the board member because “she wanted this fixed,” the source said.

So, that’s the major stories that I’ve been reading about today.  What’s on your reading and blogging list?

Mankiw’s Introductory Econ Class stages a Walk Out

Posted: November 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Economy, education | Tags: , , , | 11 Comments

This has to be one of the most intriguing situations that I’ve heard about for some time.  Any one that teaches knows that student evaluations really count for people that aren’t tenured and don’t have some kind of research status that makes them immune to student complaints.  Administrators pay attention to them a lot more than they probably should.  I’ve had raises parsed out based on the 4th decimal place of department averages. I always used to wonder about the one question where freshmen students get to judge whether or not you know your subject area. I mean, how would they be in a place to know that if they’ve never had any exposure to a technical, complex topic before?  There are sometimes very useful things you can learn from students.  I’m wondering what the real lesson should be from a walk out associated with a political movement.

I’ve occasionally had students complain to me about other professors either personally or on my evals.   It puts you in an awkward position.   I’ve never seen it raise to this level in all the years I’ve been teaching in a variety of colleges and universities.  The roots of the walk out were in the Occupy Movement.  The contents of the letter explain the motivation directed at Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw published in the Harvard Political Review.

Greg Mankiw has his own blog as well as having published his own textbooks for introductory economics.  I’ve never used them but I’ve looked at them during textbook searches.  It’s fairly standard treatment of the subject. Mankiw was Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Dubya Bush.  He’s been an adviser to Mitt Romney. He also has a lot of clout if you look at his cites and pubs at IDEAS/RePEc rankings.  The funny thing is that he’s actually considered a “New Keynesian” economist.  Here’s a quote from an article he wrote in the NYT in 2008.  I quote this to show you he’s not really that atypical of a macroeconomist.  He shows up in fairly mainstream, traditional Republican circles.

“If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.”

The students  complain that Mankiw has an inherent bias.  There should be no surprise you frequently hear that from students who come in wanting their own biases reinforced.  I personally try to challenge my students from all sides of the political system just to try to get them to think critically rather than on automatic.  I have no personal experience of Mankiw’s classes so I have no idea if their complaints are legitimate or not.

As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

Care in presenting an unbiased perspective on economics is particularly important for an introductory course of 700 students that nominally provides a sound foundation for further study in economics. Many Harvard students do not have the ability to opt out of Economics 10. This class is required for Economics and Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrators, while Social Studies concentrators must take an introductory economics course—and the only other eligible class, Professor Steven Margolin’s class Critical Perspectives on Economics, is only offered every other year (and not this year).  Many other students simply desire an analytic understanding of economics as part of a quality liberal arts education. Furthermore, Economics 10 makes it difficult for subsequent economics courses to teach effectively as it offers only one heavily skewed perspective rather than a solid grounding on which other courses can expand. Students should not be expected to avoid this class—or the whole discipline of economics—as a method of expressing discontent.

Supposedly, about 70 of the 700 students walked out.  I really haven’t read anything about the walk out from other blogging economists. I think it’s because every one pretty much feels a certain amount of empathy for a colleague.   Also, there is such a thing as academic freedom.  I do, however, find it strange that the complaints say that Mankiw spends too much time on Adam Smith as compared to J.M Keynes given his research agenda and his writings.  I’d like to offer up this WSJ Book Review of a Keynes Biography to illustrate why I’m a bit confused.

But mathematics is, fundamentally, the language of logic. Modern research into Keynes’s theories—I have conducted such research myself—tries to put his ideas into mathematical form precisely to figure out whether they logically cohere. It turns out that the task is not easy.

Keynesian theory is based in part on the premise that wages and prices do not adjust to levels that ensure full employment. But if recessions and depressions are as costly as they seem to be, why don’t firms have sufficient incentive to adjust wages and prices quickly, to restore equilibrium? This is a classic question of macroeconomics that, despite much hard work, is yet to be fully resolved.

