All Thane’s Day and the Occupy Movement

Some time ago I wrote a post about the Occupy movement’s insistence on maintaining a non-hierarchical, horizontal organization even if keeping that kind of organization might not always be in its best interest.  I pointed out that for thousands of years humans naturally have been organizing ourselves into hierarchies for good reason:  a hierarchical structure brings with it a number of distinct advantages that consensus driven organizations just do not possess.

This afternoon, just to have something to look at while I ate my lunch, I randomly opened Jared Diamond’s fantastic book Guns, Germs and Steel and came across something Diamond wrote about social organization that seems to travel along the same line as my earlier critique.  I’m going to get to Diamond in a moment, but first I’d like to tell you about All Thane’s Day.

OWS: Let’s Amend the Bankruptcy Laws

I recognize that the Occupy movement so far has eschewed participatory politics in favor of blanket protest and raising awareness in the public mind of severe societal problems like income and wealth inequality, the corporate control over our political system, and the crippling student debt so many have been saddled with over the past decade or so.

But if there is one specific piece of affirmative legislation it seems to me the movement could and should get behind, it would be amending the law to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy once more.  Indeed, this should be a no-brainer.  The elimination of this substantial debt overhang would benefit the individuals themselves, it would benefit the country by helping free up income to be spent in the actual economy, and it would be the moral thing to do.  I also think it would do a great deal to rein in the skyrocketing cost of higher education, but I’ll admit to a bit of speculation on that last point.

Better Get Organized: Lessons From Tahrir Square

Over at Digby’s David Atkins has another great piece up titled Lessons from Egypt:  Occupy the Democratic Party.  Essentially, Atkins (who, not coincidentally, is involved with the Democratic Party in California) points out that despite the fact the Egyptian revolution was largely set off by the liberal parties and youth activists who occupied Tahrir Square, the big winners in the recent Egyptian elections were Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis.  The reason for this, Atkins explains, is simple:  the Islamists were better organized.

There is a lesson here.  No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries and no matter how successful the revolution, at the end of the day organizational power will step in to win the day.  It always does.  That organizational power can be a force for good or for ill.  But especially in democratic societies, the ability to leverage organized support for specific ends will always trump anarchic mass sentiment.  (emphasis added)

Here, Atkins is touching on something that has long concerned me about the Occupy movement:  the insistence that a lack of formal organization is one of its fundamental tenets. 

Over the summer I read Hacker & Pierson’s Winner-Take-All-Politics, which chronicles the subversion of the US political system over the last 30 years until it now functions almost exclusively for the 1%; if there is one lesson I took away from that book it is that in modern politics nothing is more important to achieving one’s goals than is effective organization.  The 1% are highly organized and they know precisely where to apply the sharpest pressure to our body politic to get what they want; for the Occupy movement to imagine that a loose agglomeration of ordinary citizens – completely and willfully disorganized – can ever hope to match the political effectiveness of the 1% is simply naive. 

If they truly want to effect change, if they truly want to accomplish something concrete that might materially improve the lives of the 99% on whose behalf they march, then the Occupy movement eventually is going to have to organize itself in some way.  And, in order to be politically effective, they are going to have to organize themselves either within the Democratic Party or – and this would be much, much better – outside the Democratic Party but associated with it and pulling it strongly back to the Left.

I pay a lot of attention to the Occupadores and it causes me no small amount of heartburn when I hear some of them say things like “the entire system is corrupt,” and then suggest that they would rather not even vote than sully themselves by taking part in the corrupt political process that now exists.  I remember heaving a sigh of relief only about a month ago when I read that -- after much discussion in Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly -- OWS had voted not to make abstaining from next year's election its official political position.

But don’t get me wrong . . . I understand their frustration, really I do; like everybody else who voted for him, I did hope that once he was ensconced in the White House Barack Obama would at least try to do something other than “business as usual.” 

Nevertheless, we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.  I lived in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, and had Ralph Nader not insisted on running as the “Purity Party” nominee (or whatever the hell it was he called his ticket) we would have been spared 8 years of Dubya.  Hell!  We might even have been spared 9/11.  Don’t forget that it was the outgoing Clinton National Security team that warned the new administration to focus on Osama bin Laden; had Gore won the election that team might have remained in place and might even have prevented the greatest American tragedy since December 7, 1941.