Which brings us to a third group of macroeconomists: those who fall into neither the pro- nor the anti-Keynes camp. I count myself among the ambivalent. We credit both sides with making legitimate points, yet we watch with incredulity as the combatants take their enthusiasm or detestation too far. Keynes was a creative thinker and keen observer of economic events, but he left us with more hard questions than compelling answers.

So, my guess about the situation and the lack of comments of blogging economists on this is along the lines of students will be students.  Mankiw is clearly no Austrian economist which is one school of thought that every one walked out on years ago but is experiencing a resurgence because of Koch Brothers’ investment.  I think he’s gotten tagged because of the folks he’s advised.  Again, these are guys are old school Republicans and not part of the Tea Party insurgence.  Dubya actually did implement some fairly traditional Keynesian stimulus in his response to the 9/11 macro shock.  The political discourse has gotten so harsh and has been so narrowly covered by the press that it must be harder for younger people not to think that every Republican and their advisers is off the Richter scale of reason.  I guess that’s my way of  saying that calling Mankiw an out of the mainstream economist makes about as much sense as calling Obama a Kenyan-born socialist.  The claims oversimplify Mankiw, Adam Smith, and J.M Keynes. But, we are talking freshmen and not doctoral candidates.  I think this reflects the anger in the current national discourse a lot more than it reflects anything else.  I’m just wondering if any of Mankiw’s peers on either side of the neoKeynesian battle lines will speak up.

In a way, this reminds me of  the article I read about 5 days ago on Thomas Sargent in the NYT.  Sargent was lauded as  a ‘non-Keynesian”  in a WSJ article covering his win of the Nobel prize in economics this year.

In telephone conversations last week, Professor Sargent said he felt insulted by people who call him “non-Keynesian” or “right wing,” terms that, he said, are based on a misunderstanding of his thinking. And he rejected attempts to categorize his views in simple slogans.

He doesn’t wear his political opinions on his sleeve. “They really don’t matter in my research,” he said. But because others have applied labels to him, he decided it was worth setting the record straight. He’s a Democrat, he said, “a fiscally conservative, socially liberal Democrat,” adding, “I think that budget constraints are really central.”

It’s important to consider the “incentive effects” of government policies, he continued. “There are trade-offs in efficiency and equality, and they lead to choices that aren’t easy,” he said.

This sort’ve lends itself to the traditional economist jokes where the punchline always has something to do with “on the one hand, on the other hand”.   I kind’ve liked the opening paragraph on that article and so I’m going to borrow it as I start the close to this blog piece.

EXPRESSING your own views is challenging enough.  Describing someone else’s opinions without talking to them first opens the door to serious trouble

I once did an experiment in a few class rooms just to see if any of them could guess my party affiliation.  I got your basic 50-50 split between those who thought I was a  Republican and Democrat.  I will usually step up and answer a direct question on policy with my opinion if I’m asked for it. Usually, I will play the role of devil’s advocate just to get student’s to question their thought process more.  I did express constant surprise this summer that a huge number of politicians seemed to feel that it was okay to default on US debt. That’s basically because I was teaching a graduate finance course and the basic risk free rate for every model is generally presumed to be one US Treasury rate or another.  I asterisked my explanations for the first time ever with an explanation that this might be the first year ever where we have to find another empirical example for a risk free rate if the debt ceiling extension doesn’t pass.  I did get called out as having a ‘bias’ for this in one eval.  Given the way that many Republicans considered US default a reasonable policy, I suppose I had to have at least one person show up that considered my asterisked explanations to be a bias.  So, let’s just say on some level, I can relate to Greg Mankiw even though if you put the two of us in one room there would undoubtedly be a lot of things we don’t see eye-to-eye on.

So, what do you think?  Just politics?  Just students being students?

The Beginning Is Near

Posted: November 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, American Jobs Act, Baby Boomers, Bailout Blues, Banksters, Black Agenda Report, commercial banking, Economy, income inequality, investment banking, jobs, unemployment | 27 Comments

Maybe it’s my age [and no, I’m not telling] but I find great promise is those four words scrawled on a makeshift sign.