Just imagine what the 21^st century would look like without 9/11.  No wars in Afghanistan, or in Iraq.  Our civil liberties still more or less intact.  An American soul not permanently stained by half its citizenry arguing that torture is okay “when we do it.”  Thousands of lives, immeasurable treasure not thrown away.  All of that possibly avoided but for a vanity campaign pandering to the self-righteous and proclaiming that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between Nobel Prize winning environmentalist Al Gore and . . . George W. Bush.

Yeah.

Steve M. had a great line yesterday in a post asking Does Obama Have His Nader Now?:  “if you respond to the awfulness of Democrats by ignoring the unspeakableness of Republicans, you’re going to repeat 2000.”  And if the people calling for a new American politics are determined to sit the game out until the rules get changed to their liking, we’re going to end up repeating the last thirty years.

We can do better.

First Amendment Freedoms Are NOT Subject to Budget Constraints

There is a truly pernicious, evil idea that nearly everybody in the United States reflexively parrots and that at first glance looks like it might make sense but really, really doesn’t:  that the United States of America should be run like a business.

“We need to put a businessman in the White House!”  (Wait . . . George W. Bush was “the MBA President,” remember?  How about we don’t do that again.)

Matt Taibbi on Occupy Davis

I swear, I will stop writing about this whole Liberty/Freedom distinction.  For one thing, it is tiresome to hear yourself keep spouting off about the same "revelation."  For another, it isn't much of a revelation.

Still . . . Matt Taibbi has a great piece up over at his blog, and - again - he seems to be dealing with the same kind of thoughts.  As always, please do click over and read Matt's take on the UC-Davis pepper spraying of unarmed, non-violent, peaceful protesters.

Here's a taste:

What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us.

And we are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while the people running this country for years now have been operating according to the completely opposite principle that different people have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case-by-case basis.

Not to belabor the point, but the person who commits fraud to obtain food stamps goes to jail, while the banker who commits fraud for a million-dollar bonus does not. Or if you accept aid in the form of Section-8 housing, the state may insist on its right to conduct warrantless "compliance check" searches of your home at any time – but if you take billions in bailout aid, you do not even have to open your books to the taxpayer who is the de facto owner of your company.

The state wants to retain the power to make these subjective decisions, because being allowed to selectively enforce the law effectively means they have despotic power. And who wants to lose that?

The UC Davis incident crystallized all of this in one horrifying image. Anyone who commits violence against a defenseless person is lost. And the powers that be in this country are lost. They’ve been going down this road for years now, and they no longer stand for anything.  

(emphasis added).

Lord knows I've been a critic of the Occupy movement and its tactics, but maybe I've just been overly focused on the achievement of small-term, small-time, concrete goals.

If The Powers That Be overreact so badly to so little, one just has to think that maybe Occupy is really on to something here.  Maybe it is enough -- right now -- simply to keep pointing out how far America falls in failing to be what it promised us.

NSFW Comedy

Both of these are from the Best of the Left Podcast and Blog.  If you don't know that one by now, you may want to check it out; I'm a big fan.

In any event, these are two of the YouTube videos that came to my attention via Best of the Left.  As always, your mileage may vary, but they both cracked me up.

NSFW (due to language):

(1)  An Irishman is asked to comment on America's Wall Street:

(2)  Lee Camp explains what Occupy Wall Street is really about:

Hope you like them too.

No Sympathy For John Pike

Over in The Atlantic Alexis Madrigal has an extremely interesting (though unfortunately titled) article that briefly traces the recent history of how protests have been policed in America.  This history runs from using “escalated force” against protesters in the 1960s, to “negotiated management” with protesters in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, to the “Miami Method” that evolved as a result of (i) the 1999 Seattle WTO riots, (ii) the 9/11 attacks, and (iii) 2003 Free Trade of the Americas protest in Miami.

As I’ve recounted here, the 1999 Seattle WTO protests were, in fact, sparked by the Seattle police.  They resulted in both the police chief and the mayor losing their jobs and the city having to pay out about $1.8 million to settle the claims brought against them by citizens whom the police abused.

And I was actually in Miami for the 2003 protests, although I did not take part.  But I recall following the investigation afterward into police overreach that the local independent press reported, and I remember the evidence presented of massive unlawful arrests, routine use of unnecessary force, and undercover police agents provacateur that infiltrated the protesters.

I found Madrigal’s article interesting for two reasons especially.  First, toward the end, he intimates that protest policing methods may be about to evolve again as a result of our now ubiquitous recording technology and social networking sites:

The large-scale deployment of video recording technologies combined with high-speed media diffusion channels have allowed everyone to see what only a tiny number did back in 2003 in Miami.  They are seeing kids getting pepper sprayed and hundreds of protesters getting arrested.  They’re watching police throw flash grenades into groups of American citizens.  These images are coming to them through the same Twitter accounts and Facebook updates that show them photos of their friends’ new babies and the score of the USC game.

While it’s easiest to note the incidents of police violence, the protesters’ cameras also record what’s *not* in the images.  Authorities have long claimed that they were merely battling the “black bloc” of violent anarchists.  But when you look at all these videos, the bogeyman isn’t there.

Instead, it’s a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away.

Second, Madrigal argues for a sympathetic understanding of just why Pike did decide to pepper spray those students:  because that is what current protest policing methods taught him to do, and that “while it’s his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students.” 

But while I understand the point Madrigal is making here, I am a lot less sympathetic toward John Pike than Madrigal wants me to be.  Count me instead as one of the “[m]any . . . calling for Pike’s firing.”  To begin with, regardless of what the current police system taught Pike to do, his behavior is abominable and ultimately he is the one whose finger is on the trigger of that military grade pepper spray with which he’s dousing peaceful college students.

Moreover, if we are in fact looking at the beginning of a change in how protests are policed in this country, then the way to effect that change is for the people who actually engaged in terrible conduct under the old system to suffer consequences for that terrible conduct.  This can only underscore the lesson that brutality by the police will simply no longer be tolerated in our country.

And sure . . . maybe it seems a little unfair to punish people like Pike who might only have been playing under the existing rules of the old system, but what is the alternative?  “Sorry for the police abuse, people, and we’re going to change the rules so that doesn’t happen anymore but nobody who engaged in it is actually going to be punished.”  What are the odds that will get your local cops to change their ways?  I’d say slim to none.

So, sorry, but Pike really should be flushed away.

More Thoughts Re: UC-Davis Part 2

Doesn’t it seem a bit weird to anybody else that the UC-Davis campus police appear to be so well-armed?  Seriously, in addition to the military grade pepper spray that was used on the students, these campus police are decked out like storm troopers.

The questions this observation immediately brings to mind include:  How exactly was the decision made to spend the campus police’s budget on paramilitary equipment?  What kind of threat did the campus police think they would be called upon to deal with when they purchased this stuff?  Did they expect having to use it to put down student protests (the only thing I can think they might have anticipated facing)?  Do they routinely walk around campus decked out like this, or is this kept only for special occasions?  Did they think, when they were called upon by Chancellor Katehi to break up the Occupy protest, “finally, we get to use this stuff”?

It’s the last question that gives me pause.  I have absolutely no difficulty imagining a scenario in which the UC-Davis Campus Police successfully lobbied to spend its money purchasing anti-protest paramilitary equipment, and then locked it away for years because it was never needed.  But if you have a toy then eventually you are going to want to use it – even if its use really isn’t justified.  Just like Barney Fife from the old Andy Griffith Show, you are going to look for a reason to take that bullet out of your pocket and load it in your gun.

And that, of course, can lead directly to the kind of brutal overreaction we saw at UC-Davis last week.  Video of that incident makes clear that the campus cops’ paramilitary toys weren’t needed then, either . . . but you just know they were looking for an excuse to break this stuff out.

Perhaps we would all have been better off if the people responsible for overseeing things like campus security at UC-Davis had just tamped down on their guard dogs’ Rambo fantasies by pointing out that their job is to protect the security of college students, and thus their job realistically will never really require military-grade anything.

More Thoughts Re: UC-Davis Part 1

By now, this video of the UC-Davis cop pepper-spraying non-violent student protesters has become ubiquitous:

 In discussions with others about this incident, at least two people have made the same remark to me about the cop’s flourishing of the pepper-spray, right before he starts using it, for what he clearly feels is his audience:

PERSON A:   I think he was trying to get on record that he had warned the kids what was coming if they didn’t leave.