 

I’m sure–in fact, I know–there are others of my generation [Boomers] who look at the Occupy Wall St. [OWS] Movement, read the signs and scratch their heads.  Or more likely they criticize the primarily young protesters as naïve, idealistic, disorganized, wanting something for nothing. Why don’t they just get a job? many say.

These reactions miss the point, as far as I’m concerned.  These youngsters want something all right.  They want their futures.  They want to control their own destinies with a measure of integrity, a sense of possibility rather than bending to the yoke of a failing system, one that only works for those on the top of the heap.  The statistics are there for everyone to read. No mystery! Wages of ordinary Americans have been stagnant, while the rich have become richer than Midas.  Jobs have been sent willy-nilly beyond our shores but the trade-off  [we’ve been told numerous times] are cheap consumer goods, the more the better. 

He who has the most stuff wins.  Many people bought into that.  For a while.

Throw in 9/11, multiple wars, massive unemployment, rising health care costs, climate-related weather events, the negligence in the Gulf of Mexico, etc. and the shine has definitely come off the latest gadgets and toys.  As an electorate, we’ve had a slap upside the head.

What I find astounding is people blaming this particular group—the OWS protesters, primarily the Millennials–for what is clearly our responsibility, a product of our refusal to hold our politicians accountable and demand justice–a return to the Rule of Law–instead of foisting the unpleasant, annoying task on our children [or grandchildren, as the case may be]. We’re the ones who bought into the Big Lie. Or worse, pretended it didn’t exist. These young students and 20-somethings had no hand in what we watched and allowed to develop.

The kids are making us look bad. They’ve endured dismissal, ridicule, concrete beds and lousy weather.  And they’re called the slackers?

Nor should we forget that Boomers are running things right now.  Our generation sits in the halls of Congress and refuses to pass legislation to put the country back to work.  Boomers sit in the offices of the White House and pretend to hold a populist agenda, while doing the bidding of their monied benefactors.  They sit on the Supreme Court and try to convince us that corporations = personhood.  And they certainly populate Corporate America and Wall St., where repeated decisions and deals have been made to maximize profits at the expense of ordinary citizens.  Not all Boomers, of course.  But our generation is well represented in the lever pushing–the Make Love Not War crowd.  Time to own it.

But even if we’re far, far removed from the corridors of power, just living our lives, I would suggest quiet acquiescence of the status quo isn’t working either.  Hello, Boomers.  The confidence fairy that has been running [ruining] our financial system will not be coming to spread pixie dust over the wreckage and make things right.

Not going to happen. And the young?  They see right through it.

For over thirty years, corporate greed has grown, metastasized to the point that nothing is sacred—not the health or education of our people, not the environment [on which we depend to exist], not our principles of equal opportunity, not even our insistence that The Rule of Law is imperative for our Democratic Republic to survive. 

And what was the trade? Constant debates that American health care is the best in the world without adding the qualification: only if you can afford it.  The refusal to admit that the decreasing quality of our primary and secondary educational systems condemns many of our citizens to poverty and the staggering increase in university tuition costs and subsequent debt saddles our college graduates to years of unmanageable debt.  The reckless and short-sighted risk-to-wreckage of our environment be it through fracking or drilling or proposed tar sand pipelines, while we turn up our noses to promoting and supporting green technology. The cruel pretense that all our citizens start off on a ‘level-playing’ field, while the evidence of privilege and influence-driven access to favors are as acute now as during the Gilded Age.  The unwillingness to investigate and prosecute those involved in the biggest heist in history, the very same financiers and corporate bigwigs, who continue to exert control over our political system. 

Two years ago, Dick Durbin stood before Congress and said: The banks own the joint.

We should have listened or turned up our hearing aides.  Because sadly, the man spoke the truth. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is not a strategy for the future.  It’s unsustainable.

So, when I look at the live streams of the cross-country demonstrations, read the twitter feeds, I don’t think slackers.  I think of a generation who has said what we, the grownups, should have said quite some time ago: Enough is enough.  Or as Bill Moyers said recently: “People are occupying Wall St. because Wall St has occupied the country.”