PERSON B:    You just know that his excuse is going to be that he told the protesters what he was going to do if they didn’t get up and leave, so it’s their fault that he had to pepper-spray them.

Now, I agree with these persons’ assessments of what we see in the video and what it is the cop thought he was doing.  But what I find extremely disturbing about all this is the underlying assumption that goes into the cop’s little performance.  He clearly anticipates – and is probably correct in doing so – that the average American citizen will agree that if the protesters didn’t comply with his order to clear the premises after he threatened them with violence then they deserve to get hit with pepper-spray (or maybe tazed, or perhaps beaten with nightsticks).

But this mindset is insane.  I don’t recall ever voting to give cops the right to abuse people for failure to comply with an order.  Arrest them, sure, slip the little zip-cuffs on them and haul them away to be bound before a magistrate – that is the very essence of peaceful protest, of civil disobedience.  But when did we decide that – before doing that – the police are perfectly justified in physically abusing peaceful protesters?

This seems to me an example of the idea of “liberty” – i.e., you have only the privileges society affords you, which can be taken away from you at any time by the people responsible for enforcing society’s dictates – trumping the idea of “freedom” – i.e., you have an absolute right to exercise certain prerogatives that precedes society’s dictates, and society may not abridge these rights.  (See here for more on the liberty/freedom distinction).

And that is very dangerous, because it can only work to enshrine the status quo.  While enshrining and perpetuating the status quo is the goal of any system, it cannot be the final goal of our society.  If it were, we’d still have segregation.  Hell, if it were, we might still have slavery.

Sometimes events conspire to prove that the status quo is unjust and inequitable and needs to be changed.  And that is when the freedom to challenge the status quo has to trump society’s interest in maintaining “business as usual.”

OWS: Frank Miller Update

Curt Franklin and Chris Haley, at their Webcomic Let's Be Friends Again, imagine what it must be like in Frank Miller's strange, strange head when he thinks about the Occupy movement (click on image to enbiggin):

(For a further explanation, see here.)

America's Tacit Approval of Police Brutality

Updated Below

Via Angry Black Lady at Balloon Juice comes this story about Occupy Davis (UC-Davis), where “a police officer approached a group of students sitting in a line peacefully on the ground, walked up and down the line and pepper-sprayed them directly in the face – as one would spray pesticide on weeds.”  If you click over to ABL’s post you can watch the 8 minute YouTube of the incident, and here is a photo:

(h/t Atrios)

My first thought, when I spotted that photo at Eschaton, was the same as ABL’s:  anger at the cops’ decision to deal with these student protesters in such a casually cruel way.  “They’re treating people like things,” I thought to myself, “nothing more than an impersonal nuisance to be dispersed.”

But, upon reflection, I don’t think my initial impression was correct.  The truth is, the cops were not dealing with these students as mere things, but definitely as people.  And while the decision to pepper spray them directly in the face seems from the photo and the video to have been casually made, I’ll bet it wasn’t. 

OWS: Liberty vs. Freedom

Real Life stuff and trying to keep up with what is going on with the Occupy movement has delayed me getting into American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, but I picked it up again yesterday. 

The author, Colin Woodard, begins by describing in chronological order the origin of the oldest of these cultures: El Norte (the northern portion of Spain’s American empire, essentially a 100 mile strip running along the modern U.S./Mexico border and – at the time – up into California), New France (the settlement of eastern Canada and, as an outpost and afterthought, Louisiana), Tidewater (English planters in Maryland, Virginia, southern Delaware, and northern North Carolina), and Yankeedom (the New England states, especially after the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony established dominion over them following Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War).

In his description of the Tidewater culture, Woodard begins foreshadowing the United States’ own Civil War by offering a cultural/historical explanation for the starkly different traditions that would develop between the states.  He describes 17^th century Tidewater as essentially nothing more than a place of huge manorial estates without a single actual town to be found there.  He explains that each such estate was in essence a perfect fiefdom, in which the planter whose estate it was had complete and absolutely authority – including that of life and death – over all persons.

He then attempts to explain how a culture of such authoritarianism could produce champions of republicanism like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison. 

My Suggestion for Moving OWS Forward

Digby warned yesterday that PPP was preparing to release the results of a poll measuring the public’s attitude toward the Occupy movement, and that those results wouldn’t be favorable to OWS.  The results are here, and they essentially indicate that Occupy is losing favorability with the American public:

The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country.  Only 33% now say that they are supportive of its goals, compared to 45% who say they oppose them.  That represents an 11 point shift in the wrong direction for the movement’s support compared to a month ago when 35% of voters said they supported it and 36% were opposed.  Most notably, independents have gone from supporting Occupy Wall Street’s goals 39/34, to opposing them 34/42.

[snip]

I don’t think the bad poll numbers for Occupy Wall Street reflect Americans being unconcerned with wealth inequality.  Polling we did in some key swing states earlier this year found overwhelming support for raising taxes on people who make over $150,000 a year.  In late September we found that 73% of voters supported the ‘Buffet rule’ with only 16% opposed.  And in October we found that Senators resistant to raising taxes on those who make more than a million dollars a year could pay a price at the polls.  I don’t think any of that has changed – what the downturn in Occupy Wall Street’s image suggests is that voters are seeing the movement as more about the ‘Occupy’ than the ‘Wall Street.’  The controversy over the protests is starting to drown out the actual message.  (emphasis added) 

Hope Springs Eternal

As I mentioned last night, Matt Yglesias already has gone on record expressing the belief that Bloomberg’s decision to shut down the occupation of Zuccotti Park “has ensured continued relevance for the issue.”  And this does seem to be shaping up as the favored consensus among those working in the Left Blogosphere.

Over at No More Mister Nice Blog Steve M. refers to this phenomenon as “The Dubious New Pundit Meme:  Bloomberg Did Occupy Wall Street a Favor.”  He cites Ezra Klein arguing that Bloomberg’s clearing of the park was done “in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.”  He also cites Derek Thompson of The Atlantic arguing that “[w]ether or not the protesters return to their tents, New York police have given them a chance to lift up, take stock, and pitch their energies in an issue worth occupying . . . .”

Same as It Ever Was: The Feds' Crackdown on Dissent

Something that had been worrying about in the back of my mind for the past coupla weeks was whether the crackdowns we’ve recently been seeing on Occupy protests in cities around the country might have all been part of a single coordinated effort.  My interest was definitely piqued when Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let it slip in a BBC interview that she

was recently on a conference call of 18 cities who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them.

And now we get this story that suggests not only that the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement was coordinated by the various cities involved, but that the federal government was assisting in that crackdown as well:

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces.  As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics.  And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

[snip]

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules.  Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear.  In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was least likely to be present.

Well.  That sure sounds like what happened in New York two nights ago.

* * *

Sadly, if it turns out the federal government did assist a coordinated effort across the nation to disenfranchise American citizens of their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and protest their very disenfranchisement . . . well, I won’t be surprised. 

One of the very first things I wrote on this blog was “A Brief History of American Class Warfare.”  There I provided three examples – largely glossed over by our history books and forgotten by most people today – in which The Powers That Be wielded federal power, including the U.S. military, against disenfranchised Americans who were protesting the system that had disenfranchised them.  One such forgotten example was the use of the U.S. military – including tanks – to drive out the Bonus Army that had created a permanent encampment (much like OWS did) on the banks of the Anacostia River in 1932 to agitate for payment of their promised WWI bonuses.

The sad fact is that the United States has a long history of using all its institutional might to preserve whatever existing system has control of it -- the Constitution be damned -- and the idea that the Department of Homeland Security might be involved in crushing peaceful American protesters instead of dangerous foreign terrorists just doesn’t surprise me.  I suspect that most DHS officials don’t even think of this as “mission creep,” but as simply doing the job they were hired to do.

I will be curious, however, to learn precisely what the federal interest was in crushing the Occupy movement.  I’ll be curious as well to see whether my fellow citizens don’t get just a teensy bit alarmed now that their government is actively working to suppress voices that peacefully dissent from continuing “business as usual” here in America.