Yesterday, between 7 to 10,000 people took part in a general strike in Oakland.  They shut down the port of Oakland, a major access for Chinese goods, the 5th busiest port in the country.  Local businesses shut down in support of the effort.  To its credit, the protest has remained remarkably peaceful although early morning reports indicate that violence did break out before sunrise. Unfortunately, the authorities in Oakland nearly cost the life last week of a young Marine vet, Scott Olsen.  Discontent can have consequences.

But attitudes are shifting and changing. Voices are being heard.

Last April with little fanfare, Joseph Stiglitz stated in a Vanity Fair article:

“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

Since the Occupy Movement started, this sentiment has been echoed, magnified:

On October 22, Noam Chomsky gave a speech on Dewey Square in Boston and said:

“I’ve never seen anything quite like the Occupy movement in scale and character, here and worldwide. The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that’s already coming.”

At Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford recently wrote:

“There comes a time of awakening. We are now in that time – although some Black folks are not yet awake. Our job is to wake our people up, so that we don’t sleep through this moment.

The young people that began this Occupation Movement less than two months ago are not “us,” but they have done all of us a great service. They have shouted out the name and address of the enemy – the enemy of all humanity. The enemy’s name is Finance Capital, and the address is Wall Street, and that is the truth.”

Chris Hedges recently stated on Truthdig radio:

“But this is a widespread movement; it’s decentralized; it takes on its own coloring and characteristics, depending on the city that it’s in; and so there will be, you know—as you point out, I mean, movements are by their very nature messy and make steps forward and steps back. But I think that there is a resiliency to this movement because it articulates a fundamental truth of inequality that hits the majority of American citizens.”

Even House Speaker John Boehner remarked in a recent speech at the University of Louisville:

“I understand people’s frustrations,” he said. “The economy is not producing jobs like they want and there’s lot of erosion of confidence in our government and frankly, under the First Amendment, people have the right to speak out … but that doesn’t mean they have the permission to violate the law.”

Hey, it’s a start.  Certainly better than designating OWS as ‘The Mob.’

People are rousing from their long, restless slumber. The conversations have begun and are different from what we’ve heard or read before.  The protesters persist. They march, they endure.

The Beginning is Near.

Thursday Reads: Power to the People!

Posted: November 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Foreign Affairs, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, morning reads, Spain, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 40 Comments

Good Morning!! Over the past couple of days, I’ve become really fascinated with the situation in Greece. It’s a pretty fluid situation at the moment. On Tuesday Robert Reich wrote a pretty good primer on what is happening and expressed his view that letting the Greek people decide their own fate is the best idea. Here’s a bit of it:

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou decided in favor of democracy yesterday when he announced a national referendum on the draconian budget cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding from Greece in return for bailing it out.

(Or, more accurately, the cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding for bailing out big European banks that have lent Greece lots of money and stand to lose big if Greece defaults on those loans – not to mention Wall Street banks that will also suffer because of their intertwined financial connections with European banks.)

If Greek voters accept the bailout terms, unemployment will rise even further in Greece, public services will be cut more than they have already, the Greek economy will contract, and the standard of living of most Greeks will deteriorate further.

If Greek voters reject the terms and the nation defaults, it will face far higher borrowing costs in the future. This may reduce the standard of living of most Greeks, too. But it doesn’t have to. Without the austerity measures the rest of Europe and the IMF are demanding, the Greek economy has a better chance of growing and more Greeks are likely to find jobs.

Shouldn’t Greek citizens make this decision for themselves?

Reich argues that it would have been better in the long run if the American people had been consulted about the bank bailouts here.

If Americans had been consulted about the 2008-2009 Wall Street bailout, I doubt it would have happened the way it did. At the very least, strict conditions would have been placed on the banks in return for the money. The banks would have had to eat the losses of the predatory mortgages they sold, and help homeowners reduce those mortgages. They’d be required to improve the capitalization of small banks in communities across the country. They’d be forced to accept stringent new regulations, including resurrection of Glass-Steagall

But we weren’t consulted. The wishes of the American people were considered irrelevant by the oligarchs who run this country. And the European oligarchs are hoping to prevent the Greek people from claiming a right to make a democratic decision.