And I will be very curious to learn whether any right-wing militia whack jobs, the overweight ones running around in the woods of Idaho in camo gear training to fight the inevitable totalitarian police state that they envision the federal government imposing sometime in the near future, will rally in support of the Occupy protesters when they learn the federal government has indeed taken action to shut down dissent, and that part of that action involved a “massive show of police force” -- including even the black helicopters that haunt the militamen's fever dreams, and the imposition of no-fly zones for civilian aircraft.

My guess is that they won’t.  My guess is that the hard-core, survivalist nutjobs of the extreme right-wing in this country are going to look at what their much loathed feds did and say:  “Good on the feds.  Dirty hippies.”

Truly, we are doomed.

Parsing the Order Ending the Occupation of Wall Street

So, we now have the Order of the Supreme Court of New York effectively ending the occupation of Zuccotti Park.  You can read it here.

(Note that the New York judiciary is organized, ah, differently than is the federal judiciary and that of all the other states.  In New York, the Supreme Court is not that highest court in the land.  That would be the NY Ct. of Appeals.  No, the NY Supreme Court is actually the trial court, and hierarchically is therefore the lowest court in the land.  No, I don’t know why they gave it that name either.)

As was easily predicted, the basis for the judge’s determination that OWS does not have a constitutional right to occupy Zuccotti Park is the ability of others to impose “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech. 

Disappointingly, I Think I Got it Right

Matt Yglesias argues today that being booted from Zuccotti park by the NYPD button men ultimately may have been a good thing for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Essentially, Yglesias argues that the protest could have ended in only one of two ways:  either the cops would come in and throw everybody out, or the protests would simply fizzle as people lost interest.  Yglesias suggests that having the protests simply fizzle would have been “demoralizing to everyone who’s come to look at the various Occupations as a key signal of popular discontent with rampant inequality.”

I said something similar only a few weeks ago, when I wrote that if Bloomberg were smart he’d just send the word out to the NYPD that they were to leave OWS alone unless the protesters engaged in illegal acts that substantially interfered with others’ rights.  “Without conflict, I doubt the media would continue covering the story,” I suggested, and the greatest danger to OWS was “probably not co-option but incorporation.  By its continuous presence it may simply become integrated into everyday life, assimilated as background noise, and ultimately disregarded as ‘just something those people do.’”

Of course, I also predicted that L’il Mikey and the rest of the 1% were unlikely to let the movement wither away by simply ignoring it; their own evident terror at possibly being called to account for their sociopathy and their narcissistic inability to see that middle-America would quickly lose interest in both the protesters and them if thing settled down would – I predicted – preclude any such outcome.

And, today, it looks like I was correct about that.

So now the Occupy movement transitions into Phase II . . . whatever that is.  Yglesias argues that “by ordering the protesters to be removed the Bloomberg administration has ensured continued relevance for the issue.”  I certainly hope that is the case.

I guess we’ll see.

There Goes Bloomberg’s Unity Party Nomination

Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to wipe out the Occupy Wall Street movement – and to do so unconstitutionally, by using the police to impose a de facto media blackout preventing coverage of the event – has given us all a little taste of just how high-handed and autocratic L’il Mikey naturally is.  To be sure, these aren’t the actions one associates with the persona Bloomberg has spent so many years cultivating of a “semi-liberal centrist,” but instead with that of a privileged member of the 1% who is not used to being denied anything he wants.

Of course, until he was actually challenged by the Occupy movement it was easy for L’il Mikey to play his easy going, easy guy role.  I keep thinking of Matt Taibbi’s description of Bloomberg after watching him in action at a Huffington Post event last year:

Bloomberg’s great triumph as a politician has been the way he’s been able to win over exactly the sort of crowd that was gathering at the HuffPost event that night.  He is a billionaire Wall Street creature with an extreme deregulatory bent who has quietly advanced some nastily regressive police policies (most notably the notorious “stop-and-frisk” practice) but has won over upper-middle-class liberals with his stances on choice and gay marriage and other social issues.

Bloomberg’s main attraction as a politician has been his ability to stick closely to a holy trinity of basic PR principles:  bang heavily on black crime, embrace social issues dear to white progressives, and in the remaining working hours give your pals on Wall Street (who can raise any money you need, if you somehow run out of your own) whatever they want.