Of course if the Greek people do decide to default on their debts, there will be serious consequences–for them and for the rest of Europe. Krugman calls it “Eurodämmerung.” He argues that

…the euro was an inherently flawed idea that can work only given a strong European economy and a significant degree of inflation, plus open-ended credit to sovereigns facing speculative attack. Yet European elites embraced the notion of economics as morality play, imposing across-the-board austerity, tightening money despite low underlying inflation, and have been too concerned with punishing sinners to notice that everything was going to blow apart without an effective lender of last resort.

The question I’m trying to answer right now is how the final act will be played. At this point I’d guess soaring rates on Italian debt leading to a gigantic bank run, both because of solvency fears about Italian banks given a default and because of fear that Italy will end up leaving the euro. This then leads to emergency bank closing, and once that happens, a decision to drop the euro and install the new lira. Next stop, France.

Yikes! But Fortune also says Italy and France are in trouble if Greece defaults. And Spain could go bust too.

What worries is that Spain and Italy are not in the Greek situation but they could be. Greece is bust and Spain and Italy could be driven bust. They both have a lot of debt and each year some of that debt has to be repaid. Now governments almost never do repay debt, they just borrow some more and use the new money to pay off the old. Bit like swirling what you owe around a few credit cards.

Which is just fine: except, if interest rates rise then they have to pay more interest on this new debt that they’re issuing to pay off the old. And if interest rates rise enough then they do go bust, as the interest payments they have to make take too much money out of the budget. Switching money around on zero interest introductory rate cards is very different from doing it when you’re being charged 30%.

Now, the general agreement is that when the interest rates are above 6% then Italy and Spain are in danger of going bust. When they’re over 7% they will do so. But of course, when people see that Italian interest rates are above 6% then they become more wary of lending Italy any more money and so interest rates keep on rising to possibly above 7% and game over.

It’s still not clear what Greece is going do in their referendum. Dakinikat says they need to ask the people if they want to leave the European Union or not. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have said that the referendum must ask the Greek people if they want to opt out of the Euro, but not the EU itself. Meanwhile, the offer of a bailout of Greece has been called off until after the vote on the referendum is taken. From Naked Capitalism:

The Eurocrats have decided to try to push Greece into line, threatening expulsion from the Euro (note, not the EU) if Greece does not back down. From a practical matter, if the Greeks were to turn down the bailout package, it would lead to a banking crisis, making a Eurozone exit a not that much more traumatic incremental move with considerable upside. And under the Maastrict treaty, Greece cannot unilaterally exit (although as various commentors have pointed out, Nato is not going to send in tanks if the Greeks were to do so).

But this may be an appeal to the Greek public, or more likely, an effort to break Greek prime minister’s Papandreou’s thin coalition on the eve of a vote of no confidence.

So that’s another possibility–that Papandreau’s government might fall. More on the European reaction from Bloomberg:

Led by Germany and France, Europe’s economic and political anchors, the euro’s guardians yesterday cut off financial aid for Greece until a vote they said would be on Dec. 4 or Dec. 5 determines whether it deserves a fresh batch of loans needed to stave off default.

“The referendum will revolve around nothing less than the question: does Greece want to stay in the euro, yes or no?” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters after crisis talks hours before a Group of 20 summit set to begin today in Cannes, France. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Prime Minister George Papandreou’s government won’t get a “single cent” of assistance if voters rejects the plan.

The hardball tactics open the door for a nation to leave the currency bloc that at its setup in 1999 capped Europe’s progression from war to prosperity and was declared “irrevocable” by its founding fathers. Polls show most Greeks object to the austerity required for aid, yet more than seven in 10 favor remaining in the euro, a survey last week of 1,009 people published in To Vima newspaper showed.