He understands that as long as you keep muggers and pimps out of the prime shopping areas in the Upper West Side, and make sure to sound the right notes on abortion, stem-cell research, global warming, and the like, you can believably play the role of the wisecracking, good-guy-billionaire Belle of the Ball for the same crowd that twenty years ago would have been feting Ed Koch.  (emphasis added).

But with the events of last night and this morning, I think it is fair to say that – when push comes to shove – Bloomberg has finally revealed what constitutes his highest priority:  “giv[ing his] pals on Wall Street whatever they want.”

And what is even more revealing – in an extremely chilling kind of way – is the degree to which Bloomberg refuses to recognize any restraint on his ability to do whatever he wants in order to help his Wall Street buddies get rid of the nuisance that is OWS.  In additional to unconstitutionally blocking the press from doing its job, he is apparently more than willing to simply disregard court orders with which he disagrees.  Via ThinkProgress from earlier this morning:

A judge has ruled that Bloomberg cannot lawfully evict protesters from Zuccotti Park and has issued a temporary restraining order against New York City.  The order allows the protesters to return to the park until after a hearing on the matter today at 11:30 a.m.  In a news conference, Bloomberg said that it was his intention to open the park at 8 a.m. this morning but that, as a result of the restraining order (and contravening it), he will keep the park closed until the hearing.

[snip]

During the question and answer period, Bloomberg added, “It’s our considered judgment that the best course of action is to leave it closed,” in the event that “the judge changes her mind.” (emphasis added)

Now, let’s be real clear about what L’il Mikey is telling us.  He received a Court Order (i) explaining that he did not have legal authority to kick protesters out of the park, and (ii) requiring him to allow the protesters back into the park, but that he himself has decided to disregard that Order and instead act in accordance with his own “considered judgment.”

Is it just me, or doesn’t it strike anybody else that L’il Mikey essentially has decided that as Mayor of New York he alone has the authority to decide how the peace is to be kept in his city?  The situation now has gone well beyond a simple dispute about the right of protest; by disregarding the Court’s legal Order and publicly explaining that he instead is going to follow his own judgment, L’il Mikey has effectively announced the imposition of autocratic law.

Where I come from, recognizing and adhering to the rule of law is one of the cornerstones of being an American.  This is especially true when it comes to the rule of law as it applies to our different branches of government.  Refusing to recognize that the Mayor of New York is bound by the lawful orders of the New York Courts to the same degree as is everybody else is positively un-American.  And now, so is L’il Mikey Bloomberg.

So, can everybody please just shut up now about running L’il Mikey as a centrist, third-party candidate?  He isn’t a moderate, and he isn’t a centrist.  Like almost everyone who makes up the 1%, he is a rich autocrat who doesn’t believe he is bound by the same rules as everybody else.

And he’s an un-American shitbag to boot.

Our Unequal First Amendment Rights

UPDATED BELOW


Good Lord.  I woke up this morning to find David (There is No Spoon) Atkins reporting over at Digby’s joint on the NYPD’s clearing of Zucotti Park.  Atkins listed a number of incidents reported via twitter and I am sure that the story will become clearer as it progresses, but these reports struck me as paticularly creepy:

--  All media and press were not allowed within a block of Zucotti Park;

--Airspace over Zucotti was blocked by police helicopters and legally blocked to prevent any media coverage;

--Journalists gathered together to attempt to gain access were denied.  According to one report, one cop tore a press credential off a journalist, while another responded to a journalist’s claim to be press by saying “not tonight”;

--the Brooklyn Bridge was shut down until 6 am;

--Most subways and trains into downtown were blocked, including with cops at entrances.

Is there any doubt that L’il Mikey Bloomberg and his button men, the NYPD, intended to create a full media blackout here?  I thought this was something that we don’t allow happen in the United States of America, land of the First Amendment and home of the Bill of Rights.

OWS: More Than Just Unemployed Young People

From the very beginning, many of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street have made clear that the events in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and “the Arab Spring” provided inspiration for the Occupy movement.  As a result, one thing I’ve been curious about is how closely the economic and social conditions in the United States that led to the Occupy movement correspond to those that sparked the protests that came to be dubbed the Arab Spring.  

So I was very interested to discover over at Rortybomb that Mike Konczal has a post up comparing the Arab Spring countries to the United States with regard to at least one metric.