They’re going to have to decide between two awful choices, and the rest of Europe will have to deal with the results of the vote–if there is a default, failures of banks that hold Greek debt and getting Italian, French, and German taxpayers to pay for more bank bailouts–unless Papandreau’s government falls.  Read the whole article at Bloomberg to get a sense of how serious all this is.

In U.S. news, Occupy Oakland called for a general strike today. That situation is still fluid as of this writing, 11PM Eastern on Wednesday night.

OAKLAND – Protesters blocked streets near City Hall, smashed windows at a bank and gathered by the thousands in an attempt to shut down the nation’s fifth-busiest port Wednesday.

The Occupy Oakland protest was the largest in a series of rallies in several cities as the Occupy Wall Street movement that began Sept. 17 tried to grab national attention.

A group of about 300 protesters, many of them men wearing black, some covering their faces with bandanas and some carrying wooden sticks, smashed windows of a Wells Fargo bank branch while chanting “Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.”

Are you getting the feeling this genie can’t be put back in the bottle either? The Occupy demonstrations have shown us that we pretty much live in a police state at this point. There very little respect for the protesters’ constitutional rights by local governments or law enforcement. From Counterpunch, here is a report of what actually happened when police attacked protesters in Oakland on Oct. 25.

In a heavily armed pre-dawn raid, on Tuesday, Oct. 25, with back up from armored vehicles and helicopters, the Oakland Police Department in conjunction, with over 15 other police departments from Northern and Central California, stormed the sleepy Occupy Oakland Encampment.

Asleep inside tents of the makeshift Occupy encampment, were over a hundred men, women and very young children. The heavily armed police force, dressed in black ninja-like outfits, and special forces helmets, with full face-shields down, and armed with and assortment of latest riot gear, fired tear gas canisters and concussion grenades into the camp, as helicopters circled above.

Police then attacked and ransacked the entire encampment. In a short time, the camps library, soup kitchen, and children’s center were left in ruins, and over a hundred of the inhabitants were roughed up, arrested and held on high bail. The activists suffered many injuries, including broken bones.

Please read the whole thing–it’s an eyewitness account of a horrifying paramilitary action by police. As everyone knows, Iraq war veteran Scott Olson was critically injured in the melee.

Late last night as part of the general strike, Oakland protesters succeeded in shutting down the Port of Oakland.

Several thousand Occupy Wall Street demonstrators forced a halt to operations at the United States’ fifth busiest port Wednesday evening, escalating a movement whose tactics had largely been limited to rallies and tent camps since it began in September.

Police estimated that a crowd of about 3,000 had gathered at the Port of Oakland by early evening. Some had marched from the California city’s downtown, while others had been bused to the port.

Port spokesman Isaac Kos-Read said maritime operations had effectively been shut down. Interim Oakland police chief Howard Jordan warned that protesters who went inside the port’s gates would be committing a federal offense.

In New York, Los Angeles and other cities where the movement against economic inequality has spread, demonstrators planned rallies in solidarity with the Oakland protesters, who called for Wednesday’s “general strike” after an Iraq War veteran was injured in clashes with police last week.

Organizers of the march said they want to stop the “flow of capital.” The port sends goods primarily to Asia, including wine as well as rice, fruits and nuts, and handles imported electronics, apparel and manufacturing equipment, mostly from Asia, as well as cars and parts from Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai.

We knew there would eventually be civil unrest, and now we’re seeing it all over the world and here at home. What next? I’d say 2012 is going to be an eventful year.

With that, I’m going to wrap this up. I know there’s lots of other news, but these two stories–Greece and the general strike in Oakland–seem to me to symbolize what’s happening in the world today. People are sick and tired of being bilked by the super-rich, and ignored by the politicians. It’s so chaotic, yet I feel that the only hope we have is for the people to keep resisting as best they can. For so long, I was afraid nothing would wake American up, but I’m finally getting the feeling that we won’t go down without a fight. Let’s keep the elites nervous!

Sooooo… what are you reading and blogging about today?

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